Microsoft Teams is getting big performance improvements next month | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Teams is getting big performance improvements next month

theverge.com

65 pointsAmorymeltzer78 comments

So they are moving from Electron to Webview2. Basically saving memory and CPU resources by sharing WebView 2 runtime which is default on Windows 11.

Doesn’t sounds like a big improvement to me at all.

Trying to build full-on real applications with hypertext and its macros has never been a good idea in the first place. It keeps surprising me that companies that have all resources to build proper, native, efficient first-class desktop apps, opt for what is effectively a very advanced word processor instead. Some also insist that it's the only way of building desktop apps now.

This world desperately needs a modern native multi-protocol desktop IM client. By "desktop", I mean using fully native controls (appkit/win32/gtk, yes, three separate GUI implementations), taking advantage of multiple windows, and ignoring the existence of touchscreens. I may build one in the future.

MS teams is the only electron app on my computer that feels slow. Microsoft has done an almost uniquely bad job.

Native desktop apps probably aren’t coming back. Typescript is a vastly better language than C++ and Python which the current gui frameworks support.

> Native desktop apps probably aren’t coming back.

They are if I build one.

> Typescript is a vastly better language than C++ and Python which the current gui frameworks support.

No, TypeScript is a marginal improvement over JavaScript. It doesn't change the fact that JS with its ecosystem is a dumpster fire because it's unfixably flawed in way too many ways.

There are many languages capable of calling C/C++ functions. I'm a Java kind of person, so I'm waiting for the proper FFI (java.foreign) to be released. Yes, I know about JNA, I use it in one project, but I don't like it. But in the end you can really write a "native" app in anything that's capable of putting the right values into the right registers and jumping to the right address. As far as the user is concerned, the nativeness comes from the GUI toolkit the app uses and the app's responsiveness.

p.s. nice username

Mind if I ask what OS you're on? On macos I use teams a lot and it is very fast even when resources are tight yet you're not the first person I heard say it is slow.

Not the parent, but I use teams in macOS. I wouldn’t call it fast, but I also haven’t experienced the kind of horrible performance other people apparently have.

Video playback and taking calls on a second, larger (40” 4k) display, have improved slightly but are still bad enough that I’d rather move the app to the laptop’s display (32gb mbp mid-2020)

I do think it’s a second-rate app compared to most of Microsoft’s usual offerings - OneNote being a notable exception. Other than the video item above, I’ve found overall performance to be adequate and not remarkable one way or the other.

It's super slow on windows, but VSCode has become very slow, too.

My point exactly. It's not like MS lacks desktop programming languages for its own products/OSes.

Indeed. WebView is based on edge which is based on chrome just like electron.

And react is a framework in JavaScript which they are claiming it will replace.

None of this makes sense.

I think what they mean is that there’s been an ongoing effort for Microsoft to migrate Teams from 1) Electron to Webview2, and 2) Angular to React, though as far as I can tell this has been going on for at least a year. Journalist probably just isn’t actually technical, but either way Microsoft wants to hint that this is a significant release and performance can be expected to improve.

As for whether or not Teams will still suck… I guess we’ll find out.

I'm not particularly familiar with Electron and WebView2, but even the Electron blog suggest that WebView2 uses some different IPC formats that can be faster[1]. Considering a big selling point of Teams is as a hub for other Microsoft products, and other plugins, it doesn't seem unreasonable that improvements to the IPC would translate to better performance for Teams, in at least many of the expected usecases.

[1]: https://www.electronjs.org/blog/webview2/#performance-discus...

I didn't know about that blog but as far as I get it they mention the IPC just as an edge case that might give a little benefit and mention overall similar performance in their summary:

> Electron and WebView2 have a number of differences, but don't expect much difference with respect to how they perform rendering web content. Ultimately, an app’s architecture and JavaScript libraries/frameworks have a larger impact on memory and performance than anything else because Chromium is Chromium regardless of where it is running.

Which does indeed make sense, Microsoft is way too focused on adding shiny new features to Teams and too little on its performance.

But anyway I hope it does make a big difference. It's really a source of frustration now.

They are also moving huge portions of the code to react rather than old AngularJS. I'm not sure if they have replaced it entirely or not, but the classic AngularJS was the cause of innumerable performance problems.

Only Win 11? Isn’t everyone on win 10?

Automatically updated on Windows 10 [1] as well.

[1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-is...

it is though?

