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The most obvious one is screen sharing - that requires some access that isn't possible through the browser. Also, interacting well with audio and video hardwar

The most obvious one is screen sharing - that requires some access that isn't possible through the browser. Also, interacting well with audio and video hardware might need native support. Discord is another interesting datapoint. You can access that through the browser or natively, but their team has said that the native client means (among other things) better access to audio codecs for better quality audio and things like noise cancellation.

com2kid 6y ago
> The most obvious one is screen sharing - that requires some access that isn't possible through the browser. Browsers have had screen sharing for awhile. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Screen_Capture_API/Using_Screen_Capture https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Screen_Capt... It doesn't work well across all OSs (see the Wayland discussion from a few days ago....) but it is there.
- cglong 6y ago
  Yeah the Teams webapp supports screen sharing (and does it pretty well)! I particularly like the way Edge (and I assume Chrome) let you choose to just share a specific browser tab.
- snowwrestler 6y ago
  Video calls through a browser seem really hard to do well. I think that's why so many video call systems like Zoom really push you to download and use their native client. My kid's school issued Chromebooks for remote schooling and are using Zoom through the browser. It was so bad that I pulled out an old Macbook instead. The Zoom native client running on a 12 year old Macbook works way, way better than running in updated Chrome on a recent Chromebook.
  - com2kid 6y ago
    That sounds more like an issue with Zoom and the Chromebook. :/ My ~8 year old desktop works great with video chat in Firefox. Then again my 8 year old desktop has 32GB of RAM and it is amazing what throwing 32GB of RAM can do to solve problems. I've actually used video chat in multiple web apps for years now w/o issue though. In theory almost every aspect of video chat should be offloaded to GPU, the browser should just be a dumb canvas to throw pixels at, if that isn't the case then something has gone wrong somewhere in a particular setup. :(
  - dheera 6y ago
    Have you compared it to using Hangouts? I have no problem with the in-browser video quality on Hangouts, and get even better quality using a direct P2P WebRTC link. I think Zoom is doing its own streaming schengens in the browser with JS and not using the native WebRTC framework for video streaming. It's very possible that they made the web client experience deliberately poor so that they could sell you on downloading the native client, and then spy on you.
dheera 6y ago
> that requires some access that isn't possible through the browser It is possible: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Screen_Capture_API/Using_Screen_Capture https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Screen_Capt... Google Hangouts allows screen sharing from the browser. Even if it isn't supported across all browsers, I'd much rather download the latest release of Firefox or Chromium than a proprietary client by Slack.

com2kid 6y ago

> The most obvious one is screen sharing - that requires some access that isn't possible through the browser. Browsers have had screen sharing for awhile. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Screen_Capture_API/Using_Screen_Capture https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Screen_Capt... It doesn't work well across all OSs (see the Wayland discussion from a few days ago....) but it is there.

cglong 6y ago
Yeah the Teams webapp supports screen sharing (and does it pretty well)! I particularly like the way Edge (and I assume Chrome) let you choose to just share a specific browser tab.
snowwrestler 6y ago
Video calls through a browser seem really hard to do well. I think that's why so many video call systems like Zoom really push you to download and use their native client. My kid's school issued Chromebooks for remote schooling and are using Zoom through the browser. It was so bad that I pulled out an old Macbook instead. The Zoom native client running on a 12 year old Macbook works way, way better than running in updated Chrome on a recent Chromebook.
- com2kid 6y ago
  That sounds more like an issue with Zoom and the Chromebook. :/ My ~8 year old desktop works great with video chat in Firefox. Then again my 8 year old desktop has 32GB of RAM and it is amazing what throwing 32GB of RAM can do to solve problems. I've actually used video chat in multiple web apps for years now w/o issue though. In theory almost every aspect of video chat should be offloaded to GPU, the browser should just be a dumb canvas to throw pixels at, if that isn't the case then something has gone wrong somewhere in a particular setup. :(
- dheera 6y ago
  Have you compared it to using Hangouts? I have no problem with the in-browser video quality on Hangouts, and get even better quality using a direct P2P WebRTC link. I think Zoom is doing its own streaming schengens in the browser with JS and not using the native WebRTC framework for video streaming. It's very possible that they made the web client experience deliberately poor so that they could sell you on downloading the native client, and then spy on you.

dheera 6y ago

> that requires some access that isn't possible through the browser It is possible: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Screen_Capture_API/Using_Screen_Capture https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Screen_Capt... Google Hangouts allows screen sharing from the browser. Even if it isn't supported across all browsers, I'd much rather download the latest release of Firefox or Chromium than a proprietary client by Slack.