19 ms·

Ask HN: Why is MS Teams so slow, do devs test Teams on less powerful machines?

233 points by mmsimanga 5y ago

I have a laptop with an i5 processor and 8G of RAM. Hard drive is an SSD. It sometimes takes me a full minute and a half to get Teams open and ready to join a meeting. It is driving me crazy.

gnicholas 5y ago
The Mac application has never worked well for me — video fails often. It is very reliable in one respect: every time I open it, it installs itself in my Login Items, no matter how many times I have previously removed it. I now use the web app exclusively, both because it works better (at all) and because it doesn't act like malware.
markus_zhang 5y ago
One thing I strongly believe, ans have iterated it here a couple of times, is that MS uses peripheral software such as Teams to train their new hires. They knew the new hires need a couple of years to mature, and Teams are bundled with Office anyway, so they won't worry if someone messes with a release.
pjmlp 5y ago
I just use the Web version, it works good enough.
- stuartd 5y ago
  Me too, on my work PC which must be nearly 10 years old by now. I don’t get why people run an app that bundles a browser when they can run the app _in_ a browser? I must be missing something (only use teams with an external partner, and not often)
- davewasthere 5y ago
  Yeah, I've found this to be the least broken (and fastest) way of joining a meeting. No issues with any other meeting platform (Slack, Zoom, Discord etc... all work a treat), but the Teams client, on multiple machines? I've lost track of the number of times it's just not worked for me, or been an absolute dog. Hope that Microsoft give it some love, because it's definitely got room for improvement.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    I dream the day all Electron garbage is either a Web widget or a PWA.
jguzmanjr 5y ago
It’s Microsoft. What else did you expect ?
- aliswe 5y ago
  Some software is really nice though, their todo app for example (im serious)
  - outside1234 5y ago
    What todo app? This one? https://to-do.office.com/tasks/today https://to-do.office.com/tasks/today
    - aendruk 5y ago
      Yes, i.e. Wunderlist (RIP): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wunderlist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wunderlist
      - vymague 5y ago
        Google told me Wunderlist had natural language support. Microsoft To Do doesn't.
  - vymague 5y ago
    I guess the Wunderlist team is more competent than their Teams one.
    - randomsearch 5y ago
      Yep they’ve managed to make a product that is only a little bit worse than Wunderlist, after buying Wunderlist
      - vymague 5y ago
        I just checked it. Kinda surprised that Microsoft To Do doesn't have natural language support like Wunderlist.
urbandw311er 5y ago
MacOS or Windows?
shrimp_emoji 5y ago
Not only slow, but the most buggy IM I've ever used. (Both web and native.) We have a decades-long history of IM platforms, and I've never seen one where messages were randomly deleted from DM history or tell me "we lost your picture; please attach it again" when editing a message (extra fun when it was a temporary snippet from the clipboard[0]). 0: Extra extra fun considering Windows doesn't have clipboard history like Linux DEs have for years.
- david_allison 5y ago
  > Extra extra fun considering Windows doesn't have clipboard history like Linux DEs have for years. Windows + V allows you to enable it.
apostle36 5y ago
Jitsi is the best. Open source and free but all the dinosaurs use teams because it belongs to micro$oft. I installed it today because a client is using it and surprise: it works only with Google Chrome and Edge! No Firefox, no Brave.
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  Since when does teams not work on Firefox? I've been using team running in Firefox for ages
  - GuB-42 5y ago
    Last time I tried, voice calls were unsupported.
  - gnicholas 5y ago
    I think GP was talking about jitsi, not teams. I used teams in Brave just today, can confirm it works.
  - gnabgib 5y ago
    Teams voice/video chat doesn't work on Firefox. Likewise Jitsi recommends using Chrome[0] (it does run in Firefox, they suggest if enough users are on Firefox the performance will be poor).. something to do with the WebRTC implementation. Source: Click the voice/video chat button in teams on FF and get the popup: "This feature isn't available yet for your browser. Try the web app with Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome, or switch to the desktop app." Since Jitsi suggests it's engine related, Opera/Edge/Chrome/Chromium/Brave probably all work fine for Teams (unless they user agent sniff) [0]: https://community.jitsi.org/t/software-unusable-on-firefox-why/22143 https://community.jitsi.org/t/software-unusable-on-firefox-w...
