19 ms·

Microsoft Teams 2 will use half the memory, dropping Electron for Edge Webview2

328 points by riffraff 5y ago

fuzzy2 5y ago
To repeat what I wrote elsewhere: Microsoft is looking to port Webview2 to macOS and then Linux. No timeline though. So this will eventually also apply to macOS, yes. https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/1314 https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/131... https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/645 https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/645
- deleted 5y ago
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sivakon 5y ago
The fact that they market Xamarin/MAUI as cross platform and Blazer for web, and not use any of their tech to build a cross platform native/web app is laughable.
- mattferderer 5y ago
  TypeScript is also there thing. They've been pushing React as well in SharePoint & other areas for quite a few years. Blazor is very new & was considered experimental until recently. It's still fairly bleeding edge. Microsoft started Teams in 2016 & bought Xamarin in 2016. JavaScript developers are also more plentiful than Xamarin I assume. They should choose the best tools for the job, even if it's not there own. - Edit - It looks like WebView2 is a Microsoft thing based on their Chromium browser version. Super common for Microsoft to make multiple competing products that do similar things.
  - sivakon 5y ago
    Word/Excel run natively on Windows and MacOS. Also have a web client for them. How does that justify using web technologies for cross platform development?
    - mattferderer 5y ago
      I believe Word/Excel have a really old code base. The web tech versions of them are very different applications with different feature sets. They're about as similar as VS Code is to Visual Studio. I think Microsoft is trying to move towards a cross platform for everything from what I've seen. They have a ton of legacy stuff though.
j4yav 5y ago
The amount of memory that app uses is the least of its issues.
gbil 5y ago
Some hope for Mac users maybe? Current state is just shit, especially for corporate users who can't just drop it https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/36387562-mac-teams-helper-takes-up-too-much-cpu-and-makes https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...
- Hamuko 5y ago
  >Some hope for Mac users maybe? Nope, Edge WebView2 is Windows-only. Unless the memory improvements are not actually tied to Electron, but rather Teams 1.0 having a shit codebase. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/#supported-platforms https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/#su...
  - zamadatix 5y ago
    WebView2 is being ported to Mac and Linux https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/645#issuecomment-731474506 https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/645... Linux looks like it won't happen until 2022 but Mac is first. I'd guess they are aiming to have it release around the same time as a bunch of other stuff this Fall but still can't commit to that date yet. Regardless it'll be coming to Mac.
aetherspawn 5y ago
Well if it’s prebundled, I guess it will be properly audited and hopefully less evil than Zoom.. which has been known to install services on your PC that are easily exploitable. Maybe people will stop sending me zoom invites.
thrower123 5y ago
It had better use less memory. Currently it runs at about a gig on my machine, without any meetings in progress. This is about 8-10 times heavier than the Skype for Business client was. WebView2 looks to be a great choice instead of Electron, now that they're shipping Edgeium everywhere. The old IE WebBrowser control has been a non-starter for a while.
jbverschoor 5y ago
Are they using react-native?
- nailer 5y ago
  No react Js. Web view 2 is still a web view backed by Chromium
  - thrower123 5y ago
    There's still a lot of Angular in there right now. Presumably standardizing on one stack will trim a not trivial amount of bloat out.
- jbverschoor 5y ago
  Doesn't make any sense, especially since they created https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-windows https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-windows Can we stop using document formatting as applications? We're also not using Word with OLE/COM/ActiveX objects to do video conferencing.
richardstephens 5y ago
Drop Electron.... for Edge Webview2. I mean, okay sure, half the memory is an improvement. But what is going on in the chat industry that everyone's converged on Electron? You'd think Microsoft of all companies would be able to figure out how to build native apps. If I want a chat service with native apps, it seems like my only option is IRC.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Native anything is a lot of work for not a lot of gain as most users of Teams are forced to have it.
  - Hamuko 5y ago
    Why bother integrating it into the operating system itself then? That's also a lot of work for something that people are forced to install anyways.
    - wongarsu 5y ago
      Or you can just pitch proper integration as a Windows 11 feature, to give companies another incentive to upgrade
    - MattGaiser 5y ago
      Is it all that integrated besides being pre-downloaded?
  - Bancakes 5y ago
    These are trillion dollar companies, I'm sure they can afford to lead the software industry for the greater good.
    - MattGaiser 5y ago
      I don't think RAM conservation is high on anyone's list of initiatives to improve the world. The resource consumption of Electron is mostly of interest to computer scientists who like to see how small and efficient they can make something. But in this case, it does not really matter.
adolph 5y ago
Given the love for VSCode, is Electron a real problem for Teams?
- rapsey 5y ago
  No. There is no reason for Teams to be the dog that it is other than it being terribly written.
  - adolph 5y ago
    Blaming a poor user experience on “being terribly written” seems to be nearly a tautology except that I’m sure there’s been beautifully written software that was otherwise as bad as Vogon poetry. Teams tries to do a lot of functions. Maybe too much?
  - aszen 5y ago
    Apparently it was written in AngularJS, yes the old angular version. Which may explain the performance or the lack of it
    - aszen 5y ago
      Now they are switching to react
jrochkind1 5y ago
I wonder if/when this will effect MacOS Teams. My 2015 MacBook, despite being old, is generally just fine for my web development work -- the one notable exception is Teams, it is almost unusably slow for me. I hadn't yet investigated whether it was a RAM/swap issue or other. But it's the only thing I have to regularly use (per employer) that gives me trouble.
- breakfastduck 5y ago
  It runs like garbage on macOS. 2019 16", if Teams is open the rest of the OS also starts to degrade in performance. Teams is basically unusable except making or answering a call.
- dagw 5y ago
  I have a top of the line Thinkpad with Windows 10 Pro, 64 GB of RAM and a 6 core Xeon CPU. If it makes you feel any better, Teams is slow and annoying on my machine as well.
nailer 5y ago
If it works they’ll probably do vscode next
darksaints 5y ago
Thanks for the improvement, but half the memory is still about 5x as much memory as it needs to use.
- CharlesW 5y ago
  FWIW, Slack is just as bad. Looking at RAM usage while running both on macOS, Teams is at 490 MB and Slack is at 500 MB.
darthrupert 5y ago
Does that mean it'll be Windows-only?
- moogly 5y ago
  Looks like they're porting it to macOS and Linux: https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/645 https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/645
xvilka 5y ago
Maybe one day they will discover Qt framework too.
- darksaints 5y ago
  Qt is about as ideal as you can get for cross platform apps. Unfortunately the licensing is an impediment for a lot of usecases.
  - drclau 5y ago
    So, Microsoft should buy Qt then.
    - zvrba 5y ago
      Yeah, and support it on .net.
    - skeletal88 5y ago
      Please, no! They would fuck it up somehow, and then abandon it after a few years. Qt has been very stable and dependable for.. ages. MS has created and forgot then forgot too many frameworks during the same time.
    - sircastor 5y ago
      Couldn’t they just buy a commercial license?
    - solarkraft 5y ago
      Or something like it, maybe something already running on .net ...
- sircastor 5y ago
  A few years back my company put out reqs for Qt devs because we were pushing hard to do some POCs with Qt frameworks. We had a hard time finding those people. I don’t know if it was location or compensation or what.
axutio 5y ago
I'm wondering how swapping Electron for another Chromium backend will allow them to halve the memory usage. Is Node the main reason that Electron uses so much memory? Or is the Chromium renderer poorly optimized to the extent that it's using double the memory needed?
- oscargrouch 5y ago
  You must remember that each Electron instance will have its own gpu and browser process. If you do just like Chrome, one host process + one gpu process and all the rest are renderer process as it was meant to, you will use less memory. Im working on something that are meant to enable native applications with a Chrome-based platform, and it was one of the first thing i've tried to achieve. Electron was just being sloppy and stick with its first MVP.. because being able to centrally control things through a process like the Chrome browser process does, give you a lot more functionality to explore, compared to what Electron is doing where each host/browser process is isolated and don't know about the other players. Its akin to use a cannon to kill a fly..
g051051 5y ago
I intend for it to use 100% less memory.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
fabiospampinato 5y ago
I'd like to see an independent check of this claim, like 50% memory reduction, but under what circumstances? If that's at startup when the app doesn't consume a huge amount of memory that's not a particularly interesting claim. If that's after hours of app usage when the previous Electron app used to consume let's say 1GB that's really impressive, but if the app is consuming 1GB of memory it's because the app itself is allocating a huge amount of stuff in the heap, you can't just swap browser engine under the hood and cut that in half with no downsides, otherwise every browser maker would do just that.
