Hacker News Reader

I'll add more:

- Fries CPU and GPU on video calls, making it difficult to use other applications or demo when screensharing

- Interacts unfavourably with at least some WiFi drivers leading to unidirectional and bidirectional losses of connectivity

- Copy and paste randomly break so you can't copy content from Teams or paste anything into it; applies to both text and images

- Doesn't honour setting not to automatically restart which makes it hard to kill when it needs to be restarted

- Automatic restart means it often restarts before it's cleanly shutdown leading to reoccurrence of the problem you tried to kill it for in the first place, or other random bugs and instabilities

- Too slow to start up and load channels: show the cached content immediately - stop blocking on bloody network calls like it's the 1980s and you've never written any code that calls over a network before

- Causes system instability on video calls with multiple participants

- No feedback on image paste/upload: is it uploading or not? You don't know. Leads to images that you thought hadn't worked just randomly appearing in the middle of typing - not very helpful. Put a placeholder (ideally correctly sized) where the image will go on the client whilst it's uploading and then get out of the way.

- Doesn't seem to be possible to resize/rescale images

Could think of plenty more but I should do some work.

(And, despite all of the above, it's still probably the best of a bad bunch - Hangouts call quality is often terrible, and Zoom is just a complete mess when it comes to anything beyond the basic video calling functionality.)

Here's some more:

- eats your battery like nothing else. Got charge? Not if teams has anything to do about it. Discord does more, at better quality and doesn't eat that much power.

- has some bizarre interaction with the volume slider: clicking it mutes just the teams call, but sliding the volume controls alters the volume level of the whole computer. Why?

- cuts off the sides of video, because it defaults to "fit video", so too bad to anyone sitting at the side of the camera, no way to change the setting, so you have to change it by. hand. for. every. video. feed. every. single. call.

- insists on continuing to send you notifications for that re-occuring marketing meeting you were in once, 6 months ago, but notifications for the link your teammates posted in the chat of the call you are currently in, are apparently not worthy of delivery.

- inexplicably defaults to using non-native notifications (on Mac OS), not sure why they felt the need to BYO awful notification system on an OS that has one built in, but it's awful.

- sends you a notification about a meeting starting, with a join button. when you hover your mouse over the join button, the notification disappears. the meeting is nowhere to be found. you have to got to outlook calendar and join the meeting from there

- sometimes the same meeting ends up existing twice with the same name, with half the participants in here, the other half back there

- when your internet is bad, you can no longer hear the speaker talking, but the video feeds of 5 other participants all run fine

- when I join a call with a built-in microphone and a webcam microphone attached, teams pre-selects the webcam microphone, but sends the sound of no microphone at all. I have to go the hidden away settings, change to the built-in microphone and back to the webcam microphone to make it work.

- a few versions ago, teams would hammer microsoft servers with multiple authentication requests per second, eating a lot of CPU and bandwidth, but there's no indication of anything going on in the UI - you are still logged in and everything works normally.

- powerpoint presentations sometimes work, sometimes all you get to see is a black rectangle

- uploading files is extremely buggy, and it's not always clear if it did work or not.

- Difficult to permanently delete entire chat history

- Odd behavior when using smartphone and desktop app at the same time - sometimes calls accepted on desktop are still ringing on mobile.

- Slow scroll back to history in chat.

- Message-Image size (height) limit is small

- Message length maximum is far too small

- When sharing a whole screen or a window, the teams application is forcibly minimised, regardless of whether teams in on that display or not.

Thank you all so much for this list! It's really going to come in handy with my custom Teams client, OperCom! https://opercom.co.uk

This is the kind of website design I can get behind.

Haha thanks, sadly it's probably going to have to change for something a bit more visually appealing.

The audio part drives me crazy. Why does it have to re-implement its own volume controls, device settings, and mixer and completely ignore the OS counterparts? On windows if the OS doesn't do what they need they could just walk over (ok drive over) to the windows guy's office and ask for it. I guess they could also send them a message on Teams but then they would never see it.

It's written like a computer game from the 1990s. For unfathomable reasons, it takes "full control" of your audio stack. I want to say.. ha-ha... for performance reasons, but we all know that can't possibly be true.