hbn 5y ago
At my company, the developers are all on fairly powerful MacBook Pros, and everyone else in the company has Windows laptops (I think generally Surface devices) For the developers, Teams works... as good as Teams can. So not great, but it works most of the time (for me, anyway). For everyone else though, I hear nothing but issues. Constantly having to restart to make Teams work. And again, this is on Surface devices, so Microsoft is making the app, the OS, and the hardware! Even aside from the performance, I just think Teams is laid out horribly and it stifles communication. The redundancy between chats, group chats, and Teams channels (which are like a message board?) is just bizarre and constantly causes confusion. It's so much worse than Slack (which we used to use, and I used at a previous job) where all communication channels are listed along the left side, and you didn't have to dig through menus and trees of categorization to get to certain places to talk to your coworkers. And since Teams channels are sectioned off behind another screen from your chats (where you'll probably be most of the time), the only way to be aware of when someone posts in one of the channels is to turn on notifications for it. Which is very annoying! edit: oh also a recent update made it so when you paste a code snippet into the plaintext editor thing (whatever it's called, you activate it by typing 3 backticks), it strips all the whitespace from the left, meaning you lose all the code indentation. Just great
- mxuribe 5y ago
  > ...The redundancy between chats, group chats, and Teams channels (which are like a message board?) is just bizarre and constantly causes confusion... Oh yeah, I'm with you! I'll admit that Slack's UX and UI is not my favorite either, but at least any challenges are in a single dimension (not like Teams in multiple, challenging dimensions)...Meanwhile Teams' is just awful. I mean, the Teams "rooms" (I guess i call them "rooms" because its annoying to call them "Teams Sites"?) almost exist like channels/rooms in good ol' IRC...but then Teams has channels underneath Teams Sites/rooms...?...Plus, if i want to chat with an indiviodual, those live in the separate "Chat" area...Ugh! To the valid point about slack, at least its all there on the left. I guess i could sort of see if there was drastically different functionality between Chats and Rooms/Sites...but i dont think so. So, why then separate them? As much as i dislike Microsoft as an organization overall (for their historic corporate behavior), they often don't jhave the worse UX ideas...But for Teams, ugh! I'm gpoing to pivot a little to matrix, and specifically the Element client...which is the most popular matrix web client. I'm an admitted matrix fanboy, so clearly i'm biased...but even Element has areas that are simpler for me to comprehend and utilize...Also, Element in my mind is still waaaaay early in its evolution, and still very much far from their UX being topnotch. But even in Element's infancy is leaps abovew what Teams is now after several years. I acknowledge that Teams "does more" (like embedding Office software, etc.)...and of course the underlying matrix protocol is NOT limited to chat...But, wow, is Teams sucky.
marknote 5y ago
Similar experience on MacBook Pro m1. Sometimes it uses more than 2g ram. Crazy.
sirwhinesalot 5y ago
One of the most awful pieces of software I've ever had the displeasure to use. It's decent for calls, that's the only positive I can name. The chat experience is by far the worst I've ever had to deal with: - My sidebar is riddled with old meetings chats nobody cares about anymore. Makes it hard to find actual important direct conversations with people. - The text editor is absolute jank, I've yet to figure out how to get out of a quote after starting one, lists constantly glitch out, it keeps "bold/italic" state like office but with no easy way to remove it. - Because it connects to sharepoint you get to enjoy all the lovely permission bullshit when trying to share a simple freaking file. Half the time I post a picture it glitches out for me and I can no longer see it. Or I can see it but not if I make it fullscreen. Honestly the abysmal performance is just the cherry on top...
- calmoo 5y ago
  Teams was a not-insignificant reason for leaving my last company. My day to day stress levels immediately plummeted after going back to using Slack. People say Slack is terrible, but I tell them go to use Teams and then come back to me. It is by far the biggest dumpster fire software I've had the displeasure of using. It's the only software that has made me consistently angry. All of the issues you described I have experienced. One of the most plaguing issues was actually viewing new messages. When clicking a channel to view new messages, 50% of the time the screen would be blank and I would have to click away and back to render the chat.
  - sirwhinesalot 5y ago
    That blank screen issue has happened to me as well. The pandemic massively increased how much I needed to interact with Microsoft Teams, and let me tell you, it did not make me happy. Not one bit. Perhaps it's a giant ploy by Microsoft to try and get people to hate remote work. How do you screw up a chat program this badly?
    - hackerfromthefu 5y ago
      Another neat blank screen issue is sometimes people video doesn't work on a call, but it can be fixed by disabling the network card in device manager for a few seconds then re-enabling the network .. at which point the video works. Mindboggling
aliswe 5y ago
Its very annoying. The SSO is so bad as well - the popup telling you to login doesn't have a window title either, or lock to the teams window, so it comes across as a completely anonymous prompt. Phishing attack anyone? Closing the login prompt only opens it again. I hope youre not offline and on mobile - prompt will open, close, open, close, tens of times per second. And lets not forget the dark pattern of soft forcing me to login on Windows with a Microsoft account after I successfully logged in. Need to click that text link - the CTA and primary button logs your machine in! Start writing a message and then choose a message to reply to. Voíla, reply quote comes after the message. Wysiwyg constantly gets formatting wrong, sometimes without possibility to restore it by deleting text. Its like it gets stuck in a table or wonky css or something. Deletes newlines of pasted text. Click a chat that you havent opened in a while and quickly start typing while its loading. Your text will come out garbled as the input gets selected and the text position marker reset to 0 after finished loading the history. Wanna send an image from slack, to teams? Well you will need to either take a a screenshot or download it - Teams doesnt understand the clipboard if you right click and copy the file. Neither does copying an image from Teams paste into either Slack or Paint. (99% sure on that last one) Dont try calling someone when youre already being called on mobile. The app wont let you call, but it fails to tell you that someone is in fact calling you. If you try sending a voice message when on a call, even when muted, the app bugs out. I guess theres more to report if only someone would seem to care about the application.
sebow 5y ago
Element, Jitsi, even Threema business... Hell even Telegram has way more usable (and dare i say one of the best records in terms of stability of cross-platform clients along the years). Now i get why in a company environment one wouldn't use free services from matrix/discord or telegram, but at the same time there are self-hosted options or cloud ones that are relatively cheap and still way better than MS/Zoom.A company choosing a service because of promotional plans from big corporations is not a good deal, it's a red flag.