- hulitu 5y ago
  > I'd like to see an independent check of this claim, like 50% memory reduction, but under what circumstances? You have 32 GB RAM ? Teams will use only 16 GB. > If that's at startup when the app doesn't consume a huge amount of memory that's not a particularly interesting claim. Of course it's at startup. Then the app needs to draw its ugly black window and it needs more RAM. It uses HW acceleration, you know. And it's slow like hell. > If that's after hours of app usage when the previous Electron app used to consume let's say 1GB that's really impressive, but if the app is consuming 1GB of memory it's because the app itself is allocating a huge amount of stuff in the heap, you can't just swap browser engine under the hood and cut that in half with no downsides, otherwise every browser maker would do just that. Every respectable browser will use the whole available memory. From time to time they will have a patch to halve the memory usage but they will recover quickly.
beebeepka 5y ago
As if Electron is the actual problem hay. I am forced to have this junk running on my work PC at all times. As far as I know, everyone hates it. I only know a couple of people who like it and I definitely don't value their input since we disagree on pretty much everything I know Discord is supposed to be for gamers but I've only used it for work and it's hands down the best thing out there
- BLKNSLVR 5y ago
  I use Discord for family communications, it's great. We even have a #shoppinglist channel.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- dafelst 5y ago
  It seems to me that Electron is a scapegoat here - VS Code is built on Electron and is super snappy and responsive for me, even on large projects. This means two things: 1. Even complex Electron apps can be performant and responsive 2. Microsoft as a company has people that know how to make this happen. The reality is (speaking as a former MSFT employee) that the Teams and VSCode orgs are so far separated that they might as well be in different companies. The average quality of devs and their respective management chains varies WILDLY across organizations, and given how shitty Teams has been and continues to be, I think it's fair to say one or both of these factors is at play here.
  - est 5y ago
    Everytime Electron is mentioned, VSC will be presented as counter example. The problem is VSC is the only snappy Electron app out there, Microsoft spend millions optimizing it, while most other Electron apps are crap. Native programs can be made snappy easily. That's the whole point.
    - dafelst 5y ago
bloopernova 5y ago
Not really relevant but I need to vent. Client dropped Slack for Teams. I hate it, and information exchange has dropped precipitously since everyone switched. So slow, half the time text markup doesn't work, and the UI is inconsistent depending on if you're typing in a chat, meeting, or channel. Oh and none of the Slack logs were kept, losing years of information. (But that's not the fault of the Teams software) I loathe Teams.
- xyst 5y ago
  I agree with this. Also how can they forget an option to “paste without formatting”? Copying stuff from other sources is extremely painful. At this point, I leave it as is. I don’t have time to micromanage each copy and paste. Also teams has this arbitrary message character limit that makes it terrible for sharing large chunks of text (partial logs for example). While the integrations with outlook (mail/scheduling) + teams works “well enough”, the experience of the app itself leaves something to be desired.
  - bloopernova 5y ago
    I have to use the Mac plain paste shortcut all the time: shift+option+command+v (Ctrl+shift+v in windows, not sure about Linux) Definitely a helpful shortcut!
    - xyst 5y ago
      Didn’t know OS’s had their own native plain paste shortcut. I’ll start using this, thanks!
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      I wish "paste without formatting" was the default, and you had to use the contortionist keyboard shortcut to include formatting.
      - pivo 5y ago
        You can change it, modify the key mapping like so: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/copy-paste-text-without-formatting-mac/ https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/copy-paste-text-without-format...
BLKNSLVR 5y ago
Teams sucks. It's user interface is unintuitive and messy. I find it difficult to find the context I want. Search doesn't seem to work. It takes a long time to load. When it eventually loads, it pops itself up in front of whatever I've opened and started working on (whilst Teams is busy loading) to take all my keystrokes until I notice the keystrokes aren't showing up in the program I was already using - I've seen at least one person's password entered into a chat session because of Teams "grabbing the front". And, finally, Teams has taken the initiative to redefine "full screen" such that even that unambiguous terminology is now meaningless. Full screen now means "zoom in, just a little bit". Fuck you Teams. Screen sharing / video conferencing works fine, however. Except the full screen thing, so even the decent bit has a large caveat. My apologies for the outburst, but I had to get it off my chest. Teams fucking sucks.
- _ix 5y ago
  I started writing a long-winded thing to enumerate the problems with Teams that no product person at Microsoft will ever see, so why bother? It's a terrible product. The purported sticker price for enterprises disguises the costly loss of productivity due to this mess. It's just a godawful mess.
- rjsw 5y ago
  > Teams sucks. Yep. Was in a Teams meeting last week. Audio mixing is poor compared with Zoom, any background noise on an active microphone will cut out another person speaking. The controls menu keeps changing. Click on the "raise hand" icon and it disappears, you can't "lower your hand" until it reappears some random time later.
  - stefan_ 5y ago
    Why is it that in every one of these meeting apps, speaking causes them to totally garble any other person speaking simultaneously? It's like they go "oh you are speaking lets downgrade all others to 1kbit/s". Stop with the byte pinching and just give us the full fidelity sound like I'm using TeamSpeak, it's fricking audio.
godelmachine 5y ago
This is great news! When will Firefox do the same? Asking this since many years now.
bla3 5y ago
Electron and Edge Webview2 are basically the same: they both wrap Chromium in the end, possibly with some downstream changes. So this is primarily a branding exercise, and maybe and admission that Microsoft isn't upstreaming some improvements to Chromium.
jarym 5y ago
I had this issue with Teams where if I pasted code from VSCode (even just a 1 liner) it'd add a NUL character to the end and when pasted back into VSCode by the recipient it would mess up the JS file (no longer able to load properly in a web-browser). Just don't understand how MS can mess up simple copy+paste so badly.
- hulitu 5y ago
  > Just don't understand how MS can mess up simple copy+paste so badly. They have years of experience in this field. I always keep a Notepad window open - to be able to copy paste properly.
- sam_bristow 5y ago
  The behaviour that still catches me out in Linux is Ctrl-Shift-C starting a call. The number of times I've been copying between a terminal and Teams and accidentally started a call is really frustrating.
cudgy 5y ago
Tools like Slack and Teams are focus-killers and should be banned from all companies that want to work efficiently. The synchronous nature of these tools and the chatty blather they encourage should be avoided by all serious knowledge workers.
- skinkestek 5y ago
  Compared to people calling or finding me at my desk they are extremely asynchronous. What tool do you suggest for teams?
  - cudgy 5y ago
    Simple … email … I choose when/if I will respond on a schedule that I define and My response can be more complete therefore avoiding many of the roundtrips that these tools support and encourage. If someone needs a meeting, they can schedule a meeting from open time that I have provided in my schedule that is shared to my team.
    - skinkestek 5y ago
      It is what you make of it. I have tens or hundreds of unread slack messages. I also know people in the Blackberry era who'd call somelne because they hadn't yet replied to a mail they send a whole 5 minutes ago..!
- dagw 5y ago
  The "chatty blather" is a culture 'problem' (assuming you see it as a problem), not a tools problem. Where I'm working now we only have channels directly connected to specific projects and only people working on those projects are on those channels, and there is no project irrelevant chatter happening. There are no company wide channels and no 'off topic' channels so very little social banter takes place on Slack or Teams. Personally I think the problem is over-rated and wouldn't mind if there was a bit more off topic chat going on in our Slack/Teams.
  - 5y ago
raspyberr 5y ago
Teams is an embarassing piece of software. I use it on work laptop - a Microsoft surface. The laptop is Microsoft branded and all their software is so slow. Clicking to change chats is 1-2 seconds of delay. Opening office files is 1-2 seconds of delay. Opening calendar in outlook is 1-2 seconds of delay. Everything is so laggy and 90% of the time all you want to see is text. Ctrl-F search through Teams defaults to non-exact search.
- raspyberr 5y ago
  In fact I once timed getting into a Teams meeting from turning the computer on and it took pretty much exactly 5 minutes. FIVE MINUTES. The laptop has an SSD how is it five minutes?
- nullify88 5y ago
  I've recently switched to the browser based client https://teams.microsoft.com https://teams.microsoft.com and ditched their desktop application as I grew frustrated with its extremely slow UI. The browser client is more responsive, consumes less CPU and RAM, and uBlock some of the tracking javascript. I can live with some of the missing features: No noise cancellation Audio devices are configured via windows sound settings Can only share full screens and not individual windows Standard Windows notification sounds and not the Teams sounds. Maybe missing more otherwise its more or less the same app. I've installed it as a Chrome App and it has its own window, task bar icon / shortcut and generates notifications. I'd suggest others to try it out.
