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Comment by Neywiny | Hacker News Reader

You can run zoom in the browser. At least you could some years ago. Encryption is relevant depending on what you're doing but not everything needs to be super secret. A common practice is to email or use secure file shares while on the call to maintain that security.

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You can still. There's a small dark pattern to discourage it, though. You go to the URL for the call, click the button to launch the app, and when that fails, you see a small link to do the call in the Web browser.

Small? Gawd, I hate doing that for every single Zoom call I have to join.

I already have Zoom installed on the work computer but for some reason it has started doing this weird thing where every time I click a Zoom meeting link in Google Calendar, Google Chrome downloads a copy of the Zoom installer at the same time as it opens the already installed Zoom. I didn’t notice until I already had six recently downloaded copies of the installer in the Downloads folder.

No idea why this happens. But it’s probably part of the crappy pushiness of Zoom to get people to install their app that makes them trigger a download of the installer because either they are not detecting that Zoom is already installed at the right time, or they are so eager to download the installer that they don’t even care about whether or not you already have it installed.

I’ve disliked Zoom since the beginning for their antics, and the only reason I have it installed is because I have to for the meetings at work, and the work computer belongs to the company I work for anyway, not to me.

I would never install Zoom on my own computer.

Tangentially related, I think Safari detects duplicated downloads and only keep one

I had to do it once and is extremely difficult, I don’t remember the details but I think you have to do dozens of extra steps on your account configuration and it won’t work on your phone unless you request the desktop version of the website.

I'm used to it by now.

Click on the meeting, where you will land on a download landpage. Then click the big download blue button in the center of the screen. WHen you click it a link will appear in the 2nd row below the blue button, something like "continue from browser", click on that, and you are golden

every once in a while, someone will ask me to screenshare on a shared monitor, then i will have to explain i cannot , because i am on zoom browser.

Its always great to see the reactions that gathers. Its a true rainbow: bemusement, curiosity, exasperation, outright suspicion...and everything in between!

It works just fine? At least on Linux wayland it works in both firefox and chromium

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/zoom-redirect... handles the necessary skip. All it needs is to redirect /j/* to /wc//join (and /s/ to /wc/*/start).

You can also install and run Zoom in FlatPak which secures your computer by running the executable in BubbleWrap. If you know what you're doing, you can also sandbox it directly.

Flatpak is handy, but given their history, if I can run it in the browser, I'll leave it there. I don't want it, even in a sandbox.

Check out these CVEs: * https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-49457 * https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-22844

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