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Comment by tazjin | Hacker News Reader

Google Meet is the only one of these that has always worked reliably for me. Doesn't require any strange clients, works in most browsers, never randomly fails to move just some person's audio and so on.

Disclaimer: I work for Alphabet, but already held this opinion before I did.

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We use Google Meet and it struggles to keep up with meetings with more than 10 people. It seems that the common hack is to ask each attendee to disable their camera. On the plus side, it is the only one that reliably works from a browser only.

I think this is a case where the Hangouts brand is tainting the premium GSuite brand, again.

> worked reliably for me

Every second time I’m using it, I either don’t hear the other people, or people do not hear me. YMMV.

If you have these issues, especially so frequently, I'd wager it's a problem on your end.

Yeah, probably. But what should I do about it. It’s unusable for me. Doesn’t work with Chrome, doesn’t work with Firefox. Zoom works for me every single time.

Edit: Maybe if I could receive some support from Google to find out what my problem is, I’d be able to fix it. But that ain’t going to happen.

Almost all problems on video conferences are on the user's end. What Zoom excel at is to mitigate most of those user issues by trying to figure out all the corner cases that the user might be in.

I couldn't get it to work in Firefox ESR on Debian 10, and audio was consistently choppy for me in Chromium 80 after I went through their forced account creation process. Zoom wouldn't use my camera either in Chromium :c

Jitsi and Google Meet worked by following a link and clicking one popup. Much easier UX

Same here - often it'll tell me I'm waiting for other people to show up but the other people will never see I'm there. It works somewhat better with Chrome but I loathe having that installed on my Mac. Rarely I do have to do so, but am forced to spend time removing its tendrils afterward (it's not just deleting the app!).

I just had a Google Meet call. They couldn't hear me. Zoom has its issues but it is definitely reliable for its purpose.

In my case this is usually caused by a conflict with firefox's anti-fingerprinting. Which I think is fair enough.

I gave up on Google Meet/Hangouts/Whatever. When chatting with Googlers, it is really nice. But their products available to me as a non-Google employee suck and change quite a bit. Just trying to debut issues with participants was frustrating it it would vary based on how they clicked the link, what they had running, etc.

I wish Google would just provide the internal tool and sell that. It’s the opposite of dogfooding their product. They eat the good stuff and product a lesser product to their customers.

Google Meet is the tool we use internally. It's available as part of GSuite.

When I tried it years ago, the GSuite version could not dial out to an external phone number to join them in. Is this now available to gsuite users?

I tried looking up the features on the Wikipedia page [0] and didn’t see a really comprehensive list. I reviewed Wikipedia because when I searched for google meet, Google’s top result (that seems like their product page) [1] just had an “open” button that linked out to the App Store to install “Hangouts Meet by Google.”

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Hangouts [1] https://meet.google.com/

It's missing too many features to be usable. No remote control. The speaker detection is terrible. Audio quality is bad. We only use it because we are cheap and it comes free.

Note that "Google Meet" (part of Enterprise suite) is different than the free "Google Hangout".

Hangouts is different than Google Meet, their premium product. But my big problem with them is that when screensharing you cannot see anyone's faces.

Tiled layout was recently released which allows you to view a grid of all people on the call in addition to the shared screen.

I have never gotten Google Meet to work in Firefox. Or the new Edge for that matter, despite it using the Chromium engine.

It seems to work only in Chrome and Safari.

I get it to work properly on Firefox/MacOs lately, better than Safari actually, but it's a very recent development.

I find this amusing because I regularly use Meet on Firefox and Linux.

My pet peeve with Meet by the way is the absence of a native grid view in big rooms.

only skype worked for us meeting group to group over single feed and open speakers, skype seems to work well doing audio google meet hasn't fixed it for ever. personal audio on most works for me, unless you have like less than 2-3megabit for video.

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