  - isoprophlex 5y ago
    Thanks for this! Looks to be a game changer for my productivity and sanity! I was about to get a second device for teams. Performance has degraded so badly that it's now impossible to pretend to be in a meeting and run an IDE / office apps / factorio at the same time.
  - Ristovski 5y ago
    > Can only share full screens and not individual windows At least on Chrome, the Teams screen sharing option summons the Chrome screen sharing dialog, which allows you to select either the whole desktop, individual windows or specific tabs inside the browser. Maybe the limitation is from the browser you are using? (Although I would be very surprised)
failwhaleshark 5y ago
Native apps or die. I won't use anything based on Atom or Electron. The reason is that these "cross-platform" applications on top of web browsers are basically complete operating systems emulated on top of the underlying OS. It's worse than turtles all the way down; they're sea urchins: fragile, prickly, and lethargic. And these memory-hogging leviathans multiply faster than rabbits so developers don't have to get their "hands dirty with details" like fast, efficient, proper software. Just because someone can write a ray-tracer in BrainFuck doesn't mean NVIDIA/AMD/Intel should steer the whole industry to using something impractical because developers get excited about all of the "possibilities."
- anoncake 5y ago
  No one uses Teams voluntarily anyway.
DavidVoid 5y ago
Hopefully they'll make it easy to be signed into multiple Teams accounts at the same time. Currently, you have to use a script in order to launch multiple Teams instances [1]. [1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/multiple-instances-of-microsoft-teams-application/m-p/1306051 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/multi...
- eaa 5y ago
  By the way, you can sign into multiple accounts in Teams for Android.
KingMachiavelli 5y ago
Not sure what everyone issues are. I use Teams (in the browser) on Linux and it works fine under both X11 and Wayland (with some work). A bit less polished than Slack but it also has a lot more features. The worse thing about the desktop/Electron version is that they are really bad about keeping the electron version updated so the browser version will support screen sharing on Wayland while the desktop app doesn't.
- CharlesW 5y ago
  In my experience, most people in engineering orgs default to hating Teams far more than it deserves. and loving Slack far more than it deserves. This has roots in Microsoft's history as computing Bad Guy and Slack's pre-Salesforce history as Scrappy Indie. Teams is more complex than Slack but also does more, but it's also not a complete superset of Slack, so unplanned/unguided transitions from Slack to Teams tend not to go well. Like any sort of knowledge management change, it can go well with empathy, planning, and care.
  - iso1631 5y ago
    > Teams is more complex than Slack but also does more Perhaps that's the problem. I generally prefer the right tool for the right job, and once I have a tool that works, the effort to switch needs a compelling reason. Adding a "hammer" function to a screwdriver makes the screwdriver worse, it doesn't provide that compelling reason. Adding multi client access, stored chats, and even some formatting, were compelling reasons to switch to slack over irc.
- spystath 5y ago
  In reality the Linux and web versions are not similar to the actual Windows client. For instance the Linux version is stuck to 2×2 video streams at best, doesn't support background blurring, audio/video quality is inferior, doesn't support sharing a single window, no breakout rooms etc [0]. None of these are of any considerable importance to me but Linux or the web has never been priority for Teams nor will ever be. In fact I will not be surprised if/when Linux is dropped completely when transitioning to Webview2. Judging by the "PR-speak" [1] this is what probably will happen anyway. [0] https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/40324324-keep-the-linux-client-up-to-date-with-the-latest-f?page=1&per_page=20 https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su... [1] https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/645#issuecomment-731474506 https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/645...
DonHopkins 5y ago
Does WebView2 expose an API to add primitives directly to the JavaScript interpreter, or must you do everything by sending JSON messages?
- wila 5y ago
  You can send javascript directly to the WebView2 control [1]. [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.web.webview2.core.corewebview2.executescriptasync?view=webview2-dotnet-1.0.864.35 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.web.we...
  - DonHopkins 5y ago
    >public System.Threading.Tasks.Task<string> ExecuteScriptAsync (string javaScript); That's what I mean by sending JSON messages, but I'm asking if there is a way of directly calling native code from the JavaScript interpreter, synchronously passing pointers to JavaScript data structures back and forth, not just copying strings back and forth between separate processes through an asynchronous message queue. Like Microsoft's deprecated COM/OLE/ActiveX, or Apple's Objective C / JavaScript bridge, or what SWIG does for JavaScriptCore, for example: https://steamclock.com/blog/2013/05/apple-objective-c-javascript-bridge/ https://steamclock.com/blog/2013/05/apple-objective-c-javasc... http://www.swig.org/Doc3.0/Javascript.html http://www.swig.org/Doc3.0/Javascript.html For example, how can I get direct read/write access to the pixels of an html canvas or the memory of a JavaScript byte or float array, instead of serializing images as png files or base 64 encoded strings, or buffers of numbers as decimal text json arrays?
    - wila 5y ago
      There's this [1] and the C++ variant here [2] So far I have not yet investigated what can be done with that. It looks a bit promising (and complicated). Microsoft's deprecated control had the mshtml document interface and that was indeed very powerful. The Async script capabilities give you a lot of power, but I agree that the asynchronous part of it is a huge pain and is causing me extra headaches as it is basically preventing me from creating the API I want to create. [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.web.webview2.core.corewebview2.addhostobjecttoscript?view=webview2-dotnet-1.0.864.35 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.web.we... [2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/reference/win32/icorewebview2?view=webview2-1.0.864.35#addhostobjecttoscript https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/ref...
Shorel 5y ago
And... will it work again in Ubuntu?
dmitryminkovsky 5y ago
Was thinking maybe this would mention Tauri but looks like they're rolling their own? Haven't tried Tauri myself, and but really looking forward.
billti 5y ago
The article says Electron is a memory hog because it is based on Chromium, but so is WebView2! As it is based on the new Chromium version of Edge. It’s still not clear how the switch results in half the memory use then (though I’m happy to see it!)
- Matthias247 5y ago
  It might have the savings on by windows which already loads Edge for other purposes
- wila 5y ago
  It's because they control the whole stack. FWIW, I'm currently finishing up an ActiveX wrapper for WebView2 so that it can be consumed in a way similar to the old IE WebBrowser control and so far I'm pretty impressed. To give you a basic idea. I'm running the control embedded and the WebView2 control consumes about 60MB after navigating to my own -mostly text- website. Browsing within that control to the page of the hacker news topic makes the RAM usage go up to 130MB. Navigating back to this hacker news comment page and the memory usage drops down to about 75MB. So yes, I'm impressed by how well it works. edit: Another huge advantage. Last week I upgraded MS Edge and WebView2 is also upgraded. So the control is kept up to date and not depending on an external dependency that might end up being a security nightmare. The control itself continues to work fine.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    > : Another huge advantage. Last week I upgraded MS Edge and WebView2 is also upgraded. So the control is kept up to date and not depending on an external dependency that might end up being a security nightmare Or disadvantage if you look at it from the developer's point of view - they have zero control over the browser version, so if there's a bug, or lacking feature, or something deprecated, you're screwed.
    - wila 5y ago
      It's a COM interface they can't deprecate without changing the interface. re. "zero control".. you can set a minimum version that you require for your application. If Microsoft creates a bug then yes, you might have an issue. But that counts for the whole stack anyways.
edhowzerblack 5y ago
Teams is shit.
jordemort 5y ago
As far as I can tell, WebView2 only runs on Windows right now; the current version of Teams runs on Mac and Linux as well, though. I wonder if that means WebView2 will also be coming to those platforms, or if it'll remain an Electron app on those platforms, or if they're just dropping support for those platforms entirely. This could also have interesting implications for VS Code. I wonder if Electron has a future at all, or if it's going to go the way of Atom, which was another thing MS picked up from GitHub and then walked away from in favor of a quackalike with a stronger Microsoft pedigree.
jl6 5y ago
On the offchance that someone from Microsoft is reading, I’ll take this opportunity to again express my disbelief that it’s impossible to print a chat or export it in any way from Teams. Even copy & paste is broken if you try to get more than a screenful. Here is why this functionality is important: * When a colleague leaves the organisation, you can’t search for a chat with them any more, so the chats are effectively lost. * When people chat in a meeting, that meeting becomes the only place the chat exists, and do you really want to have to keep years worth of old meeting items in your calendar just to avoid losing that chat? And how are you supposed to organize calendar items as a store of conversations anyway? * Its the most basic level of interoperability. How can you take a product seriously when it traps your data like this?