Compare the Teams app vs running Teams on Edge in the web. Big difference.

Shouldn't be too big of a difference, and I personally don't see any improvement - it's still the Angular-based app running in the browser

Comment on the page point to a few GitHub issues for macOS and Linux support.

Linux: https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/645...

> Hey all - We don't currently have a timeline for when we would begin this work. Unfortunately it's very unlikely to be soon.

macOS: https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/131...

> No updates since @ningccn's comment above. We are continuing to make progress on Mac and haven't begun Linux planning yet.

I'm surprised they even mention WebView2 for Linux.

Because they already deprecated the Linux version of teams and building a PWA instead which runs in the user's browser not in a WebView

Well, that actually sounds ok/more than great!

These people who trust the Slack app... I dont get it. The native experience is not really better. When I run things on the web, I know there is a lot more trustability, and in the case of many app, the overhead will be lower (which I wish they could fixed with shared lib WebViews, but oh, it's os dependent... maybe you should run the web directly instead of trying to native? (but woe that no one has done good cross-platform webbrowser dynamic lib yet)).

I recently switched to linux part-time and I haven't found an electron app thats better than its web PWA counterpart. Discord, slack, and spotify specifically seem to run much better in the browser.

On macOS I wouldn't dare run discord in the browser because then I lose quite a few features, but on Linux those features aren't supported at all anyways!

if they dont fix it on MacOS and Linux they’ll keep getting bad feedback. The whole point of using web tech is being cross platform, looks like they don’t get it

> The whole point of using web tech is being cross platform, looks like they don’t get it

They never got it, the current Teams app was never actually cross-platform. It has wildly different features depending on platform (browser, "native", OS). Funnily if you switch your user agent you get all features even on Linux (clearly the afterthought) though.

You get also quite limited, artificially, when using Firefox.

I'm wondering if part of the push to those electron apps is because more young developers know how to use HTML/CSS and JavaScript than there are people who know how to use GDI+, Qt, and so on. Maybe cross-platform support is actually an afterthought.

A lot of decisions in the modern IT industry seem to be based on so-called "developer experience". It doesn't matter that your binary is hundreds of megabytes, it doesn't matter that an IM client takes up a gigabyte of RAM and 10% of CPU just running in the background — what matters is that developers have a "nice" experience. All these problems stem from that.

Software developers who actually know what they're doing and ignore fashion aren't as exciting to hire, I guess.

They’re obviously more expensive to hire rather than less exciting. Native cross-platform development for a medium-to-large app is a hell of an investment. On going maintenance and dealing with platform upgrades is costly. Probably super impractical more often than not. I don’t see it boiling down simply to “developer experience”, but I don’t completely disagree on that point.

Instead, you leverage what you already have - any modern product is already going to have a web interface. The idea of packaging that interface into a self-contained desktop application with little to no additional effort is just too appealing. Sure, everybody else screws it up when attempting this route, and performance becomes a huge problem, but surely your team will do it right. And besides, webdevs are a dime a dozen compared to C++ guys (and fluent on two or three platforms? Good luck. You’ll pay through the nose the get them and more to keep them.)

It is, that and if you want to get something out of the door quickly then electron is a good way to do it. Part of that is web tech is higher level than writing qt/gtk apps, and part of that is the additional developers that you mentioned.

Developers that know how to make native desktop apps well are a dying breed

Are they going to fix how the misery of threads in public channels compared to private chats costs the economy cumulatively billions of dollars in communications overhead?

It baffles my mind how many times we’ve lost good explanations, duplicated debugging work, and made information impossible to search for others because it’s more pleasant to put it in a private chat with 8 people than deal with the misery of the motherfucking auto-collapsing threads in regular rooms.

We have up on public teams chats and use them only for alerts by bots. They aren't just badly designed but we found that some users no matter how many times you explain it to them don't understand the concept of threads and create a new one with every message they send.

Teams is adequate, gets the job done, but it is not great. You use it because you have to not because you love it.

The dichotomy between Chat and Teams seems arbitrary.

The biggest miss is search. So much data is trapped inside Teams. If Teams had instant search that worked as well as the Search box at the bottom of Hacker News that would be a killer feature.

> The biggest miss is search.

Hey, at least the search finds stuff since a few months. Before that, a search would show exact results, with no way whatsoever to show the context of the result, making it utterly useless. It’s not a great search, but I’m just happy I can find things at all, now.

