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When someone sends you a zoom invite, cancel the download, then click the having problems link to download again. Cancel it again. It will show you a link to jo

When someone sends you a zoom invite, cancel the download, then click the having problems link to download again. Cancel it again. It will show you a link to join by browser. A few other meeting apps have dark patterns like this. One of my favorite things about Hangouts Meet is it's web first.

chadlavi 7y ago
Thanks for this! I've just been refusing to use it
- tympan 7y ago
  Discord seems to be better than most others
ilikepi 7y ago
I tested "Join by Browser" recently. On macOS (Mojave), it only seemed to work in Chrome, and the video resolution of the other person was poor, but it did work. Also, I did not need to click a "Having problems" link before the "Join by browser" link to appear, so maybe this feature is being deployed more widely now. Since you mentioned Google Meet, I recently tried that with a group of 6-7 people, and it only lasted about 10 minutes before multiple participants (myself included) started having issues. It seems like it needs more time to bake, but since we're talking about Google, it's probably unlikely to ever receive that time before they kill it and reinvent it a year later.
- saltcured 7y ago
  There is an account preference option for the one scheduling new meetings whether the join with browser link is present in meeting landing pages. At least, that's how it works with our university license...
- colatkinson 7y ago
  We've been using Google Meet at my work for daily "standups." Typically 4-6 people, lasting 15-30 mins. Been very smooth sailing, even using Firefox. Out of curiosity, what kind of issues were you running into?
  - Kaze404 7y ago
    No Firefox support was my only complaint for Google meet. After that was fixed I never had issues again.
  - ilikepi 7y ago
    It was a SaaS demo, so we had one person sharing their screen, several participants watching, and a couple dialed in via phone. I was one of the ones watching the presentation. About 10-15 in, a few of us, including myself and the presenter, were booted off the call. Attempts to rejoin were all met with vague error messages about there being some sort of network issue. (None of us were co-located at the time.) I was able to rejoin by phoning in, but the presenter was never able to reconnect on his computer. We eventually abandoned Meet and used WebEx instead. This has been my only experience with Meet, but first impressions do tend to carry a certain weight. It's entirely possible this was an unfortunate coincidence, and that the service is typically as reliable as other solutions. My limited personal experience with Meet, and previously with Hangouts, does not support this however.
userbinator 7y ago
What I find irritating is this proliferation of meeting apps like these, all using their own proprietary variations of protocols and consuming huge amounts of system resources, when there has been a standard protocol for it that's been around since the late 90s, with a variety of different clients available: SIP. One could be sent a SIP URI for a meeting and it would work in any client. Maybe it's like IRC vs all the other IM "solutions", except with an even larger difference in userbase. Edit: looks like Zoom does use SIP too, but it's not that obvious how to use your own client: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201207626-Video-Layout-for-H-323-SIP https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201207626-Video-La...
- tmpz22 7y ago
  Well the best product usually wins in this space. Usually this means well-managed vanity features like sleek design, animations, emote, but also occasionally more heavy weight performance improvements like video quality and sound quality. Ultimately if the standards and protocols you mentioned provided for that, they'd have won, but they didn't so here we are.
  - Godel_unicode 7y ago
    Standards are distinctly not products. Also, the thing that tends to win in this space is lock-in and network effects.
    - ebiester 7y ago
      There is no real difficulty switching. At work, we use multiple solutions, including Zoom. Zoom has been the most reliable. If one was more reliable or had a killer feature, we could switch in an instant. Slack has chat history that makes it difficult to switch. What does Zoom have?
      - Godel_unicode 7y ago
        Sounds like you don't work in a large organization with lots of standing meetings and extremely non-technical users. That must be nice. Many large companies have lots of extremely valuable non-technical users who can just barely figure out how to follow step-by-step instructions to setup calls with even the most point-and-click interface. The switching cost there is extremely high.
INTPenis 7y ago
I'm surprised it was that complicated. I helped a friend out with Zoom last weekend and she had been using the browser exclusively until I pointed out they have an app. She's not very good with computers but zoom is fairly easy to use. Also reading the EFF article on Zoom I feel like these are great usability features. The issue is if Zoom collects and stores the information.
guessmyname 7y ago
This is one of the reasons why I always join a Zoom call from my phone, by calling their international numbers [1]. Recruiters sometimes ask me to turn my video on during interviews… I politely decline and move on to other opportunities. Their app is so privacy invasive, I cannot understand why people keep using it, specially considering 2018 vulnerability [2]. Feross Aboukhadijeh talks about Zoom security problems in Stanford’s CS253 Web Security course [3][4]. [1] https://zoom.us/zoomconference https://zoom.us/zoomconference [2] https://www.tenable.com/blog/tenable-research-advisory-zoom-unauthorized-command-execution-cve-2018-15715 https://www.tenable.com/blog/tenable-research-advisory-zoom-... [3] https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs253/ https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs253/ [4] https://feross.org/ https://feross.org/
- GuqLyr 7y ago
  Looks like Zoom is discussed in Lecture 18: https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs253/lectures/Lecture%2018.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs253/lectures/Lecture%2018.p...
  - pressurefree 7y ago
    STEVEN KING.
ribeka 7y ago
I am using this bash script to convert the link that open zoom app into a link where you can join meeting using your browser: function zoomify() { echo "${1/j/wc\/join}" }
therealmarv 7y ago
there is now a browser extension which does this automatically https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22659216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22659216
- lloeki 7y ago
  there is a setting in the meeting creator's account to have the link right away
scarface74 7y ago
Knowing what I know about Zoom and being careful what I install on my computer, I use all such apps on my iPad except for Teams.
jwr 7y ago
Whereby (https://whereby.com/ https://whereby.com/) is also web-first and works really, really well. Simple, no fuss, people don't have to install anything to join your meeting. Highly recommended.
- smartbit 7y ago
  > We in Whereby are committed to safeguarding the privacy of our users. Our business model is to provide a paid service to users who need additional features on top of the FREE version, and does not rely on widespread collection of general user data. [0] Interesting. Thank you!! [0] https://whereby.com/information/tos/privacy-policy/ https://whereby.com/information/tos/privacy-policy/
- internalfx 7y ago
  I use whereby as well, I highly recommend it.
madwhitehatter 7y ago
The one thing nobody ever mentions about this is the Chinese connection. Zoom is 100% developed in China. They have a datacentre in tianjin. Even states in their financial papers. The S1 form that one of the risks is the fact the product is predominantly developed in China. By PRC citizens. Encryption is also off by default? why is this? The Zoom App also collects screenshots and transcriptions of shared data. This is fine if you are Facebook or Google.