zerop 5y ago
Going by comments here, I think most people find the Teams awful, then why are companies moving from Slack to MS Teams. Is the cost the main factor?
- Krasnol 5y ago
  From my personal experience people are moving from nothing to Teams. Welcome to Germany.
- Medicineguy 5y ago
  I think so, yes. I could also imagine that business people: 1. see effort in integrating Slack/Matrix/.. . into their landscape 2. think MS is a big name and thus will build a proper product 3. see no big difference in terms of functionality.
- simonbarker87 5y ago
  Yes, you get Teams for free as part of Office 365. Sadly no one has run an analysis to see how much cost there is in reduced communication because of how bad Teams is. If it were measurable I bet the cost of teams actually far out weighs the cost of Slack. I’m leaving my current role in Wednesday and I’m so happy to be leaving Teams behind, I hate it. I ask if companies are using Teams now when interviewing and it’s a mark in the “cons” column if they are.
- azalemeth 5y ago
  I completely and utterly think it's MS abusing their monopoly position (again). Slack, Zoom, etc, all cost actual hard money. Microsoft released Teams for effectively for free, paid for by existing (extortionate) subscriptions (that are never in the public domain). Now, despite the product being almost _universally_ hated by its users, it's number one. Urgh.
MR4D 5y ago
I wonder if VS Code will follow.
sys_64738 5y ago
Is this just son of Active X?
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  What, you mean like Mozilla's XP/COM?
makecheck 5y ago
Somewhere along the line, we really lost it in software. A few decades ago I paid about $1000 for a one MEGABYTE memory upgrade, and even that was needed only because a single graphics application at that time could clearly benefit from the extra RAM to do more things. Now? I have 32 GIGABYTES of RAM, and we are celebrating that a chat client has now managed to find a way to use a slightly less absurd amount of memory, and has graciously returned some of our massive computing resources to us? This app barely does anything!! The apps that require all that power should at least be more useful...right? As far as I can tell, every person on the planet is using more battery power and upgrading their machines more often just to make up for the laziness of software companies. In exchange for the ability of software teams to “easily” write one obnoxious cross-platform beast, we all get to burn through our CPUs and memory. These companies have more than enough money to invest in writing software for different platforms using the heavily-optimized system frameworks on those platforms.
- Zababa 5y ago
  A few decades ago most software wasn't free and wasn't usable on the web. > These companies have more than enough money to invest in writing software for different platforms using the heavily-optimized system frameworks on those platforms. Companies don't work that way. Why put X million dollars in Teams if it won't really increase revenue?
- nomorewords 5y ago
  You could argue that the companies were brought to the success they have due to the fact that they were fast to market to all available platforms. And to think of it, I don't reckon a small company writing a client for only windows/mac would make it big enough to get the money to port it to the other systems.
Havoc 5y ago
We've got Win10 tablets at work with 8gb. Having teams open makes everything else slow to a standstill. I find myself literally confirming that yes I have already scrolled down in excel during a screenshare...lets just give it a couple secs to actually scroll. You'd think we're back in dial-up era How does a Microsoft app, on a Microsoft OS on Microsoft hardware perform so incredibly badly? No way Microsoft is dogfooding this. If they did they'd have nuked it from orbit years ago. Teams 2...sure. I hope they carry over zero lines of code.
rubyfan 5y ago
Of all the things to fix with Teams, Electron isn’t it. Our company forced us to switch from Slack to Teams. We have it the benefit of the doubt but are regretting it every day. Collaboration is down vs Slack and we’re all less happy. Sounds small but little things effect morale.
bastawhiz 5y ago
Electron came out of Atom, which came out of GitHub, which Microsoft now owns. Obviously Microsoft is a vast empire and there's no reason every team will adopt other teams' work, but it seems curious to hear that electron was dropped for what's effectively the same tech (chromium rendering a web app). The article tries to explain why Edge Webview2 is better, but I don't find the explanation very compelling. Chromium doesn't seem to be the problem, because both technologies use chromium. So is it the Node bits? Configuration of chromium inside of electron? From the outside looking in, I find it curious that they didn't just change Electron to do whatever magic they wanted it to do. Certainly they have the expertise and resources.
- hirsin 5y ago
  Teams was built on Electron a long time before Microsoft purchased Github.
  - bastawhiz 5y ago
    Does that matter? Microsoft employs probably all of the foremost experts on Electron right now. The decision to move away from electron didn't happen before Microsoft bought GitHub.
- dstaley 5y ago
  I think there's two reasons memory usage is lower. First, WebView2 is essentially just another tab in an already running browser process. If they're not pinning to a specific version of WebView2, they're reusing the host machine's copy of Edge, which I believe is always running now, so startup latency is reduced. I think their numbers don't include the memory usage of this "always on" instance, and only count the Teams-specific memory usage. Second, Microsoft has done a lot of under-the-hood work to reduce memory usage of Edge on Windows that hasn't made it upstream into Chromium, so I suspect that gives them an additional decrease in memory usage simply by switching from Chromium to Edge-Chromium.
jimnotgym 5y ago
I have noticed that most people I see who have not had a good experience with Teams are coming from Slack. Could it be like if you have learnt Vim it is hard to move to Emacs and vice versa? My company love Teams and don't struggle with it. For me the killer feature is the deep integration with Office. In many businesses Word, Outlook PowerPoint and most of all Excel are where people spend their days. SSO, deep integration, that is what enterprise IT wants.
jstsch 5y ago
Everyone is talking about memory usage. But for me it's nuts how much CPU Teams is using when doing a video chat. Facetime video calls are barely measurable, CPU-wise, whereas a 1-1 call with Teams can easily occupy more than a full core. Quality and latency are much better with Facetime too.
pubudutr 5y ago
The teams UI is so fragile that I often end up reacting an embarrassing emoji on random messages. A single meeting usually drains the entire battery. I can't imagine how this kind of application gets passed QA and shipped.
- Ristovski 5y ago
  I sometimes wonder if one of the issues is all the testing being done on very powerful machines. "It's plenty fast on my machine!" is the new "It works on my machine!"
musicale 5y ago
Teams is what made me learn to hate Electron and web apps masquerading as desktop apps. They also seem to have learned little from Slack, Discord, etc..
imglorp 5y ago
Teams is a compliance product for some CIO to check a box and get their kickbacks and bonuses. Its features center around corporate control of conversations. So whoever has a negative comment about usability has absolutely missed the target customer for Teams: it's not the end user and certainly not software people.
suyash 5y ago
Native apps area always for the most part going to be better than web app, electron is a poor choice of technology. JavaFX would have been better for cross platform development if not C++.
riffic 5y ago
lipstick on a pig. Teams is not very good.
emddudley 5y ago
Teams has worked great for me. It's comparably fast to Slack. Calls and screen sharing work perfectly. I am not sure what is different about my situation versus the other users here. I use the native app on Windows, and my org currently has channels and most integrations disabled (Outlook, OneDrive).
denysvitali 5y ago
If you can't wait for Teams 2 for your platform, maybe you can check out my project, teams-cli [1] or the new (WIP) Matrix Application Service [2] [1]: https://github.com/fossteams/teams-cli https://github.com/fossteams/teams-cli [2]: https://github.com/fossteams/matrix-teams-as https://github.com/fossteams/matrix-teams-as
syspec 5y ago
Isn't EdgeWebview2 also built on top of chromium? I though edge was now a fork of chromium
dang 5y ago
Recent and related: MS Teams Switches from AngularJS to React, Ditches Electron. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27633756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27633756 - June 2021 (63 comments)
alfiedotwtf 5y ago
With all the hate here, where's the web-only, WASM zoom/live/meet killer? Although it wouldn't be easy, it doesn't seem that hard either! It almost feels like a summer project for interns could do a better job than the current batch of video conferencing services at the moment. Requirements: - No install, from the web - No login - There is no 3rd requirement Is that actually hard to build? What am I missing?
shubham_sinha 5y ago
I guess the challenge for MS wasn't to make native app on multiple platforms but to beat the competition i.e Slack as fast as they can. They operated like a startup. Used electron, reached to market fast, gained traction. Now they can thing for performance improvements. Note: Most of the users using MS Teams are not startups but listed companies. That's a constant source of revenue. Tapping that segment with not so shitty electron app has worked wonders for MS
over_bridge 5y ago
Random complaint but Microsoft apps on Android are the only ones I use that simply do not behave as they should. Teams captures the audio channel and I have to manually close the app before anything else can play audio. Notifications don't work when you tap them, instead just opening an empty shell when I then have to close manually (Teams and Outlook do this). It's very frustrating that a company of that size and tech 'prestige' can't make native apps and instead rely on these crutches like Electron. The difference is very noticeable in the user experience.