Teams is a good argument for anti monopoly laws. We have so many superb messaging apps and yet we all have to use one that is only just considered usable.

Amen. Searching chat history is a uniquely horrible experience. I’d like to search for a word or phrase and see not just the single chat response it appears in, but some context around it. As it stands I’ve found myself searching for a phrase, noting the date on which it occurred, then finding the chat/discussion and scrolling up to that date.

I’m actually happy that any chat message in teams is pretty much gone forever as soon as is it off the screen. It keeps people from using it for anything other than one off questions.

This should've been the chance for M$ to finally start dogfooding MAUI. I guess even they decided MAUI is DOA.

Considering they're trying to make apps for teams happen, I doubt MAUI was ever an option. All the "app" thingies are web anyway so they'd be littering WebViews all over the place (which is arguably worse than one big WebView).

Exactly this. If Microsoft does not believe in the project MAUI, why bother asking developers to use it? Utterly pointless!

There's been a holy war going on inside Microsoft for at least a decade over XAML based UI versus web based UI. The web groups keep winning those fights. Microsoft isn't a monolith, it's a battlefield and some of that spills out to the rest of the world, often with developers getting stuck in the crossfire.

Very well said. I've upvoted everyone in the chain here, but I think MS should stop believing in MAUI. The web is the universal target, for many reasons, many of them good, but more so, MS should actively not be swimming against the tide. They vant deliver as well & as far, & it will cost them face when they try & dont match up.

Teams linux client is possibly the buggiest application I have used ever ... a close second is perhaps vscode linux client

SaveAs dialog appearing in the background in VSCode (https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/146422) is insanely annoying...

I get this in vscodium on FreeBSD too with KDE.. really annoying indeed, the first few times I thought it just crashed.

How is vscode buggy for you on Linux? The only problem I've had with it is that it (and chrome itself) take tens of seconds to show anything when I log into my account using i3wm on Ubuntu.

It's just as buggy on Windows -_-

The secret to using teams is to run the webapp version in a dedicated browser instance like chrome or brave. Then if I have calls/meetings, I switch over to taking it on an iPad.

For those that have to sign into multiple tenants/orgs. I keep a native client running in a vm somewhere

Multi-account-support keeps being the thing that web versions of apps just wont do. It's such a frustratingly petty & shallow limitation.

Firefox's Multi-Account-Containers could concievably be the reagent, the fix, but it lacks so much fit & finish. Getting things opening in the right container has been a struggle. There's been zero positive activity from Firefox in 5+ years.

The temporary containers Addon has helped me with this, you can assign/exclude patterns or subdomais besides the unusual redirect dance when doing some SAML auth on a new app it works fine

I do this too, but open the Teams app for calls.

They took away full screen viewing of someone's shared screen on the browser version. I only use the browser because I run ubuntu. It really sucks now to have someone try and show you their code.

I _think_ it still works as expected if you enter fullscreen mode from the browser itself, unless I'm misremembering.

Teams: [ping]

Me: Sees notification, clicks

Teams: See this room with no new message?

Me: ...

Teams: Imma have you wait a bit.

Teams: OK, here's the new message.

Slack does this too. These are multi, multi billion dollar enterprises; there’s no excuse to this. Especially when something like Telegram does this an order of magnitude better.

Lucky if you see the message. There's an annoying bug where sometimes if you continue a conversation on mobile then return to desktop, the messages sent on mobile don't show up on desktop unless you manually delete teams cache files, databases and then restart it.

My (big5 .ca) bank does this too. The absolute worst.

3:42am, me still up for some reason

Notification: A withdrawal was made

Me: What? At this hour? <clicks>

Bank app: Face ID and/or secret question dance

Bank app: Spinner

Bank app: You don't have any notifications

I've had to train myself to wait 15 minutes before clicking on any withdrawal/deposit notifications.

Using Teams as a Linux user is a nightmare, and continues to be. Now microsoft doesn't know if they want to continue to persist forcing Electron garbage down people's throats, or fall back to the web version, which is equally terrible. Latest, they try to push people away from electron version to web client in a browser (edge only works right of course!), and the web is still as broken as it ever was under firefox or chrome.

Last month my current customer announced they're tracking everything said on teams to threaten who to fire, so now even less people use it now for fear of layoffs. Hooray for big brother!

Teams is still a shitshow, I just feel bad for the monkeys that are stuck using teams, the most anti-social service ever employees fear to use.