- tentacleuno 5y ago
  > ... Hell even Telegram Telegram's UX blows Element out of the water for me. IME, Element is slow, buggy, and most of the time just refuses to launch telling me I'm "offline" (a quick peek at Developer Tools shows it is connecting to the home-server fine). I always groan when I have to open Element to do something. Telegram's UX is amazing.
  - sebow 5y ago
    Well once again I agree, Telegram has been the gold-standard of how a client implementation of an IM app should be done in Qt(frankly it blows everything else that exists as far as I know).To explain why i said that particular phrase is because some might jump with the 'telegram privacy' argument which somewhat is a legitimate one when it comes to messaging in a company environment, whereas Element gives the option of connecting to a self-hosted instance.
laughingpine 5y ago
Not that this will help at all, but from my experience it really seems like the product has degraded in quality over the last few years. Originally we only had a few folks using Teams, and the client was pretty snappy and just seemed to work. Then over time more features were added, and things started breaking. For example: On my desktop client, images will not load when clicked unless you back out of a conversation then come back in and click the image. This is not something I experience on the web client. Also on the desktop client, I cannot for the life of me do formatting any more. Bullet or numbered lists are out! The web client seems to work better for me, but will start to chug near the end of the day, which requires a quick reload of the app.
- nikau 5y ago
  Ahh I thought the image not displaying thing was just for me. Other "how did this shit ship?" bugs: Cant seem to handle simple `blocktext` half the time Pasting tables ends up with black on black most of the time Changing chats takes multiple seconds Scrolling through chat history lazy loads for each screen worth with a few seconds delay each time. It's dogshit.
roebk 5y ago
What has been broken for months is viewing images. When I click the thumbnail to enlarge it, the image viewer appears but the image doesn’t load. Rinse and repeat 3/4 times and I can eventually see the image. Other members of my team experience the problem. I cannot fathom why MS has not prioritised that bug fix. One colleague who’s on a modern desktop with an i7 and 32GB of ram waits the upwards of 20 seconds to load a conversation. In the past couple of years Teams has sores in popularity and perhaps the dev work has been focused on scaling. It’s clear to me MS need to allocate some developer for getting the fundamentals right.
- gnat 5y ago
  Can confirm. All the complaints people have here are about experiences I've seen myself: images not loading, resource-hungry to the point where anyone who needs to run Teams with another app (eg to screenshare) needs a non-Microsoft laptop, sidebar full of ancient chats, pants notifications, pants reauth flow. It's brutal, coming to Teams from Slack. It makes you sad.
- kenny11 5y ago
  I run into the incredibly annoying image not appearing problem dozens of time per day as well. One interesting thing about being based on Electron is that they've made the bugs cross-platform as well - the image loading bug happens just as often on the Mac version as on the Windows version.
- watmough 5y ago
  Interesting! I get this on the Teams Preview for Linux (CentOS 7) all the time. It is infuriating. Other than that, I sometimes need to reboot to pick up my Logitech webcam correctly, when working at home. Otherwise, it really seems pretty decent. This is on a 2019 Razer Blade 15" with 40 GB dram.
sangupta 5y ago
I had a similar issue but with an i9/16GB RAM/SSD. Teams would open really slow, hang a lot and the best, drop off meetings in between as soon as I activated other applications. I use Slack/Outlook a lot and this aggravated the problem. Solution was to upgrade to latest Macbook with 32GB RAM. It now runs though I still have issues - just the audio goes out between meetings. I was lucky to have the work laptop upgraded. In short, Teams is crap. My daughter uses Google Meet at school and its so fast/fun/easy on an old 8GB laptop.
jug 5y ago
Yes, it's because it's shipping with an entire web browser. Although I agree with others here this is only part of the problems with MS Teams. It's not a very fun application to use, honestly. Everything is sluggish and many UI decisions are not great. But at least the performance should get better some day. Microsoft has now made the "personal" edition of Teams that is shipping with Windows 11 into one that instead of shipping a browser, uses Edge as a renderer (WebView2). Since that's probably already cached in RAM anyway, it launches near instantly and consumes much less RAM than the clunky edition that doesn't share resources with anything else. However, MS Teams for Business still does not exist in such an edition although I assume they are working on it.
- Analemma_ 5y ago
  "It's slow because it's Electron" is a lousy excuse: Discord is an Electron app with more or less the same purpose and it's perfectly snappy. Hell, Microsoft's own VSCode is considered the gold standard of how to do Electron apps well. It's fast as shit, assuming you're not opening huge files. It baffles me that the Teams org isn't begging the VSCode org for some of their performance mojo.
  - jamil7 5y ago
    > It's fast as shit Why does this keep being said about VSCode? Electron has it’s benefits and so does VSCode but it’s in no way fast or “fast as shit” as far as editors and even IDEs go, sorry but it’s slow.