328 points by riffraff 5y ago

To repeat what I wrote elsewhere: Microsoft is looking to port Webview2 to macOS and then Linux. No timeline though. So this will eventually also apply to macOS, yes. https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/1314 https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/131... https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/645 https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/645

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

sivakon 5y ago

The fact that they market Xamarin/MAUI as cross platform and Blazer for web, and not use any of their tech to build a cross platform native/web app is laughable.

mattferderer 5y ago
TypeScript is also there thing. They've been pushing React as well in SharePoint & other areas for quite a few years. Blazor is very new & was considered experimental until recently. It's still fairly bleeding edge. Microsoft started Teams in 2016 & bought Xamarin in 2016. JavaScript developers are also more plentiful than Xamarin I assume. They should choose the best tools for the job, even if it's not there own. - Edit - It looks like WebView2 is a Microsoft thing based on their Chromium browser version. Super common for Microsoft to make multiple competing products that do similar things.
- sivakon 5y ago
  Word/Excel run natively on Windows and MacOS. Also have a web client for them. How does that justify using web technologies for cross platform development?
  - mattferderer 5y ago
    I believe Word/Excel have a really old code base. The web tech versions of them are very different applications with different feature sets. They're about as similar as VS Code is to Visual Studio. I think Microsoft is trying to move towards a cross platform for everything from what I've seen. They have a ton of legacy stuff though.

j4yav 5y ago

The amount of memory that app uses is the least of its issues.

gbil 5y ago

Some hope for Mac users maybe? Current state is just shit, especially for corporate users who can't just drop it https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/36387562-mac-teams-helper-takes-up-too-much-cpu-and-makes https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...

Hamuko 5y ago
>Some hope for Mac users maybe? Nope, Edge WebView2 is Windows-only. Unless the memory improvements are not actually tied to Electron, but rather Teams 1.0 having a shit codebase. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/#supported-platforms https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/#su...
- zamadatix 5y ago
  WebView2 is being ported to Mac and Linux https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/645#issuecomment-731474506 https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/645... Linux looks like it won't happen until 2022 but Mac is first. I'd guess they are aiming to have it release around the same time as a bunch of other stuff this Fall but still can't commit to that date yet. Regardless it'll be coming to Mac.

aetherspawn 5y ago

Well if it’s prebundled, I guess it will be properly audited and hopefully less evil than Zoom.. which has been known to install services on your PC that are easily exploitable. Maybe people will stop sending me zoom invites.

thrower123 5y ago

It had better use less memory. Currently it runs at about a gig on my machine, without any meetings in progress. This is about 8-10 times heavier than the Skype for Business client was. WebView2 looks to be a great choice instead of Electron, now that they're shipping Edgeium everywhere. The old IE WebBrowser control has been a non-starter for a while.

jbverschoor 5y ago

Are they using react-native?

nailer 5y ago
No react Js. Web view 2 is still a web view backed by Chromium
- thrower123 5y ago
  There's still a lot of Angular in there right now. Presumably standardizing on one stack will trim a not trivial amount of bloat out.
jbverschoor 5y ago
Doesn't make any sense, especially since they created https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-windows https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-windows Can we stop using document formatting as applications? We're also not using Word with OLE/COM/ActiveX objects to do video conferencing.

richardstephens 5y ago

Drop Electron.... for Edge Webview2. I mean, okay sure, half the memory is an improvement. But what is going on in the chat industry that everyone's converged on Electron? You'd think Microsoft of all companies would be able to figure out how to build native apps. If I want a chat service with native apps, it seems like my only option is IRC.

MattGaiser 5y ago
Native anything is a lot of work for not a lot of gain as most users of Teams are forced to have it.
- Hamuko 5y ago
  Why bother integrating it into the operating system itself then? That's also a lot of work for something that people are forced to install anyways.
  - wongarsu 5y ago
    Or you can just pitch proper integration as a Windows 11 feature, to give companies another incentive to upgrade
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    Is it all that integrated besides being pre-downloaded?
- Bancakes 5y ago
  These are trillion dollar companies, I'm sure they can afford to lead the software industry for the greater good.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    I don't think RAM conservation is high on anyone's list of initiatives to improve the world. The resource consumption of Electron is mostly of interest to computer scientists who like to see how small and efficient they can make something. But in this case, it does not really matter.

adolph 5y ago

Given the love for VSCode, is Electron a real problem for Teams?

rapsey 5y ago
No. There is no reason for Teams to be the dog that it is other than it being terribly written.
- adolph 5y ago
  Blaming a poor user experience on “being terribly written” seems to be nearly a tautology except that I’m sure there’s been beautifully written software that was otherwise as bad as Vogon poetry. Teams tries to do a lot of functions. Maybe too much?
- aszen 5y ago
  Apparently it was written in AngularJS, yes the old angular version. Which may explain the performance or the lack of it
  - aszen 5y ago
    Now they are switching to react

jrochkind1 5y ago

I wonder if/when this will effect MacOS Teams. My 2015 MacBook, despite being old, is generally just fine for my web development work -- the one notable exception is Teams, it is almost unusably slow for me. I hadn't yet investigated whether it was a RAM/swap issue or other. But it's the only thing I have to regularly use (per employer) that gives me trouble.

breakfastduck 5y ago
It runs like garbage on macOS. 2019 16", if Teams is open the rest of the OS also starts to degrade in performance. Teams is basically unusable except making or answering a call.
dagw 5y ago
I have a top of the line Thinkpad with Windows 10 Pro, 64 GB of RAM and a 6 core Xeon CPU. If it makes you feel any better, Teams is slow and annoying on my machine as well.

nailer 5y ago

If it works they’ll probably do vscode next

darksaints 5y ago

Thanks for the improvement, but half the memory is still about 5x as much memory as it needs to use.

CharlesW 5y ago
FWIW, Slack is just as bad. Looking at RAM usage while running both on macOS, Teams is at 490 MB and Slack is at 500 MB.

darthrupert 5y ago

Does that mean it'll be Windows-only?

moogly 5y ago
Looks like they're porting it to macOS and Linux: https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/645 https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/645

xvilka 5y ago

Maybe one day they will discover Qt framework too.

darksaints 5y ago
Qt is about as ideal as you can get for cross platform apps. Unfortunately the licensing is an impediment for a lot of usecases.
- drclau 5y ago
  So, Microsoft should buy Qt then.
  - zvrba 5y ago
    Yeah, and support it on .net.
  - skeletal88 5y ago
    Please, no! They would fuck it up somehow, and then abandon it after a few years. Qt has been very stable and dependable for.. ages. MS has created and forgot then forgot too many frameworks during the same time.
  - sircastor 5y ago
    Couldn’t they just buy a commercial license?
  - solarkraft 5y ago
    Or something like it, maybe something already running on .net ...
sircastor 5y ago
A few years back my company put out reqs for Qt devs because we were pushing hard to do some POCs with Qt frameworks. We had a hard time finding those people. I don’t know if it was location or compensation or what.

axutio 5y ago

I'm wondering how swapping Electron for another Chromium backend will allow them to halve the memory usage. Is Node the main reason that Electron uses so much memory? Or is the Chromium renderer poorly optimized to the extent that it's using double the memory needed?

oscargrouch 5y ago
You must remember that each Electron instance will have its own gpu and browser process. If you do just like Chrome, one host process + one gpu process and all the rest are renderer process as it was meant to, you will use less memory. Im working on something that are meant to enable native applications with a Chrome-based platform, and it was one of the first thing i've tried to achieve. Electron was just being sloppy and stick with its first MVP.. because being able to centrally control things through a process like the Chrome browser process does, give you a lot more functionality to explore, compared to what Electron is doing where each host/browser process is isolated and don't know about the other players. Its akin to use a cannon to kill a fly..

g051051 5y ago

I intend for it to use 100% less memory.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

fabiospampinato 5y ago

I'd like to see an independent check of this claim, like 50% memory reduction, but under what circumstances? If that's at startup when the app doesn't consume a huge amount of memory that's not a particularly interesting claim. If that's after hours of app usage when the previous Electron app used to consume let's say 1GB that's really impressive, but if the app is consuming 1GB of memory it's because the app itself is allocating a huge amount of stuff in the heap, you can't just swap browser engine under the hood and cut that in half with no downsides, otherwise every browser maker would do just that.

