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Comment by DarthNebo | Hacker News Reader

Not surprised at all.

Instead of making use of the WebRTC API in the browser, they just threw us back to Skype days of needing a native client installed on your OS....

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Really? They're the only commercial company that bothers to create a native client (and not a Electron app) and you complain that you would prefer to have no client at all?

I don't think that's the majority opinion...

I'm no fan of them (I think free apps are up to the task), but give me a native client _any day_ over something that runs in a browser. I don't want any more multi-GB RAM hoarding processes running 24h on my desktop.

Native clients may be preferred for things that are mostly offline anyway like a text editor. But for something like Zoom, it just makes sense to have a good web app and ship an Electron build for the people who really need a standalone app.

The probability of browsers and by extension Electron eventually having best in class screen sharing is basically 100% since that's what almost everyone uses so there's a vested interest by some of the largest companies in the world to make it work.

This is not true for the desktop application frameworks. While Zoom did have pretty good screen sharing (on Linux) via the desktop client, it had a awful bug where it would just freeze the entire system making it unusable.

Since 99% of people are already going to have a browser open, the incremental memory usage of a webapp is actually pretty minimal. Electron apps are a bit heavier (mostly due to the fact they all ship with their own Electron version) but it's a small trade-off given the benefits such as having the chromium sandbox and cross-platform compatibility.

Even smaller things like having a more robust and secure video decoding stack is a major advantage since it sucks when 10 applications all link against an old, vulnerable version of ffmpeg.

> The probability of browsers and by extension Electron eventually having best in class screen sharing is basically 100%

And yet they are not! Even multiplatform programs like OBS have better support in Linux than browsers.

> Even smaller things like having a more robust and secure video decoding stack is a major advantage since it sucks when 10 applications all link against an old, vulnerable version of ffmpeg.

First we make dynamic linking difficult, then we complain that static linking makes everything old and vulnerable, so as to that the only viable solution is for all desktop development to move to the browser. It doesn't sound very good.

Yes, the desktop client is a complete pain, I have to join a zoom call with a client every few months and for that I have to install a security hold riddled client.

Everything else just opens in my browser where I'm doing 70% of my work anyway, and every random place I visit is secured in it's box

Why would anyone need to install some untrustworthy software though? The web site works fine for me. I can participate in meetings through my browser, everything works.

WebRTC implementations haven't converged yet. Roll your own app, or trust to the winds of multiple browser developers and rely on a library produced by Google that you may not have the resources to fix if it breaks on a key hardware / software configuration? No good choices here, only trade-offs.

You can use the browser version too, no? I used it a few times for job interviews in the last few months, and seems to work well enough in Firefox.

The link for the web version is easy to miss below a big "download zoom" button though.

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