Using Teams on Windows is also a nightmare.

Slow as molasses, highjacking global keyboard shortcuts, bugs galore, and bad UX.

At least you have keyboard shortcuts. On macos you don’t get anything that isn’t a menu item.

>Last month my current customer announced they're tracking everything said on teams to threaten who to fire, so now even less people use it now for fear of layoffs. Hooray for big brother!

This doesn't sound like a problem with Teams so much as a problem with that company's management. However, look at the bright side: this company has loudly told their employers that they should start looking for a new job now instead of waiting for the axe to drop later.

Running it in Chromium works fine for me, also for meetings.

Teams is so bad I based my most recent job search on this. I had three prospects, one of them was using Google, other two Microsoft for the interview. I chose the ones who used Google. Not only for superficial reasons but for having the sense to pick out a better toolset. So far it seems to have been the right canary to pick.

They still use Slack for text-based communication, though. Nothing seems to have beaten it yet. Perhaps Matrix could if their 2023 wishes come true.

I hope they fix issues on macos. It blows up my M1 MacBook Pro’s battery life. Their threads seem to lock the UX under heavy processing, with video/app stuttering and frames being dropped.

Zoom on the other hand no issues whatsoever. Similarly, Slack (which is also electron based, or used to be) runs well too.

Obviously, you need to get rid of your MacBook and buy a Microsoft Surface.

It didn’t hit me until you said it. Is this corporate dickery? Not in this case, sadly. Teams is a resource hog anywhere - Windows including. At least macOS on M1 chip gets a spectacular battery life even with Teams.

Hopefully this isn't too tangential, but since we're on the topic:

What's the current state of privacy in Teams? Specifically calls and meetings.

Obviously operating under the assumption that everything you say whilst on company-managed infra is potentially or even likely subject to recording is sound practice, but I do have curiosities. Microsoft is heavily invested in both consumer spaces and cloud, so they walk an interesting line with respect to user privacy in the workplace and guarantees thereof.

My read is that compliance recording (as opposed to normal recording) still requires mandatory user notification.[0][1] That's good. The lawful intercept functionality of course doesn't.

I've heard third-party integrations can initiate recording, albeit with requisite notifications still in place. Is this accurate, or are there scumbag third-party compliance solutions that somehow manage to bypass things?

Based on other comments here, the Linux client appears to be the most privacy-focused insofar that it's too broken to function. :-)

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-recor...

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/cloud-recor...

I feel like, if tech workers were ever to properly unionize, it would be to force employers to not use fucking Microsoft Teams.

I had a chance to preview/test this upcoming release. Its a major positive improvement. It doesn't change the UI but improves the performance to the point that Teams becomes like early version of Slack from 2019

Didn’t they drop linux support recently?

One step forward, two backwards?

I bet they will move around a lot of buttons and mess up the last features that actually work. I feel like they work really hard on messing up a feature with every release.

> features that actually work

Like which one? Seriously I've tried Teams on Linux and Mac and Browser and I don't think anything works there.

I use Teams on Windows and some things still work there. I guess development is further ahead on Linux and Mac

It would be funny if this is part of a PR deflection campaign because of the Bing chat fiasco, and they end up pushing it out before it's ready and it also gets roasted. Cascading failure of management.

Is it getting big usability improvements? Consistency improvements? Stop-fucking-up-and-making-everything-terrible improvements? Because I'd like those more than performance improvements.

It's genuinely amazing how some of the richest companies in the world can't manage to make a chat program or video conferencing program worth a damn, in 2023. We were supposed to have flying cars like two decades ago, but we can't even share video and text over residential internet connections faster than some ISPs' backbones used to be, on computers the size of your hand with more processing power than old supercomputers.

>It's genuinely amazing how some of the richest companies in the world can't manage to make a chat program or video conferencing program worth a damn, in 2023.

What are you talking about?

I use Facebook Messenger's video chat regularly, and it works great. I've also used Zoom many times, and it also works great. Both of these are on Linux, BTW (FBM is through the browser).

Just because Microsoft's offering is a dumpster fire (as usual) doesn't mean everything else is too.

Do 1:1 calls work in Firefox there?

2023 and we still don't have a simple 1:1 calls, but we have group calls available... Go figure.

The phrase: "hold on, let change to {insert chromium based browser} real quick to call you", has become usual for me.

Will this be on mac OS too?

multiple account support!

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