chadlavi 7y ago

Thanks for this! I've just been refusing to use it

tympan 7y ago
Discord seems to be better than most others

ilikepi 7y ago

I tested "Join by Browser" recently. On macOS (Mojave), it only seemed to work in Chrome, and the video resolution of the other person was poor, but it did work. Also, I did not need to click a "Having problems" link before the "Join by browser" link to appear, so maybe this feature is being deployed more widely now. Since you mentioned Google Meet, I recently tried that with a group of 6-7 people, and it only lasted about 10 minutes before multiple participants (myself included) started having issues. It seems like it needs more time to bake, but since we're talking about Google, it's probably unlikely to ever receive that time before they kill it and reinvent it a year later.

saltcured 7y ago
There is an account preference option for the one scheduling new meetings whether the join with browser link is present in meeting landing pages. At least, that's how it works with our university license...
colatkinson 7y ago
We've been using Google Meet at my work for daily "standups." Typically 4-6 people, lasting 15-30 mins. Been very smooth sailing, even using Firefox. Out of curiosity, what kind of issues were you running into?
- Kaze404 7y ago
  No Firefox support was my only complaint for Google meet. After that was fixed I never had issues again.
- ilikepi 7y ago
  It was a SaaS demo, so we had one person sharing their screen, several participants watching, and a couple dialed in via phone. I was one of the ones watching the presentation. About 10-15 in, a few of us, including myself and the presenter, were booted off the call. Attempts to rejoin were all met with vague error messages about there being some sort of network issue. (None of us were co-located at the time.) I was able to rejoin by phoning in, but the presenter was never able to reconnect on his computer. We eventually abandoned Meet and used WebEx instead. This has been my only experience with Meet, but first impressions do tend to carry a certain weight. It's entirely possible this was an unfortunate coincidence, and that the service is typically as reliable as other solutions. My limited personal experience with Meet, and previously with Hangouts, does not support this however.