The trick here for everyone being driven mad by Teams randomly overriding system settings is that for each audio device there's a setting miles deep in the legacy control panel called:

    "Allow applications to take exclusive control of this device"

Untick that, and then Teams won't have the permission to change system-wide settings. In practice, nothing else needs this permission anyway, unless you're doing some sort of low-latency audio capture with professional tools or whatever.

> cuts off the sides of video

this is the same in skype. i never even knew it's a thing until i right clicked on the video feed. this is some microsoft fetish ux from hell.

It makes sense. Teams is skype under the hood.

Don't forget the massive memory use, oh and now there's TWO versions of teams - one for 'work or school' accounts and one for other Microsoft accounts. What a great idea said nobody ever.

upvote for the two different teams, like wtf...

also, there is no version that installs in a system directory (bad for deployment), and the deployment version is terrible (it downloads and installs teams every time a user logs in).

requires tracking protection to be cut for microsoft websites on linux

super buggy and unusable on linux

It's usable on Linux, I use it all day, every day. I just don't know why the Linux client is so far behind the web client despite being an electron app.

> I just don't know why the Linux client is so far behind the web client despite being an electron app

My friend, this Linux user since the 1990s would like a word.

We have Zoom in the office and the meeting room kit is fantastic. I just need to be in the room, open Zoom on my laptop and click Share Screen and it shares to the screen in the room. Never had such an easy time of it.

My favorite one is that when someone "likes" or use whatever "emotion" on your message, even if you are currently taking to the person, you need to click "activity" page in order to clear that notification and then come back

Scrolling up and back down will also clear the notification.

It is very annoying. Thankfully, there is an option to turn these notifications off.

I turned this off somewhere in the options. You can too.

Searching

Oh god the searching

It's so bad it must be actively designed to not work.

Find a result that is outside the current cached chats and want to see the posts around it for context? Just click the result... To show only the result on page?? Lol gfy, you have to manually scroll allllllllll the way back through months of texts.

Let's lump together text chats meeting chats, org chart and sharepoint/teams files, and make a totally useless search function that actively hates users.

I thought the search was shit, but it's actually way worse. If the specific message you are looking for is more than 90 days old, it WILL NOT show up in the search results. This is hard coded into teams. They are intentionally crippling the usefulness of their application. It can only be because they are mentally retarded.

- images are deepfried when pasted into chats

- can't copy an image from a chat and use it elsewhere; you have to find the download button, download it, go to your download folder, so people just screenshot the image in chat

cmd+tab only works on mac until you've received one notification, after that focus goes to an invisible window.

Most frustrating for me is that I receive no call notifications. Well, sometimes I do, but most of the time I do not and I need to wait until a call has been missed before I see who’s called. Unless I happen to be in the chat window of the person who’s calling…then I can see the “join call” button active.

It’s maddening and IT can’t solve it properly, and I’m not the only one at my company having this issue.

Utter garbage app and user experience.

Edit: even worse is if I’m being called into an existing group call…there’s no way to accept.

Yeah. I log in and type "Morning" as is the routine in our main channel.

Then over the next two hours I get 30 notifications about people liking my comment and nothing for anything actually useful, like calls. It doesn't even pretend to let me turn off notifications for reactions without losing the whole channel's notifications.

You can disable reaction notifications globally in Settings -> Notifications -> Chat. Doesn't help if you only want them for some channels though.

That's set to off. I still get them though...

Yup, I have the same, to the point where (corp office) I have to run Skype solely to know when I have an incoming call as it has a proper, working notification mechanism.

I think that's something that actively broken, the android app says in a red banner that call notifications are not delivered.

I had a period of several weeks where most days my arrow keys would just stop working. I could Ctrl+arrow to jump words or Shift+arrow to highlight, but just an arrow key by itself? Nope.

My biggest gripe though is just the sluggishness in every single thing. It’s like there’s a 500ms minimum latency for any action you can perform in the app. Truly miserable bit of software.

I always wonder how the dev teams feel on projects like this. They just know they’re shipping garbage, surely?

To make the TEAMs experience even worse, our IT department, okay at the behest of the legal team, put a policy in place that removes chat history older than 24 hours thus removing the last shred of utility from the product.

> Text copied from a conversation is polluted with names and time stamps. "I really want this feature" said nobody ever

I want this feature in any "enterprise" chat app. In fact, more often than not if I copy multiple messages from multiple authors I want to have author/time metadata. For the very same reason we leave replied-to content in emails.

