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Comment by riffraff | Hacker News Reader

> However, everything else about Google Meet is great and I wish I could make all my Zoom friends switch.

is it _better_ than zoom tho? I my experience, I don't see much of an improvement worth switching.

In my experience, Meet is far far better than the Zoom webclient. And I refuse to install the zoom desktop application.

I have a pretty modest machine and zoom wins hands-down. It also "just works." I've had trouble getting non-technical people on hangouts/meet/whatever they call it today. Zoom "just works," and they've been responsive to peoples' concerns.

Zoom is the verb now.

I've had the complete opposite experience, getting someone to use Meet is easy, send them a link and they open it in their browser. Done.

Zoom it's "Download this, install it, wait for it to come up...", and forget trying to get someone to use the web version.

Disclosure: I work in Google Cloud, but not in Meet.

I think the main benefit is not having to install a desktop app of questionable quality just to make a call.

You can use Zoom in the browser. They "just" discourage it by using a dark pattern. The link for the web client is small and gray and the browser tries to open the desktop app automatically.

You can also join by phone, at least in some circumstances.

Yeah, which makes it a pretty annoying barrier if you want to make an ad-hoc call to someone. Sending a Meet link is more convenient. Plus, Zoom is pretty crippled on the web in the feature department.

> You can use Zoom in the browser.

You can't change the layout in browser though.

Try using meet, teams and zoom on high latency and/or low bandwidth connections.

Meet seems to work better on poor connections, but it does it with a significantly more CPU intensive codec (VP9?). As a result, it only seems to work well if you have a powerful CPU. If you have a weak CPU, Zoom seems to work much better.

On my 2010 Macbook Pro, Meet uses about half the CPU resources as Zoom. Also, audio-lag is much worse in Zoom.

Background blur doesn't seem available in Firefox on Ubuntu unfortunately :(

not just Ubuntu, Firefox 82.0.2 on Mac doesn't show the option

My only experience with Meet on a weak CPU is my daughter using it for remote learning on her school supplied Chromebook which uses a Mediatek processor from 2015 which has 2 A-53 and 2 A-72 cores. Meet performs fine on the platform.

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