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Comment by bmmayer1 | Hacker News Reader

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

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"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.

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