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Comment by baxtr | Hacker News Reader

I have to admit: I hate the zoom experience. I use Chrome to avoid installing the app on my Mac. They use some dark patterns to force the app on you, but you can use zoom in the browser. However, you can’t use any backgrounds unlike google meet, which again is a way to force you into their app. These patterns alone show what kind of company you're dealing with.

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But you installed Chrome even though it does the exact same thing (runs an auto update Daemon with admin privileges, at least in Windows). Meet works well in Chrome because Google just adds whatever their apps need to html5. Other companies don't have that option. Seems kinda unfair to insist that everyone uses Google's app runtime otherwise they're guilty of "dark patterns".

Yes. You're right. I don't feel good about it either. Zoom didn't work well in safari last time I tried. And avoiding zoom is really difficult these days.

I use Zoom in FF on macOS daily, and have not had any of the above issues. I fire up the Zoom meeting in a browser tab, and then flip back and forth between tabs and windows with no negative results to the Zoom tab's functioning.

Every time I have to relaunch FF after updates, the Zoom webpage forces me to download their installer (which I delete without using), and working their way through the dark pattern UI BS to get to the 'launch in browser' link to appear.

There is an extension to go straight to the webjoin link. you can also just edit the link manually.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/zoom-redirect...

Check the screenshot. You just need to edit the "/j/" part of the path to "/wc/join/".

There are very few extensions that I trust, and to depend on an extension to do something as trivial as this is not worth the risk to me. This particular dark pattern isn't the darkest in the scheme of things.

The source code is literally 20 lines, very easy to audit. You can put the static download in your Mozilla folder to avoid auto-updates. It is a nice quality of life thing for me. But yeah definitely not necessary as you can always edit the URL yourself, as the extension author helpfully notes.

But that's 20 lines of code that I don't have to worry about just to get to a zoom link faster.

Let's face it, I'm about to join a Zoom call. How much faster do you really think I'm trying to get to it? This is actually one of those dark patterns I don't mind.

Great tip! I’ll give a FF a try. Haven’t used it in ages due to performance issues on Mac.

I read people's negative performance of FF comments, and I've just personally never experienced anything that makes me question if something is wrong. Then again, I don't use Chrome to do side-by-side comaprisons. I click a link, a page loads, I choose to read or not, and go on. That's pretty much all I expect my browser to do.

I trust Chrome, Brave, and Firefox more than Zoom, by a lightyear or so.

If I switch to other tab while using the Zoom web version in one tab, all the video of everyone in the call disappear when go back to the Zoom tab, it's really annoying and a dump way to nudge people to switch to the app.

In zooms defense, backgrounds in meet is a great way to stress test your laptop fans max capacity.

Fair point. Then again, I think users are mature enough to make this trade-off decision by themselves.

i could never bring myself to trust the app, so i made a browser extension to make using the web version less painful (skips the dark pattern page where the "join from browser" link is often hidden).

its open source so if ya dont trust this installer either, grab it from GitHub, its only a few lines of code :) hopefully others find it useful:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/zoom-web-launcher/...

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