    - bodge5000 5y ago
      YMMV but I'd never describe vscode as slow. Maybe not fast either, but pretty much normal. I've never noticed much about its speed, which would imply its not blindingly fast or painfully slow, just normal
  - sirwhinesalot 5y ago
    I wouldn't call Discord snappy, not even close, Telegram is way snappier for example... But Teams is certainly on another league (for the worse). VSCode isn't that snappy either but it's decent enough. If every Electron app was like that "It's slow because it's Electron" wouldn't be such a meme.
prima-facie 5y ago
Teams is not meant to be good, friendly or performant. Teams is meant to check boxes in executive meetings, and to beat the competition's price when purchased in bulk.
- mistrial9 5y ago
  you forgot "spy on you"
  - g8oz 5y ago
    I assume you mean Viva Insights...I'm curious as to what managers can see about your activities when that is enabled. The euphemism is "Organisational productivity reporting".
- can16358p 5y ago
  Classical Microsoft vision. If only they focused a little of their budget to design and actual your feedback...
- Corrado 5y ago
  100% agree! I suspect that Teams is just a fancy front-end to Sharepoint, so it was "easy" to build. Just fire up Electron and duplicate Sharepoint features. Oh, and tack on a chat function while your at it. Done!
matthall28 5y ago
I am upgrading from an 8GB M1 Macbook Air to a 16GB M1 Max Macbook Pro just because Teams makes my laptop unusable
spaetzleesser 5y ago
I feel Teams is thrown together by a few interns that are trying out Scrum to be "agile". Every few days a button moves to another place or some weird bug is introduced. The latest is that the left and right cursor keys stop working after a while. Makes me wonder what they are doing to have such issues and not notice and why isn't that fixed quickly? Search is basically useless. The built-in wiki isn't searchable at all. It''s just all out terrible. The only thing that works well is calls, voice and video. I am sure they have plans to destroy that too :-)
- EvanKnowles 5y ago
  That left/right cursor key bug is the worst. I'd assumed there was just something wrong with my keyboard until my colleagues also reported seeing it.
  - fian 5y ago
    It is related to italics. I often use _phrase_ to italisise. This seems to trigger the left/right arrow key bug semi-regularly. This fix is to find the Teams icon in the Taskbar, right click and Quit. Then restart Teams.
    - hbn 5y ago
      Alternative solution: > find the Teams icon in the Taskbar, right click and Quit. ...and never open Teams again!
anonymousiam 5y ago
I doubt anyone would be using Teams if it had not been produced by Microsoft. It has so many shortcomings that I know I will miss some, but here's a gripe list anyway: 1) Echo cancellation. This is a solved problem and pretty much every other conferencing app does it right. Microsoft probably rolled their own which is why it does not work right. 2) I have Teams installed on my desktop, Android phone, and iPad. (Unfortunately, my company wants us to use it.) Regardless of the notification settings in the apps, if I was on the desktop but switched my KVM away, my phone and iPad will not notify me of incoming Teams calls, messages, etc. 3) Editing a document using the collaborative environment is painfully broken. Sometimes it will take many seconds to register a keystroke (on a gigabit-class CONUS connection). Sometimes edits will disappear completely, or sometimes just temporarily. Change tracking doesn't work right. Google Docs had collaborative editing perfected over 10 years ago. 4) Moving files in/out of Teams "Folders" can be painfully slow. 5) Interoperability between the desktop Teams app and govcloud/non-govcloud users is hosed, but it seems to work fine on phones and tablets. Desktop users must access meetings via browser if their "home" Teams account govcloud flavor does not match that of the meeting originator, but no such restrictions exist on phones & tablets. WTF? 6) The Linux desktop version of Teams does not operate with govcloud at all. 7) Depending on the platform, users cannot share their desktop when using the browser-based version. Chrome actually supports this better than Edge.
- rightbyte 5y ago
  > 1) Echo cancellation. This is a solved problem and pretty much every other conferencing app does it right. Microsoft probably rolled their own which is why it does not work right. I don't know if Teams is worse or not, but my take is that it is impossible to do right for conversations since it introduces too much lag. I sincerely prefer echoes. Old time phones worked just fine and it felt like you stood next to the person you were speaking too instead of speaking through some filter group delay.
  - toast0 5y ago
    Old timey phone systems did have echo cancelation. One of the tones in high speed (hah!) modem handshakes is intended to disable the echo cancelers, so that the modems can do it better, but the system echo cancellers usually worked well for actual voice communications. They also had a whole heck of a lot less latency. Sure, routes were probably less direct, but if you had an honest to goodness analog line, the only added latency was from amplifiers and multiplexing equipment, neither of which added significant latency. More likely your call would be digitized and sent as part of a T1 or similar circuit; but that doesn't add a lot of delay, because a T1 is multiplexed as one sample per line, 8000 samples per second per line. Where your is connected at digital telphone switches, there would need to be a buffer to match up timing, but it only needs to be one sample long. There's not likely to be that many switches on a call, so total added latency is going to be a few sample lengths, and maybe around 1ms. (This is in addition to the transmission delay, of course) In contrast, modern computers have meaningful audio sampling delays, and transmitting each sample would kill your network, so you batch a few samples (usually 10-40ms worth), there's delay from the encode/decode, and packet switched networking also adds delay in waiting for a send slot. Echo cancelling with all that latency is even more important, cause the echos are hard to tune out when they come back so late.
ardit33 5y ago
Microsoft doesn't pay their devs. that well, that's why. With second rate engineers and designers, you are going to get second rate products.
randomsearch 5y ago
Had a call today. Shortly beforehand I realised it was on Teams and immediately began closing down other apps on my laptop. I paused for a moment and thought about how insane it was that i was automatically freeing up resources to cope with Teams. It’s almost the only app that causes my fan to run. It must be so frustrating for coders on that product, surely everyone wants to craft something great.
