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Comment by coffeeblack | Hacker News Reader

I never used Zoom. Why does Zoom need to be “installed”? Isn’t it a web application?

There are many video chat sites, all free for small groups and without the need to trust some random company that wants to execute code on your machine.

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Zoom actually has in-browser WebRTC support, but they make such a concerted effort to hide this option. I can only assume they have some kind of incentive for wanting people to install a client on their machine. Tracking, analytics, metadata, who knows?

If when you join a call (without zoom installed) you click the download button, then let the zoom installer start downloading, then press the “I had problems installing” (or some phrasing to that effect) button, finally the join through the browser button appears.

Yes, you have to download the zoom installer executable every time you want to join a call.

The more a company insists that I must use their native app the more I am convinced that I should stick with the safe web-app.

Also to make the join via web easier you can try something like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/zoom-redirect...

It is a web app, there's no reason whatsoever to install the native version aside from the fact that the website uses dark patterns to obscure the existence of the web version.

The downloaded version has slightly different video processing to make you look better. It may be that it's not possible to do on webrtc.

The native version is definitely more performant, from my experience.

The browser version tends to lag behind the native one by quite a bit, and has some really annoying restrictions.

For a long time you couldn't use your microphone in Firefox.

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