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Comment by yosito | Hacker News Reader

It's ridiculous that you should have to install a third party plugin to do this. It's not that hard for Zoom to add this as a preference users can control.

Zoom has terrible UI/UX. Don't get me started on how other users sharing their screens changes MY window layout, or how clicking the button to open the chat moves the toolbar, so that clicking a second time (to try to close the chat) ends up requesting to record the meeting.

Oh, and then there are the privacy concerns.

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> Don't get me started on how other users sharing their screens changes MY window layout

I share your rage. Zoom is garbage, though I hear Teams is a close second. I know people hate on Google now, but Meet works fine in a browser with no fuss.

So interesting how different people's expierences are. Every time I've used Meet it feels like my system is trying to mine crypto and I find some thing I can do in Zoom that works 25% worse. At least we can all agree that we're glad it's not WebEx

Depending on who the meeting is with, at work I use Zoom, Teams, and WebEx. Teams is so much better than the other two that I can barely think of any complaints about it (note that Zoom is itself also a huge leap better than WebEx). The only one that comes to mind is that it doesn't play nice with Bluetooth devices.

And the AI-based noise cancellation that comes with Meet is incredible. It gets completely rid of even the worst mechanism keyboard noises without affecting speech quality at all, which no other solution seems to be able to do. Significant remote office quality of life improvement :-)

I use Discord for remote work and it has something called Krisp noise cancelling that works as incredibly, if you're interested in other clients.

Krisp is garbage compared to Nvidia's free Voice RTX algorithm or Google Meet's. You also have to pay for it.

If you are on Windows and have a recent nvidia gpu, their "Broadcast" app is phenomenal at this. Their noise cancellation hides my treadmill sounds and clicky keyboard while I remain clear and, as a bonus, the background blur actually looks like real bokeh which seems to make people think I'm running a much higher end setup than I am.

No such thing for Linux :( I'd love to use it with Zoom.

The big benefit of Meet is it works anywhere, even phones, since it happens server side.

Meet is by far the best UX of the bunch, but it’s a hell of a resource hog. Amusingly less so in Safari than Chrome, but even so it still turns my 16” MBP into a space heater.

Funny, zoom's a terrible resource hog for me (running the client via flatpak). It opens an incredibly high number of files and processes. Google meet is just a browser tab.

(Oh, plus zoom don't support screenshare in kwin-wayland yet, although I can't blame them for that.)

I mean don’t get me wrong, Zoom isn’t exactly ascetic on macOS either! I think Meet is just at the mercy of the browser on desktop.

> though I hear Teams is a close second

UI polish aside, Teams + Office + Outlook was the best experience I have ever had at work.

Now I'm forced to use a mishmash of Zoom, Slack, and Google, and the friction between all of them is just maddening.

> but Meet works fine in a browser with no fuss.

Not on Firefox for me, lately. The last few times someone invited me to one, I had to switch to Chrome.

It mostly works for me in Firefox but the screen sharing experience is degraded and I pretty much have to use Chrome if I don't want someome to tell me "your screen isn't updating anymore."

It is definitely my preferred meeting app though. You just give someone a link; no install, no fuss, no muss.

> It is definitely my preferred meeting app though. You just give someone a link; no install, no fuss, no muss.

I like Jitsi for that same reason: any meet.jit.si link is a meeting, just make one up or let the site do it for you. Nothing needed but a browser.

I had an interview on jitsi, my face was inversed and it put me off big time. I couldnt find a way to hide my picture too. It was the opposite of what I’m used to seeing in a mirror

The defaults, as far as I can tell, do work like a mirror. There's a "flip" option on the "..." menu, if you want to invert that. And there's a "hide self view" option, as well as an arrow to hide the small version in the corner.

I use Teams in the browser to take calls as a guest with clients who use Teams. I've never had an issue.

Those are literally the exact complaints I was thinking of when you said terrible UI/UX. It's so ridiculous that I have to mash escape when someone shares screen. I thought what my previous company used was not the best, but if zoom is the alternative I guess I misjudged.

There is a setting to disable the auto-fullscreen behavior, at least

> Don't get me started on how other users sharing their screens changes MY window layout

You might not like it, but that's exactly the sort of "just make it work at all costs" feature that made Zoom popular in the first place.

They're basically trying to minimise the "can everybody see this?" nonsense that video conferencing is famous for. I think it's a perfectly reasonable trade-off.

There should probably be a way to opt out though.

Is it Zoom or poor URI scheme handling on the part of OS/browser vendors? The leftover open tabs aren’t unique to Zoom.

I imagine an app vendor is in a tough spot. They need a URI that can open if the user has the app or not, open the right app version for different on prem installs, and offer a web version as a backup.

On the other hand, the Zoom or other app vendor page seems to recieve a signal that the app was launched as it often changes state. Maybe some marketing person thought a feedback page was more effective than window.close()?

It appears deliberate on Zoom's part, they often use that page to advertise something after the Zoom session ends.

Yes this is so annoying. My company provides professional development workshops for the specific field we are in (Language Interpreting & Translation), I am often the moderator of the workshop. I am pretty much familiar with Zoom and that kind of thing happens so often. I have to reposition the windows the way I want it and have to do that all over again. I found it best to use OBS with Zoom, this minimize the layout changes since I am only "screen sharing" to my OBS, and my OBS have various sources like PowerPoint slide and videos. I have not uses screen sharing in Zoom ever since I uses OBS. Zoom is using OBS Vitural Camera and I can transition to different scene in ease without worrying that Zoom change the layout again.

Also annoying when sharing a screen, why mess with my layout when I have multiple screens and zoom is on the screen I'm not sharing? I'd like to not go through hoops to see those I'm talking with, and having to find the stop sharing or mute buttons on a completely new (and hidden) spot.

Still, my new employer uses Google Meet which is even more shit. Grinds the computer to a halt, especially if not using Chrome.

I prefer meet, but I do use a Chromium based browser.

> Don't get me started on how other users sharing their screens changes MY window layout

That’s a preference you can turn off…

It is (on most clients anyway, I think maybe only recently added on their Linux client) but the default is wrong. Unbidden surprise fullscreen is a terrible idea.

It not only changes the size, it steals focus. I work a lot during meetings!

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