hulitu 5y ago
> I'd like to see an independent check of this claim, like 50% memory reduction, but under what circumstances? You have 32 GB RAM ? Teams will use only 16 GB. > If that's at startup when the app doesn't consume a huge amount of memory that's not a particularly interesting claim. Of course it's at startup. Then the app needs to draw its ugly black window and it needs more RAM. It uses HW acceleration, you know. And it's slow like hell. > If that's after hours of app usage when the previous Electron app used to consume let's say 1GB that's really impressive, but if the app is consuming 1GB of memory it's because the app itself is allocating a huge amount of stuff in the heap, you can't just swap browser engine under the hood and cut that in half with no downsides, otherwise every browser maker would do just that. Every respectable browser will use the whole available memory. From time to time they will have a patch to halve the memory usage but they will recover quickly.

beebeepka 5y ago

As if Electron is the actual problem hay. I am forced to have this junk running on my work PC at all times. As far as I know, everyone hates it. I only know a couple of people who like it and I definitely don't value their input since we disagree on pretty much everything I know Discord is supposed to be for gamers but I've only used it for work and it's hands down the best thing out there

BLKNSLVR 5y ago
I use Discord for family communications, it's great. We even have a #shoppinglist channel.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
dafelst 5y ago
It seems to me that Electron is a scapegoat here - VS Code is built on Electron and is super snappy and responsive for me, even on large projects. This means two things: 1. Even complex Electron apps can be performant and responsive 2. Microsoft as a company has people that know how to make this happen. The reality is (speaking as a former MSFT employee) that the Teams and VSCode orgs are so far separated that they might as well be in different companies. The average quality of devs and their respective management chains varies WILDLY across organizations, and given how shitty Teams has been and continues to be, I think it's fair to say one or both of these factors is at play here.
- est 5y ago
  Everytime Electron is mentioned, VSC will be presented as counter example. The problem is VSC is the only snappy Electron app out there, Microsoft spend millions optimizing it, while most other Electron apps are crap. Native programs can be made snappy easily. That's the whole point.
  - dafelst 5y ago

bloopernova 5y ago

Not really relevant but I need to vent. Client dropped Slack for Teams. I hate it, and information exchange has dropped precipitously since everyone switched. So slow, half the time text markup doesn't work, and the UI is inconsistent depending on if you're typing in a chat, meeting, or channel. Oh and none of the Slack logs were kept, losing years of information. (But that's not the fault of the Teams software) I loathe Teams.

xyst 5y ago
I agree with this. Also how can they forget an option to “paste without formatting”? Copying stuff from other sources is extremely painful. At this point, I leave it as is. I don’t have time to micromanage each copy and paste. Also teams has this arbitrary message character limit that makes it terrible for sharing large chunks of text (partial logs for example). While the integrations with outlook (mail/scheduling) + teams works “well enough”, the experience of the app itself leaves something to be desired.
- bloopernova 5y ago
  I have to use the Mac plain paste shortcut all the time: shift+option+command+v (Ctrl+shift+v in windows, not sure about Linux) Definitely a helpful shortcut!
  - xyst 5y ago
    Didn’t know OS’s had their own native plain paste shortcut. I’ll start using this, thanks!
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    I wish "paste without formatting" was the default, and you had to use the contortionist keyboard shortcut to include formatting.
    - pivo 5y ago
      You can change it, modify the key mapping like so: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/copy-paste-text-without-formatting-mac/ https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/copy-paste-text-without-format...

BLKNSLVR 5y ago

Teams sucks. It's user interface is unintuitive and messy. I find it difficult to find the context I want. Search doesn't seem to work. It takes a long time to load. When it eventually loads, it pops itself up in front of whatever I've opened and started working on (whilst Teams is busy loading) to take all my keystrokes until I notice the keystrokes aren't showing up in the program I was already using - I've seen at least one person's password entered into a chat session because of Teams "grabbing the front". And, finally, Teams has taken the initiative to redefine "full screen" such that even that unambiguous terminology is now meaningless. Full screen now means "zoom in, just a little bit". Fuck you Teams. Screen sharing / video conferencing works fine, however. Except the full screen thing, so even the decent bit has a large caveat. My apologies for the outburst, but I had to get it off my chest. Teams fucking sucks.

_ix 5y ago
I started writing a long-winded thing to enumerate the problems with Teams that no product person at Microsoft will ever see, so why bother? It's a terrible product. The purported sticker price for enterprises disguises the costly loss of productivity due to this mess. It's just a godawful mess.
rjsw 5y ago
> Teams sucks. Yep. Was in a Teams meeting last week. Audio mixing is poor compared with Zoom, any background noise on an active microphone will cut out another person speaking. The controls menu keeps changing. Click on the "raise hand" icon and it disappears, you can't "lower your hand" until it reappears some random time later.
- stefan_ 5y ago
  Why is it that in every one of these meeting apps, speaking causes them to totally garble any other person speaking simultaneously? It's like they go "oh you are speaking lets downgrade all others to 1kbit/s". Stop with the byte pinching and just give us the full fidelity sound like I'm using TeamSpeak, it's fricking audio.

godelmachine 5y ago

This is great news! When will Firefox do the same? Asking this since many years now.

bla3 5y ago

Electron and Edge Webview2 are basically the same: they both wrap Chromium in the end, possibly with some downstream changes. So this is primarily a branding exercise, and maybe and admission that Microsoft isn't upstreaming some improvements to Chromium.

jarym 5y ago

I had this issue with Teams where if I pasted code from VSCode (even just a 1 liner) it'd add a NUL character to the end and when pasted back into VSCode by the recipient it would mess up the JS file (no longer able to load properly in a web-browser). Just don't understand how MS can mess up simple copy+paste so badly.

hulitu 5y ago
> Just don't understand how MS can mess up simple copy+paste so badly. They have years of experience in this field. I always keep a Notepad window open - to be able to copy paste properly.
sam_bristow 5y ago
The behaviour that still catches me out in Linux is Ctrl-Shift-C starting a call. The number of times I've been copying between a terminal and Teams and accidentally started a call is really frustrating.

cudgy 5y ago

Tools like Slack and Teams are focus-killers and should be banned from all companies that want to work efficiently. The synchronous nature of these tools and the chatty blather they encourage should be avoided by all serious knowledge workers.

skinkestek 5y ago
Compared to people calling or finding me at my desk they are extremely asynchronous. What tool do you suggest for teams?
- cudgy 5y ago
  Simple … email … I choose when/if I will respond on a schedule that I define and My response can be more complete therefore avoiding many of the roundtrips that these tools support and encourage. If someone needs a meeting, they can schedule a meeting from open time that I have provided in my schedule that is shared to my team.
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    It is what you make of it. I have tens or hundreds of unread slack messages. I also know people in the Blackberry era who'd call somelne because they hadn't yet replied to a mail they send a whole 5 minutes ago..!
dagw 5y ago
The "chatty blather" is a culture 'problem' (assuming you see it as a problem), not a tools problem. Where I'm working now we only have channels directly connected to specific projects and only people working on those projects are on those channels, and there is no project irrelevant chatter happening. There are no company wide channels and no 'off topic' channels so very little social banter takes place on Slack or Teams. Personally I think the problem is over-rated and wouldn't mind if there was a bit more off topic chat going on in our Slack/Teams.
- 5y ago

raspyberr 5y ago

Teams is an embarassing piece of software. I use it on work laptop - a Microsoft surface. The laptop is Microsoft branded and all their software is so slow. Clicking to change chats is 1-2 seconds of delay. Opening office files is 1-2 seconds of delay. Opening calendar in outlook is 1-2 seconds of delay. Everything is so laggy and 90% of the time all you want to see is text. Ctrl-F search through Teams defaults to non-exact search.

raspyberr 5y ago
In fact I once timed getting into a Teams meeting from turning the computer on and it took pretty much exactly 5 minutes. FIVE MINUTES. The laptop has an SSD how is it five minutes?
nullify88 5y ago
I've recently switched to the browser based client https://teams.microsoft.com https://teams.microsoft.com and ditched their desktop application as I grew frustrated with its extremely slow UI. The browser client is more responsive, consumes less CPU and RAM, and uBlock some of the tracking javascript. I can live with some of the missing features: No noise cancellation Audio devices are configured via windows sound settings Can only share full screens and not individual windows Standard Windows notification sounds and not the Teams sounds. Maybe missing more otherwise its more or less the same app. I've installed it as a Chrome App and it has its own window, task bar icon / shortcut and generates notifications. I'd suggest others to try it out.
- isoprophlex 5y ago
  Thanks for this! Looks to be a game changer for my productivity and sanity! I was about to get a second device for teams. Performance has degraded so badly that it's now impossible to pretend to be in a meeting and run an IDE / office apps / factorio at the same time.
- Ristovski 5y ago
  > Can only share full screens and not individual windows At least on Chrome, the Teams screen sharing option summons the Chrome screen sharing dialog, which allows you to select either the whole desktop, individual windows or specific tabs inside the browser. Maybe the limitation is from the browser you are using? (Although I would be very surprised)

failwhaleshark 5y ago

Native apps or die. I won't use anything based on Atom or Electron. The reason is that these "cross-platform" applications on top of web browsers are basically complete operating systems emulated on top of the underlying OS. It's worse than turtles all the way down; they're sea urchins: fragile, prickly, and lethargic. And these memory-hogging leviathans multiply faster than rabbits so developers don't have to get their "hands dirty with details" like fast, efficient, proper software. Just because someone can write a ray-tracer in BrainFuck doesn't mean NVIDIA/AMD/Intel should steer the whole industry to using something impractical because developers get excited about all of the "possibilities."

anoncake 5y ago
No one uses Teams voluntarily anyway.