INTPenis 5y ago
Sounds like something is wrong with your setup. I'm using the Teams Electron app on a Ryzen 5 with 16G RAM and nvme disk, I can't complain about load times at least. I just wish it had better bluetooth audio support and wayland screen sharing on Linux. Some day maybe. The most positive thing about Teams is that we finally have an app that EVERYONE uses. From my co-workers, to vendors, to clients. Monopoly is great when it allows me to connect with people easily.
sawmurai 5y ago
Teams is what made me turn in my windows notebook for a MacBook at work. On Mac, it still hangs and is glitchy, but at least I can switch chats in less than 2 seconds. And even while having a call. Hell, I can even search in the chat history now!
JJMcJ 5y ago
Everything MSFT produces seems terribly slow. Windows design issues? Coding standards incentivize slow code? Something I'm missing completely?
- can16358p 5y ago
  I'd say company culture. They don't care about design, they don't care about performance or efficiency. They want to sell their stuff to enterprises, no matter how inefficient their systems are in every way. The classic Mac vs. Windows PC at its finest. Apple cares about design and thinks from actual user perspective to make life easier and enjoyable and sell beautifully designed products to make money (as a company they have a lot to be criticized of course, but that's not the topic of this thread). Microsoft is a boring company that ONLY cares about money and enterprises.
0xbadc0de5 5y ago
Most likely because the Teams developing it are either not competent or not empowered to improve it. Probably some combination of the two. I've used it daily for years and it's never been a good experience - desktop, mobile, web (FF, Chrome, Brave)... they are all trash. Although as others have pointed out, it has gotten noticeably worse over the last year.
atonse 5y ago
I can't express how much I hate teams, and two years into a remote work revolution, they honestly don't have any excuse. My teams client is CONSTANTLY confused about this "work account home account" garbage. Holy crap Batman it's a disaster. Clicking on teams links causes my teams client to freeze up with a blank screen sometimes for minutes. So I've been late to many meetings because the Teams client just doesn't connect. I'm yet to hear a SINGLE instance of someone using teams other than "we already bought it" or "we have some strategic partnership with MS, so we have to use it" – some BS that's shoved down people's throats. The multi-account stuff is something slack and discord got right from day one. And years into it, MS still hasn't figured this out. It's appalling how bad Teams is, years later. Anytime I see a teams link in a calendar event, I groan loudly.
- dariusj18 5y ago
  Not being able to use multiple accounts is a severe disadvantage that they claimed they were working on.
- sideshowb 5y ago
  Aaaah yes you just reminded me I have similar issues switching between teams in different organizations. This thread is much needed therapy. Teams is truly awful on so many levels.
  - calmoo 5y ago
    The only solace in using Teams is being able to bond with other people who have experienced the same pain.
  - cge 5y ago
    There are a few conferences in my field that, for some reason, use Teams, and a number of UK universities seem to have been pushed into using it. It is bad enough that one warned everyone that, if their university used Teams, to please provide a non-university email address, because the university using Teams would likely prevent the university email address from being used to log in to the conference. For the actual talks, of course, most of these conferences use Teams to send out Zoom links. Using Teams for those would be a disaster.
nanidin 5y ago
MS Teams is slow because it is a loss leader that exists so that decision makers can tick off the “company wide instant messaging that meets regulatory data retention requirements” box in the process of paying for an Office package. No one is paying for Teams intentionally, so MS will not see any return on investment in improvements (except for the eventual retention problems that come up when people finally decide they’ve had enough.)
smcleod 5y ago
MS Teams is honestly one of the worst pieces of software I've had to use in my 17~ years in tech, it's slow, bloated (thanks in part to Electron) and the UX is absolutely horrendous.
outworlder 5y ago
M1-based Macs: runs flawlessly, UX considerations aside. Older Intel Macs (where Zoom, Chime and Google Meet runs fine): can't even share a screen. Turning off GPU accelerations may or may not help.
- kube-system 5y ago
  The only software that stresses my M1 more than Teams is when I ran some benchmark software. I've had a couple crashes recently too :(
- ipython 5y ago
  Have they released an ARM native version of the client? I find the web version superior on my M1 Mac since last I checked the native client was intel only
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herbturbo 5y ago
It is so cathartic to read this thread and know I am not alone in my disdain for this garbage product. I also got force-updated to the new and improved Outlook today which now looks much worse. I love my job but I hate the infusion of Microsoft's mediocrity into my life.
- kzrdude 5y ago
  The only reason I liked teams was that I had to use "Skype for Business" before it, and it was even more rubbish
  - sideshowb 5y ago
    That's yet another weird combination isn't it: teams, Skype, Skype for business, 3 calling products from the same company and still not compatible?
