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Comment by _abox | Hacker News Reader

They're not. They're basically giving up and pointing to the web app that has always existed.

That's fine? The alternative is a shitty Electron app that won't bother conforming with desktop standards. If Microsoft is giving me the option between a frying pan and a fire, I'll take their olive branch.

On your other hand, apps like Discord are completely broken on modern Wayland systems. Discord's team never bothered to fix it, so now the only "native" way to use Discord is in Chromium. You could characterize that as a regression, but I'm perfectly happy with fully featured webapps as an alternative to misbehaving native apps.

The alternative would be a proper electron app.

MS can do it. Look at VS Code.

It's strange how they make some of the very best electron apps and also some of the worst (teams sucks on windows and Mac too and I don't see how their new edge-electron will fix that because it's also just a rebadged chrome just like electron)

The problem with teams isn't electron. It's the project management that prioritizes new features over making the existing ones work smoothly. The web version won't solve this as it's simply the same thing.

There's nothing proper about electron.

By itself it is already a huge suid executable that is almost impossible to verify. The MS idea of it is also a huge suid executable that you must download as a binary from MS and is contractually prohibited from verifying.

FWIW, VS Code doesn't really work on Wayland either. For many people it still links against outdated Electron, which means a lot of Wayland-native features are broken out-of-the-box.

I don't disagree that native apps should be a goal, but what does it matter with a video call app? Even Apple knew they had to throw in the towel here, Facetime can call direct-to-web now. Arguably, Microsoft's reluctance to make a good Skype webapp could be cited as one of the reasons for it's demise. Who knows, maybe we'd all be Skyping people still if Microsoft didn't wait until 2019 for a truly nice PWA. It won't save Teams as a product, but it would be a fine way to salvage it as an application.

If you want an attractive groupware tool, it has to work on everyone's system. If you want an attractive IDE/text editor, it has to be the best for that specific system. These two goals, markets and products are completely distinct. By recognizing this dichotomy, I think they're strengthening their product lineup.

Sadly they know their market - some very senior staff where I work were gushing over that newish feature to make people look like they are sitting in seats.

Meanwhile something useful like maybe caching the stupid emoji and reaction images so they don't lag every time isn't fixed.

Oh yes the "together mode". We tried that out once and it was sluggish and didn't add much. I haven't seen it used in the whole last year.

But you're right. The saying is true. "Microsoft is better at talking to your boss than you are."

Firefox on Wayland works fine for me, even for screen sharing. Try it with `MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 firefox`.

and how is that supposed to be a negative thing?

At most, we got one electron app that can get rid off, while at the same time get a guarantee to have the same feature as other systems.

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