DavidVoid 5y ago

Hopefully they'll make it easy to be signed into multiple Teams accounts at the same time. Currently, you have to use a script in order to launch multiple Teams instances [1]. [1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/multiple-instances-of-microsoft-teams-application/m-p/1306051 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/multi...

eaa 5y ago
By the way, you can sign into multiple accounts in Teams for Android.

KingMachiavelli 5y ago

Not sure what everyone issues are. I use Teams (in the browser) on Linux and it works fine under both X11 and Wayland (with some work). A bit less polished than Slack but it also has a lot more features. The worse thing about the desktop/Electron version is that they are really bad about keeping the electron version updated so the browser version will support screen sharing on Wayland while the desktop app doesn't.

CharlesW 5y ago
In my experience, most people in engineering orgs default to hating Teams far more than it deserves. and loving Slack far more than it deserves. This has roots in Microsoft's history as computing Bad Guy and Slack's pre-Salesforce history as Scrappy Indie. Teams is more complex than Slack but also does more, but it's also not a complete superset of Slack, so unplanned/unguided transitions from Slack to Teams tend not to go well. Like any sort of knowledge management change, it can go well with empathy, planning, and care.
- iso1631 5y ago
  > Teams is more complex than Slack but also does more Perhaps that's the problem. I generally prefer the right tool for the right job, and once I have a tool that works, the effort to switch needs a compelling reason. Adding a "hammer" function to a screwdriver makes the screwdriver worse, it doesn't provide that compelling reason. Adding multi client access, stored chats, and even some formatting, were compelling reasons to switch to slack over irc.
spystath 5y ago
In reality the Linux and web versions are not similar to the actual Windows client. For instance the Linux version is stuck to 2×2 video streams at best, doesn't support background blurring, audio/video quality is inferior, doesn't support sharing a single window, no breakout rooms etc [0]. None of these are of any considerable importance to me but Linux or the web has never been priority for Teams nor will ever be. In fact I will not be surprised if/when Linux is dropped completely when transitioning to Webview2. Judging by the "PR-speak" [1] this is what probably will happen anyway. [0] https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/40324324-keep-the-linux-client-up-to-date-with-the-latest-f?page=1&per_page=20 https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su... [1] https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/645#issuecomment-731474506 https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/645...

DonHopkins 5y ago

Does WebView2 expose an API to add primitives directly to the JavaScript interpreter, or must you do everything by sending JSON messages?

wila 5y ago
You can send javascript directly to the WebView2 control [1]. [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.web.webview2.core.corewebview2.executescriptasync?view=webview2-dotnet-1.0.864.35 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.web.we...
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  >public System.Threading.Tasks.Task<string> ExecuteScriptAsync (string javaScript); That's what I mean by sending JSON messages, but I'm asking if there is a way of directly calling native code from the JavaScript interpreter, synchronously passing pointers to JavaScript data structures back and forth, not just copying strings back and forth between separate processes through an asynchronous message queue. Like Microsoft's deprecated COM/OLE/ActiveX, or Apple's Objective C / JavaScript bridge, or what SWIG does for JavaScriptCore, for example: https://steamclock.com/blog/2013/05/apple-objective-c-javascript-bridge/ https://steamclock.com/blog/2013/05/apple-objective-c-javasc... http://www.swig.org/Doc3.0/Javascript.html http://www.swig.org/Doc3.0/Javascript.html For example, how can I get direct read/write access to the pixels of an html canvas or the memory of a JavaScript byte or float array, instead of serializing images as png files or base 64 encoded strings, or buffers of numbers as decimal text json arrays?
  - wila 5y ago
    There's this [1] and the C++ variant here [2] So far I have not yet investigated what can be done with that. It looks a bit promising (and complicated). Microsoft's deprecated control had the mshtml document interface and that was indeed very powerful. The Async script capabilities give you a lot of power, but I agree that the asynchronous part of it is a huge pain and is causing me extra headaches as it is basically preventing me from creating the API I want to create. [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.web.webview2.core.corewebview2.addhostobjecttoscript?view=webview2-dotnet-1.0.864.35 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.web.we... [2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/reference/win32/icorewebview2?view=webview2-1.0.864.35#addhostobjecttoscript https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/ref...

Shorel 5y ago

And... will it work again in Ubuntu?

dmitryminkovsky 5y ago

Was thinking maybe this would mention Tauri but looks like they're rolling their own? Haven't tried Tauri myself, and but really looking forward.

billti 5y ago

The article says Electron is a memory hog because it is based on Chromium, but so is WebView2! As it is based on the new Chromium version of Edge. It’s still not clear how the switch results in half the memory use then (though I’m happy to see it!)

Matthias247 5y ago
It might have the savings on by windows which already loads Edge for other purposes
wila 5y ago
It's because they control the whole stack. FWIW, I'm currently finishing up an ActiveX wrapper for WebView2 so that it can be consumed in a way similar to the old IE WebBrowser control and so far I'm pretty impressed. To give you a basic idea. I'm running the control embedded and the WebView2 control consumes about 60MB after navigating to my own -mostly text- website. Browsing within that control to the page of the hacker news topic makes the RAM usage go up to 130MB. Navigating back to this hacker news comment page and the memory usage drops down to about 75MB. So yes, I'm impressed by how well it works. edit: Another huge advantage. Last week I upgraded MS Edge and WebView2 is also upgraded. So the control is kept up to date and not depending on an external dependency that might end up being a security nightmare. The control itself continues to work fine.
- sofixa 5y ago
  > : Another huge advantage. Last week I upgraded MS Edge and WebView2 is also upgraded. So the control is kept up to date and not depending on an external dependency that might end up being a security nightmare Or disadvantage if you look at it from the developer's point of view - they have zero control over the browser version, so if there's a bug, or lacking feature, or something deprecated, you're screwed.
  - wila 5y ago
    It's a COM interface they can't deprecate without changing the interface. re. "zero control".. you can set a minimum version that you require for your application. If Microsoft creates a bug then yes, you might have an issue. But that counts for the whole stack anyways.

edhowzerblack 5y ago

Teams is shit.

jordemort 5y ago

As far as I can tell, WebView2 only runs on Windows right now; the current version of Teams runs on Mac and Linux as well, though. I wonder if that means WebView2 will also be coming to those platforms, or if it'll remain an Electron app on those platforms, or if they're just dropping support for those platforms entirely. This could also have interesting implications for VS Code. I wonder if Electron has a future at all, or if it's going to go the way of Atom, which was another thing MS picked up from GitHub and then walked away from in favor of a quackalike with a stronger Microsoft pedigree.

jl6 5y ago

On the offchance that someone from Microsoft is reading, I’ll take this opportunity to again express my disbelief that it’s impossible to print a chat or export it in any way from Teams. Even copy & paste is broken if you try to get more than a screenful. Here is why this functionality is important: * When a colleague leaves the organisation, you can’t search for a chat with them any more, so the chats are effectively lost. * When people chat in a meeting, that meeting becomes the only place the chat exists, and do you really want to have to keep years worth of old meeting items in your calendar just to avoid losing that chat? And how are you supposed to organize calendar items as a store of conversations anyway? * Its the most basic level of interoperability. How can you take a product seriously when it traps your data like this?

zerop 5y ago

Going by comments here, I think most people find the Teams awful, then why are companies moving from Slack to MS Teams. Is the cost the main factor?