    - tanseydavid 5y ago
      You forgot Yammer...but that's understandable because Yammer was very forgettable. (chat-only)
- Braini 5y ago
  At least for Outlook I could still switch back this time, which I immediately did.
alkonaut 5y ago
I have a few issues in teams (keyboard nav in input text, copy paste some times failing, editing pre/code blocks stinks, images not opening etc). Performance feels perfectly acceptable. It’s by no means snappy but it’s not something I wish the Teams devs should focus on instead of other features and bug fixes. I have never had it take more than a couple of seconds to start, seen no crashes, find audio and video working 100% (at least as good as zoom, for example). You probably want to get a log of what takes time at startup (if that’s possible). That’s not normal.
JamesAdir 5y ago
I still can't figure out what MS want me to use. with office 365 I can get Teams, Yammer and Skype for business. Why not have one product for like Zoom that clearly works out for consumers and business a like.
- amanzi 5y ago
  Skype for Business is effectively end-of-life, although there is a current supported version of Skype for Business Server that some businesses are still using. Yammer is like "Facebook for companies". Teams is for your all your collaboration/communication needs.
austincheney 5y ago
> I have a laptop with Hardware will never solve for poorly written software by people who don't know what they are doing. This isn't a technology failure. It's a leadership failure.
winkeltripel 5y ago
Ex office dev here. Actual dev work is done on i9 workstations running 64 gb of ram, and usually located very near an Azure data center, regardless of where the dev works. The result is that it's fast for us. Everyone knows that it runs like poop, but there are other priorities, and no performance regression tests.
- foolproofplan 5y ago
  They know about performance issues don't dont want to fix or introduce performance tests? Nice.
  - toyg 5y ago
    It's Microsoft. Corporations of that size don't really have to worry about technical details that much - the competition can eat their lunch here and there and they'll still survive. They know they can crush any small fish any time. I mean, look at this very thread: Slack effectively invented this "modern IRC" bullshit, but still, when MS decided they had to have an answer, they cloned it and effectively imposed it to millions of users, no matter how inferior a product it might have been - in just a few years. They can throw hundreds of millions in the fire and they'll still be okay. No need to rush for a few perf tickets...
    - xtracto 5y ago
      Moreover, teams target audience is not people in HN. My wife works for a huge transnational manufacturing company (like Foxconn) which not long ago migrated from Google cloud to all-things-Microsoft. I cannot imagine the amount of win for the SDR that won MS that account. Now, teams allow IT drones to tick the 'online chat' checkbox, its (crappily) integrated with Office365 and basically does most of what the Financial, HR, Business, operations and Sales department need. Nobody gets fired for buying Microsoft. That's the target audience. And that audience only needs 'good enough ' software. And, being it IT, what better than computers that keep breaking, so that their job is guaranteed.
      - 5y ago
faebi 5y ago
Interestingly, the interaction latency goes down from 1-2 seconds to near instant when I switch from the native Mac App to the web version with Firefox Nightly. I am using a fancy fast M1 Pro. It's ridiculous that Firefox is faster and not slower than their own app.
Tade0 5y ago
The other day, while trying to build a docker image from inside a VM running Ubuntu(temporary setup due to issues with getting a Docker Desktop license), I had a moment to pause and reflect on how no matter how fast hardware becomes, humanity always manages to make it slow. The reason for this is related to the way development of browser-based applications (be it Electron apps or just web apps) is scaled. In order to make 20+ people work on such a project effectively you need loose coupling, so the codebase is divided into those small, independent modules - each making its own API calls. And herein lies the crux of the issue. Chrome/Chromium/Electron etc. currently have a hard limit of 6 HTTP requests being processed at any given moment - the rest is queued(or "stalled"). Notice how weirdly slow is gmail to load? It's making a total of 200+ requests. No matter the network bandwidth that's going to take a while. Same goes for banking apps, or any kind of back office application. As usual, in order to make development faster they're making the app slower.
obtino 5y ago
Half the reason it's bad is because it uses SharePoint as the back-end. Another awful product that Microsoft tries to sustain.
- argella 5y ago
  My company is forcing a move away from confluence to sharepont and teams. The ms stack is awful.
  - dx034 5y ago
    I hated Sharepoint while I had to use it, but learned to love after switching jobs where I now have to use alternatives. Sharepoint is extremely complex but also super powerful if you know how to use it. And it integrates really well into other Office products. I'm not sure if it's possible to create a software with that much complexity made for business requirements of thousands of companies all over the world, while keeping it simple. I must say I really like the Office suite and it's integrations despite all their faults. Not saying that about teams though, luckily never had to use it.
vnxli 5y ago
the ironic thing with Teams is that the one thing on the label - managing teams- is AWFUL. I'm sure company culture comes into this, but for an app that sells itself on the idea that it makes little teams for people to join, it's awful at letting you manage the teams. i'm a member of like 80 some odd teams and maybe 3 of them give updates. All the rest are silent. it's a disaster. it's fine for voice/video calls, but it's slow and not fun to use in the app on my dev machine (i7/32GB RAM)
rayiner 5y ago
I strongly suspect Microsoft has trouble getting decent developers to work on Office. There is no other explanation for why their new stuff is such a regression from the old stuff. New Outlook, for example, is a joke. It's a facelift of Oulook for Mac and Windows, but for some reason doesn't have tasks, which Outlook has had forever. Instead it opens up the web version of MS Todo. New OneNote has been out for years and again has a fraction of the features of Outlook 2016.