I agree that there should be mechanism to copy text only and even a setting to chose the default behavior.

Sure, if you're copying multiple messages in a conversation. Otherwise you're still able to select the name and time along with the message. Hijacking my clipboard with data I have not selected can fuck off.

This. No app should be futching with the text I select to copy. It's like those damn websites who use JS to add crap to text copied from their pages.

In case of a single message yes. I guess sane default behavior is to copy content only with single message and content+metadate with multiple messages.

I guess we are in agreement then

> - Media handling is inconsistent, sometimes I can't paste photos, sometimes I can

I think this has something to do with the input format of the file being pasted. I’ve been able to work around this by first copying the image I want to share into WordPad and then into Teams.

I also don’t know if this is a policy set by my IT department to reduce the bandwidth consumption from external aniGIFs.

You missed the best ones:

- Your avatar not showing for you but showing for everyone else

- Messages randomly disappearing from DM history (they're supposed to be stored locally, so I don't even know how this happens)

- Entire contacts disappearing (if they're in a group chat, they'll show up as "Unknown User")!

- Editing a message where you've attached a picture and then it says "Uh oh, we lost your attachment. Please attach it again." (Not helped by the fact that Windows lacks a clipboard history, like KDE has.)

- Once, parts of the GUI just failed to load, so all buttons and many elements rendered as text labels reflecting variable names. Menus exploded to gigantic size since a small button was now "foo_bar_widget_doohickey" and it broke the layout badly. It was pretty funny.

(And this is all native! Native app on Windows. Not the web app.)

I've never seen any software this buggy. I've been using IMs for like 20 years now, and Teams sets a new, utterly unparalleled bar for dysfunctionality.

- The mute/unmute button is hard to find, I don't think I've ever attended a Teams meeting without someone struggling with this. Teams should change its name to "You're on mute"

As far as the keyboard's concerned I think it's three buttons - something like cmd-shift-m where on Slack it's just m. Drives me mad.

- Web interface is not supported on Firefox, last I tried.

I try and avoid installing native clients for occasional uses.

I run Linux and just keep all these apps on my iPad. If I need to demo software, oh well. Zoom runs way better on Linux natively. Teams is a joke.

Something I discovered after switching to Windows: MS Teams eats the ctrl+shift+S shortcut while it's in the background, so I cannot use it anymore in other applications. It literally makes other apps stop working properly. Sigh.

the markdown like editing is horrible, why is it so hard to implement a few basic formatting options? especially using `backticks` which unless written in one go doesn't work. There was a good few months where lists (-/*) or quote blocks (>) didn't work at all unless selected with mouse, and it would drive me crazy. I used to try to contact support about it but they were always useless. search sometimes finds the message I was looking for but clicking on it never works. wiki isn't editable on mobile. and on computer it's buggy.

- Last time I tried it didn't support screensharing on Wayland.

- @name stops working if you leave it running for a while

- Image uploads to a chat failing for no apparent reason

- No obvious way of sharing/reposting an image or document from another chat

- When you paste a link and press enter to send, it doesn’t send immediately and instead sends randomly after a few seconds

- This means if you were typing a follow up message your messages will look like this:

> Hey visit this cool site: https://news.ycombinator.com/ It has al

>l these cool discussions about tech!

> - The size of the text chat column in a meeting cannot be changed and is very narrow, forcing you to find the same chat in the 'main' window

So evidently chats CAN be narrow if they want but god forbid you want to shrink down any of the windows to park on the edge of your secondary monitor. Why is the minimum window size so goddam huge?

Things I like (What?):

Ctrl-Shift-V pastes into TEAMs with no formatting. Should be part of the OS. Contrary to WebEx (what we came from for meetings), joining a TEAMs meeting from both PC and phone joins you as one participant, not 2.

> Ctrl-Shift-V pastes into TEAMs with no formatting. Should be part of the OS.

Pasting without formatting should be the default behaviour. Ctrl-Shift-V should be for people who want the shitty version.

Probably not intentional.

I don't think I saw anyone mention it but you can't copy PNGs from a web page and paste them into Teams.

If I want to share graphs from LibreNMS with my team, I have to use the screenshot tool.