userbinator 7y ago

What I find irritating is this proliferation of meeting apps like these, all using their own proprietary variations of protocols and consuming huge amounts of system resources, when there has been a standard protocol for it that's been around since the late 90s, with a variety of different clients available: SIP. One could be sent a SIP URI for a meeting and it would work in any client. Maybe it's like IRC vs all the other IM "solutions", except with an even larger difference in userbase. Edit: looks like Zoom does use SIP too, but it's not that obvious how to use your own client: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201207626-Video-Layout-for-H-323-SIP https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201207626-Video-La...

tmpz22 7y ago
Well the best product usually wins in this space. Usually this means well-managed vanity features like sleek design, animations, emote, but also occasionally more heavy weight performance improvements like video quality and sound quality. Ultimately if the standards and protocols you mentioned provided for that, they'd have won, but they didn't so here we are.
- Godel_unicode 7y ago
  Standards are distinctly not products. Also, the thing that tends to win in this space is lock-in and network effects.
  - ebiester 7y ago
    There is no real difficulty switching. At work, we use multiple solutions, including Zoom. Zoom has been the most reliable. If one was more reliable or had a killer feature, we could switch in an instant. Slack has chat history that makes it difficult to switch. What does Zoom have?
    - Godel_unicode 7y ago
      Sounds like you don't work in a large organization with lots of standing meetings and extremely non-technical users. That must be nice. Many large companies have lots of extremely valuable non-technical users who can just barely figure out how to follow step-by-step instructions to setup calls with even the most point-and-click interface. The switching cost there is extremely high.

INTPenis 7y ago

I'm surprised it was that complicated. I helped a friend out with Zoom last weekend and she had been using the browser exclusively until I pointed out they have an app. She's not very good with computers but zoom is fairly easy to use. Also reading the EFF article on Zoom I feel like these are great usability features. The issue is if Zoom collects and stores the information.

guessmyname 7y ago

This is one of the reasons why I always join a Zoom call from my phone, by calling their international numbers [1]. Recruiters sometimes ask me to turn my video on during interviews… I politely decline and move on to other opportunities. Their app is so privacy invasive, I cannot understand why people keep using it, specially considering 2018 vulnerability [2]. Feross Aboukhadijeh talks about Zoom security problems in Stanford’s CS253 Web Security course [3][4]. [1] https://zoom.us/zoomconference https://zoom.us/zoomconference [2] https://www.tenable.com/blog/tenable-research-advisory-zoom-unauthorized-command-execution-cve-2018-15715 https://www.tenable.com/blog/tenable-research-advisory-zoom-... [3] https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs253/ https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs253/ [4] https://feross.org/ https://feross.org/

GuqLyr 7y ago
Looks like Zoom is discussed in Lecture 18: https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs253/lectures/Lecture%2018.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs253/lectures/Lecture%2018.p...
- pressurefree 7y ago
  STEVEN KING.

ribeka 7y ago

I am using this bash script to convert the link that open zoom app into a link where you can join meeting using your browser: function zoomify() { echo "${1/j/wc\/join}" }

therealmarv 7y ago

there is now a browser extension which does this automatically https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22659216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22659216

lloeki 7y ago
there is a setting in the meeting creator's account to have the link right away

scarface74 7y ago

Knowing what I know about Zoom and being careful what I install on my computer, I use all such apps on my iPad except for Teams.

jwr 7y ago

Whereby (https://whereby.com/ https://whereby.com/) is also web-first and works really, really well. Simple, no fuss, people don't have to install anything to join your meeting. Highly recommended.

smartbit 7y ago
> We in Whereby are committed to safeguarding the privacy of our users. Our business model is to provide a paid service to users who need additional features on top of the FREE version, and does not rely on widespread collection of general user data. [0] Interesting. Thank you!! [0] https://whereby.com/information/tos/privacy-policy/ https://whereby.com/information/tos/privacy-policy/
internalfx 7y ago
I use whereby as well, I highly recommend it.

madwhitehatter 7y ago

The one thing nobody ever mentions about this is the Chinese connection. Zoom is 100% developed in China. They have a datacentre in tianjin. Even states in their financial papers. The S1 form that one of the risks is the fact the product is predominantly developed in China. By PRC citizens. Encryption is also off by default? why is this? The Zoom App also collects screenshots and transcriptions of shared data. This is fine if you are Facebook or Google.