- toyg 5y ago
  I don't think developer quality is necessarily the issue. Actually, the opposite: I think MS is letting its developers run wild. What do developers do, when left to their own devices? They'll reinvent the wheel here and there. Why maintain a crusty C++ codebase, when it can be scrapped and replaced with a new and fashionable JavaScript monstrosity? A coherent and integrated suite of battle-hardened desktop products requires boring technology and a "visionary Cerberus" at the helm - who can whip devs into fixing bugs rather than reaching for The Big Rewrite. But that also implies that devs will let themselves be whipped, which might be a problem in this market.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Given the trend to put JavaScript everywhere, and now even pushing for Blazor inside MAUI, I think they are having quite some problems with hiring really. Latest example, Windows 11 new settings UI is a React Native application! https://microsoft.github.io/react-native-windows/blog/2022/02/11/settings https://microsoft.github.io/react-native-windows/blog/2022/0... Who on their perfect mind can justify this as a good idea?
    - hackerfromthefu 5y ago
      Totally! They just don't pay enough compared to the SV ecosystem.
    - toyg 5y ago
      At this point a problem like "too many JS React devs" is a bit of a chicken and egg problem - everyone pushed so much for people to skill up in that direction, including Microsoft, that everyone is swamped in JS devs.
vidanay 5y ago
The only solace I take from using Teams is that it's not Skype for Business.
aae42 5y ago
completely un-usable on linux as well, i had to keep the "native" electron app as well as a browser window open at the same time to be able to actually use the software since i'm required to use it on my day-to-day, and use zoom for personal stuff, which is also super broken on linux, i'm back to Win11 now with 100% of dev work in WSL. I guess their strategy is working.
amanzi 5y ago
I'm surprised to see just about all comments here agreeing with you. I was sure there would be a whole bunch of people saying that Teams is fine for their use, but I guess I'm in a minority as I actually don't mind using Teams and performance is fine. For reference, I just exited Teams and re-opened it and it took 13 seconds to open, log me in, and update my status. I do have an i7 CPU and 16GB RAM, but I wouldn't describe my laptop as performant - it's just a small and light ultrabook.
- mmsimanga 5y ago
  The 8G or RAM I have is more than the standard 4G of RAM for none developers. All these are company issued laptops. So an i7 with 16GB RAM is a powerful machine in my world.
  - dx034 5y ago
    Do companies still buy laptops with 4GB ram? I partly have to work on a horribly slow work laptop with a crappy CPU, but even that one has 16GB memory.
  - mmsimanga 5y ago
    Ah man. I am in Africa and don't work for an IT company. So I presume those two factors given the cost of hardware here probably results in many people running on machines with 4GB of RAM. My anecdotal observation is that there is that price of hardware practically doubles from a machine with 4GB or RAM to one with 8GB of RAM. Thereafter increase isn't as jarring but I think it is enough to deter companies from buying 16GB machines.
- hackerfromthefu 5y ago
  That should be a fast machine, and 13 seconds is an eternity in my workflows.
screye 5y ago
Teams feels like a product made a 'move fast and break things team'. At its core, I really like it. The UI is intuitive. The separation between Chats, group chats and teams is neat enough, and honestly not that big of an issue. It is more than feature complete and more or less does everything. And for the things it does not do, it has 3rd party extensions. BUT MAN IS A SLOW AND BROKEN. I actively dislike using it purely because of how slow it is. My PC grinds to a halt and I literally never user the criminal in app-browser. My video calls also crash randomly and everything has a latency of a lifetime. I also have no idea why MSFT decided to brand the personal-chat-app as teams as well. It is confusing for no good reason. There is a lot of potential here. But, I genuinely feel like they should spend some time making performance and stability improvements before adding more stuff to it.
winrid 5y ago
Related fun story: At one engineering organization, the CEO said we are switching to Teams due to better Office integration. The whole engineering org, like 30+ people, just ignored it. I was a manager during this time and was also asked to switch my team to Teams. I think I just said everyone had it installed and checked that OKR... So for like six months Eng was on Slack and the rest of the org stayed on Teams, and then the CEO left and I am not sure if anyone is still using Teams there...
- gtvwill 5y ago
  Man pending on what services your company provides or what industry your in. Shit like that would result in jail time/company crushing fines if caught out.
  - axiosgunnar 5y ago
    > jail time Might as well go straight to the death penalty.
  - winrid 5y ago
    It was purely because the CEO wanted to use Office instead of Gsuite. No privacy/security related reasons. Besides, if it was a hard requirement, they would have turned off the other chat channels.
gtvwill 5y ago
Not slow here. Most problems tend to be pebkac. Tbh love teams. It shits on discord/slack as you can gear all your business ops to run from it. Need a form for yo job? Launch it in teams. Need access to a site wiki? Under the teams channel for that site. Teams rocks. Would suck trying to migrate aged business processes to it tho.
tremon 5y ago
On the other hand, Teams is the reason our entire org is now using 16GB ram as the minimum for all new laptops. Getting a developer laptop with 32GB was like pulling teeth before, now it's quickly becoming the standard, all you need to say is "I'm a developer". So it's not all negative.
