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Comment by belter | Hacker News Reader

Can Poland please fine the hell of Zoom, for the darkest pattern of pretending you need to install a client to join a meeting. And only after a few seconds, show at the end of the page you can join with a browser?

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Until this moment I had no earthly idea you could join a Zoom call from a browser. Good on them for their evil genius design team :-p

"PSA: Yes you can join a Zoom meeting in the browser" - https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/20/psa-yes-you-can-join-a-zoo...

"Zoom's forced app is irresponsible" - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/03/zooms-forced-app-is-irrespo...

Shady patterns mean shady company

I used zoom in browser before using the apps.. and the annoying dark patterns basically pushed me to avoid zoom whenever I can at this point.

A lot of these kinds of dark patterns sacrifice long term user satisfaction and brand reputation for short-term gains in questionable internal metrics (metrics that are often tied to bonuses for people who couldn't care less about the long-term success of the company or its customers).

I do not understand why people think Zoom is so good, and why companies pay money to use it. The app is so annoying. (At least on MacOS) it splits everything into many different windows that end up on different screens and it's so annoying having to scan all my screens to find the piece of the UI that lets me start screen sharing. Whenever I join a Zoom meeting from the Calendar, it first pops open a browser tab, and then that opens the Zoom app. In the year 2024, why can't it open the Zoom app directly? Surely one app can start a process to run another app?

I suspect it's two factors. The first is that it's not produced by a major and statistically we like an underdog. The second is that they made a video client that actually worked when all the majors under invested and produced clients with serious issues. From there, the market is sticky. It has worn a bit though, hasn't it?

Before it was more evident you could join from your browser.

It's just WebRTC, like Google Meet, Jitsi, etc.

Zoom is terrible for this, but it's also sometimes the fault of the meeting organiser. There's a setting in the Zoom admin panel which allows admins to enable/disable the option of joining from the browser (or there used to be, at least).

If you don't see the join from browser link even after jumping through Zoom's dark pattern hoops, ask the meeting admin to enable it.

Is this something specific to Poland. I join Zoom calls via a browser (on a PC) all the time - it was not at all hard to figure out.

No, just tested it out (in the US). I honestly had no idea there was a web client at all because of the pattern OP is talking about.

When I clicked the zoom link it opens a browser window and pops up a system dialog to launch the zoom app. After I hit "cancel" on that dialog I was on a page with a large "Launch Meeting" button (and no link to use the web version). Then, I clicked the "Launch Meeting" button and it opened the same system dialog again. Then, after I clicked cancel on that dialog a small link appeared at the bottom that says: "Having issues with Zoom Client? Join from Your Browser"

That’s so interesting, I’ve known about it from the very beginning of my introduction to zoom, back at the start of the pandemic when zoom was becoming ubiquitous someone released a chrome extension to always use the web client.

What if you open it in incognito mode? I haven't had to use Zoom for a while, but last time I did, it would automatically download an exe/pkg when opening the page.

This chrome extension is a lifesaver: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/xoom-redirector/oc...

PSA: just click the “open in app” link (which won’t do anything since you don’t have the app installed) and the “actually open in browser” link will immediately appear.

Hmm, I mean I hate patterns like this but also there are like a million apps out there that don't have a web client at all (not to mention the ones that do support web but constantly display popups saying "x is better in the app"), so it would seem odd to punish Zoom for this while letting all those other companies carry on.

And still, Zoom's "annotate" feature is not available in web version, although there is absolutely no technical reason for that.

That seems...excessive.

Being fined for not offering an obvious web-only client.

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