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Comment by drcongo | Hacker News Reader

As much as they try to hide the fact, it is actually possible to join a Zoom meeting in your browser. That way you don't have to install a sketchy app with root privileges and directory traversal bugs.

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I initially tried this when my language learning course had to go remote and the teacher insisted on using Zoom. But I ran into a dealbreaker issue with the web view: It does not have the grid view of all participants' cameras, and (to my knowledge) it also does not allow selecting the camera of a single person manually. This is an issue when I need to see a flash card that the teacher is holding up, but someone else is speaking, so the camera switches to them.

I'm currently working without this by using a device issued by my employer, where the Zoom app is pre-installed by the IT dept. and therefore using it for the language class does not make things worse.

Confusingly, there are 2 different versions of the Zoom web app:

1. The "Join from Your Browser" links take you to the worse version, which I assume is legacy or something.

2. There is also a progressive web app version [1] that has more feature parity to the desktop app. It has the grid view built-in, but for whatever reason it doesn't seem to show as many people at a time vs the desktop app grid view.

[1]: https://pwa.zoom.us/wc

Try other browsers; grid view still works in some of them (Chrome IIRC).

It definitely lets you pin a single feed, not sure about the grid view though.

I also do this on macOS with Chrome, but I found that if I join mega Zoom call (say hundreds of people) then the video will suddenly freeze after some random amount of time. That makes it unreliable and especially nervous when giving a presentation this way.

This is what I do. It's only a couple clicks deep and works as well as the native app. Definitely preferable to having that junk on my machine.

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