Krasnol 5y ago
From my personal experience people are moving from nothing to Teams. Welcome to Germany.
Medicineguy 5y ago
I think so, yes. I could also imagine that business people: 1. see effort in integrating Slack/Matrix/.. . into their landscape 2. think MS is a big name and thus will build a proper product 3. see no big difference in terms of functionality.
simonbarker87 5y ago
Yes, you get Teams for free as part of Office 365. Sadly no one has run an analysis to see how much cost there is in reduced communication because of how bad Teams is. If it were measurable I bet the cost of teams actually far out weighs the cost of Slack. I’m leaving my current role in Wednesday and I’m so happy to be leaving Teams behind, I hate it. I ask if companies are using Teams now when interviewing and it’s a mark in the “cons” column if they are.
azalemeth 5y ago
I completely and utterly think it's MS abusing their monopoly position (again). Slack, Zoom, etc, all cost actual hard money. Microsoft released Teams for effectively for free, paid for by existing (extortionate) subscriptions (that are never in the public domain). Now, despite the product being almost _universally_ hated by its users, it's number one. Urgh.

MR4D 5y ago

I wonder if VS Code will follow.

sys_64738 5y ago

Is this just son of Active X?

DonHopkins 5y ago
What, you mean like Mozilla's XP/COM?

makecheck 5y ago

Somewhere along the line, we really lost it in software. A few decades ago I paid about $1000 for a one MEGABYTE memory upgrade, and even that was needed only because a single graphics application at that time could clearly benefit from the extra RAM to do more things. Now? I have 32 GIGABYTES of RAM, and we are celebrating that a chat client has now managed to find a way to use a slightly less absurd amount of memory, and has graciously returned some of our massive computing resources to us? This app barely does anything!! The apps that require all that power should at least be more useful...right? As far as I can tell, every person on the planet is using more battery power and upgrading their machines more often just to make up for the laziness of software companies. In exchange for the ability of software teams to “easily” write one obnoxious cross-platform beast, we all get to burn through our CPUs and memory. These companies have more than enough money to invest in writing software for different platforms using the heavily-optimized system frameworks on those platforms.

Zababa 5y ago
A few decades ago most software wasn't free and wasn't usable on the web. > These companies have more than enough money to invest in writing software for different platforms using the heavily-optimized system frameworks on those platforms. Companies don't work that way. Why put X million dollars in Teams if it won't really increase revenue?
nomorewords 5y ago
You could argue that the companies were brought to the success they have due to the fact that they were fast to market to all available platforms. And to think of it, I don't reckon a small company writing a client for only windows/mac would make it big enough to get the money to port it to the other systems.

Havoc 5y ago

We've got Win10 tablets at work with 8gb. Having teams open makes everything else slow to a standstill. I find myself literally confirming that yes I have already scrolled down in excel during a screenshare...lets just give it a couple secs to actually scroll. You'd think we're back in dial-up era How does a Microsoft app, on a Microsoft OS on Microsoft hardware perform so incredibly badly? No way Microsoft is dogfooding this. If they did they'd have nuked it from orbit years ago. Teams 2...sure. I hope they carry over zero lines of code.

rubyfan 5y ago

Of all the things to fix with Teams, Electron isn’t it. Our company forced us to switch from Slack to Teams. We have it the benefit of the doubt but are regretting it every day. Collaboration is down vs Slack and we’re all less happy. Sounds small but little things effect morale.

bastawhiz 5y ago

Electron came out of Atom, which came out of GitHub, which Microsoft now owns. Obviously Microsoft is a vast empire and there's no reason every team will adopt other teams' work, but it seems curious to hear that electron was dropped for what's effectively the same tech (chromium rendering a web app). The article tries to explain why Edge Webview2 is better, but I don't find the explanation very compelling. Chromium doesn't seem to be the problem, because both technologies use chromium. So is it the Node bits? Configuration of chromium inside of electron? From the outside looking in, I find it curious that they didn't just change Electron to do whatever magic they wanted it to do. Certainly they have the expertise and resources.

hirsin 5y ago
Teams was built on Electron a long time before Microsoft purchased Github.
- bastawhiz 5y ago
  Does that matter? Microsoft employs probably all of the foremost experts on Electron right now. The decision to move away from electron didn't happen before Microsoft bought GitHub.
dstaley 5y ago
I think there's two reasons memory usage is lower. First, WebView2 is essentially just another tab in an already running browser process. If they're not pinning to a specific version of WebView2, they're reusing the host machine's copy of Edge, which I believe is always running now, so startup latency is reduced. I think their numbers don't include the memory usage of this "always on" instance, and only count the Teams-specific memory usage. Second, Microsoft has done a lot of under-the-hood work to reduce memory usage of Edge on Windows that hasn't made it upstream into Chromium, so I suspect that gives them an additional decrease in memory usage simply by switching from Chromium to Edge-Chromium.

jimnotgym 5y ago

I have noticed that most people I see who have not had a good experience with Teams are coming from Slack. Could it be like if you have learnt Vim it is hard to move to Emacs and vice versa? My company love Teams and don't struggle with it. For me the killer feature is the deep integration with Office. In many businesses Word, Outlook PowerPoint and most of all Excel are where people spend their days. SSO, deep integration, that is what enterprise IT wants.

jstsch 5y ago

Everyone is talking about memory usage. But for me it's nuts how much CPU Teams is using when doing a video chat. Facetime video calls are barely measurable, CPU-wise, whereas a 1-1 call with Teams can easily occupy more than a full core. Quality and latency are much better with Facetime too.

pubudutr 5y ago

The teams UI is so fragile that I often end up reacting an embarrassing emoji on random messages. A single meeting usually drains the entire battery. I can't imagine how this kind of application gets passed QA and shipped.

Ristovski 5y ago
I sometimes wonder if one of the issues is all the testing being done on very powerful machines. "It's plenty fast on my machine!" is the new "It works on my machine!"

musicale 5y ago

Teams is what made me learn to hate Electron and web apps masquerading as desktop apps. They also seem to have learned little from Slack, Discord, etc..

imglorp 5y ago

Teams is a compliance product for some CIO to check a box and get their kickbacks and bonuses. Its features center around corporate control of conversations. So whoever has a negative comment about usability has absolutely missed the target customer for Teams: it's not the end user and certainly not software people.

suyash 5y ago

Native apps area always for the most part going to be better than web app, electron is a poor choice of technology. JavaFX would have been better for cross platform development if not C++.

riffic 5y ago

lipstick on a pig. Teams is not very good.

emddudley 5y ago

Teams has worked great for me. It's comparably fast to Slack. Calls and screen sharing work perfectly. I am not sure what is different about my situation versus the other users here. I use the native app on Windows, and my org currently has channels and most integrations disabled (Outlook, OneDrive).

denysvitali 5y ago

If you can't wait for Teams 2 for your platform, maybe you can check out my project, teams-cli [1] or the new (WIP) Matrix Application Service [2] [1]: https://github.com/fossteams/teams-cli https://github.com/fossteams/teams-cli [2]: https://github.com/fossteams/matrix-teams-as https://github.com/fossteams/matrix-teams-as

syspec 5y ago

Isn't EdgeWebview2 also built on top of chromium? I though edge was now a fork of chromium

dang 5y ago

Recent and related: MS Teams Switches from AngularJS to React, Ditches Electron. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27633756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27633756 - June 2021 (63 comments)

alfiedotwtf 5y ago

With all the hate here, where's the web-only, WASM zoom/live/meet killer? Although it wouldn't be easy, it doesn't seem that hard either! It almost feels like a summer project for interns could do a better job than the current batch of video conferencing services at the moment. Requirements: - No install, from the web - No login - There is no 3rd requirement Is that actually hard to build? What am I missing?

shubham_sinha 5y ago

I guess the challenge for MS wasn't to make native app on multiple platforms but to beat the competition i.e Slack as fast as they can. They operated like a startup. Used electron, reached to market fast, gained traction. Now they can thing for performance improvements. Note: Most of the users using MS Teams are not startups but listed companies. That's a constant source of revenue. Tapping that segment with not so shitty electron app has worked wonders for MS

over_bridge 5y ago

Random complaint but Microsoft apps on Android are the only ones I use that simply do not behave as they should. Teams captures the audio channel and I have to manually close the app before anything else can play audio. Notifications don't work when you tap them, instead just opening an empty shell when I then have to close manually (Teams and Outlook do this). It's very frustrating that a company of that size and tech 'prestige' can't make native apps and instead rely on these crutches like Electron. The difference is very noticeable in the user experience.