Havoc 5y ago
Yep. Microsoft hardware. Microsoft OS. Microsoft app. Still runs like shit. Quite a feat
_8j50 5y ago
I don't have those issues on mac, teams is very fast. Maybe more troubleshooting might help?
akmarinov 5y ago
My favorite teams mishap is while I’m on a call, my Microsoft ecosystem access token would expire, prompting me to login and do the 2FA dance, wait on the text with the code, etc But if I’m to go back to Teams, I get a BLOCKING window that lets me know that I’ve been logged out and NEED to log back in. You can’t interact with the call at all, even though you’re still connected and can hear people talking. There’s no way to unmute and say “i need to drop so that Teams can relog me in”, EVEN THOUGH I’m on the call already… From the other people’s perspective I just hang up the call without saying anything. Worst call software I’ve used.
bandq 5y ago
Teams is like many other MSFT products, written / designed by comittee, not enough testing and questionable UI choices that will never be revisited. I've experienced a myraid of issues that others here have mentioned, not limited to meetings never ending, resources spiraling out of control, poor organization of conversations (no segmentation between 1:1 or group conversations vs. conversations from a meeting). I wouldn't hold my breath that things will get better. People have complained about Lync/Skypes for a DECADE with little to no improvement...
hestefisk 5y ago
Boy, how I wish the MS product team would read this thread. I use MS Teams every day at work (consulting), and it’s a steaming pile of hot mess. 1) Chats in three different locations. It’s so confusing and causes so much mental overload. Just simplify and out in one place. 2) Speed. It’s begrudgingly slow on my very beefy Lenovo X1 with 32 GB ram and i7 cpu. 3) Screen sharing is abysmal and hogs resources. 4) Intermittent crashes when enabling web cam, requiring me to reboot the entire machine. This happens especially when using the MS Whiteboard inside of a Teams call. Whiteboard is quite nice, but it causes Teams to crash often. What I like: Files in one place, collaborative editing (#1 killer feature). Everything else is piss poor.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Like in many product teams, I bet that they know, problem is management.
dunco 5y ago
I'm told there is a lot that is good about teams for collaboration, but our company does not use exchange, so despite paying for teams I am unable to schedule meetings. Do they really not care about the entire market for people who do not use exchange?
_nickwhite 5y ago
I’m ordering a grip of employee laptops to refresh our fleet and expand some departments. Because Teams is such a dog, my #1 requirement is 16GB RAM. Maybe Microsoft _wants_ Teams to be piggy to drive hardware sales? On another note I think Teams is actually an Electron app? I do think it runs better on my Intel MBP than my new Surface Laptop. But it’s still pretty buggy for such a high profile app.
LennyHenrysNuts 5y ago
When it first came out, I really liked Teams. It did what it was supposed to do, and did it well. Now it's just a buggy dungheap of a product.
anotherevan 5y ago
I regularly do group calls on Meet, Zoom and Teams, and find Teams the worst. For some reason the propensity to speak over each other is a lot higher in Teams than the other two.
ipiz0618 5y ago
Compared to Slack (on Windows), Teams is decent. Slack freezes many times a day for me, misses important notifications, and sometimes just crashes. There's also no group video calls, although I find huddles very useful at times...but looking at the comments, maybe I just forgot it's awfulness since the last time I used it was 2 years ago
destroy-2A 5y ago
How MSFT Squandered the opportunity they had with Skype, remember when Skype was used for everything by everyone way back... any broadcast on CNN or the like that involved a VC with some expert in far away lands had the skype logo on the VC. It was a lightweight app and you could VoIP just fine in terrible internet conditions. Something happened when MSFT purchased it - from that point on it just go progressively worse I don't think I remember them improving a single thing, then they came up with MS Teams... screwed it so bad and opened the door for an entire industry that wouldn't have existed at all if they didn't screw it over so bad.
- ChymeraXYZ 5y ago
  When you look at the audio routing in Linux "teams" is no where to be seen. It's all "skype". So apparently they just took Skype and made it "enTeRpRise"
  - hackerfromthefu 5y ago
    Well to be fair they have destroyed Skype as well. It used to work well, now it's a joke with messages often not delivered for random long time periods, call not getting through when both people are online, and just generally failing at the basics. But before MS rewrote it, then it worked very well.
StefanKarpinski 5y ago
Startup time for Teams is hilariously bad. If I start trying to join a Teams meeting when it starts I have to warn people I’m going to be a few minutes late. My computer is not especially slow. I’m sure everyone at Microsoft has it running all the time and doesn’t have to wait for it to start but I don’t because it’s not my only or even my main meeting software.
r00tanon 5y ago
The most inscrutable UX possible. It's almost like an on purpose design that puts the most useful or frequently needed things under meaningless icons wrapped in burger menus and the least useful things in large space sucking parts of the screen. But hey it's "free"...
dopylitty 5y ago
If this is a general Teams gripe session now how about there not being any debounce on mobile notifications? I have many colleagues who for some infuriating reason send small sentences one after another rapid fire. I get a vibration on my watch for Every. Single. Message. It’s incredibly stressful and makes me think something is on fire, especially if I accidentally turn off personal focus after hours and suddenly get a deluge of messages. I can’t turn off notifications entirely because they aren’t always reliable on the desktop client. Adding a debounce to notifications was a very popular suggestion on Microsoft user voice but I can’t find it on the site that replaced user voice.
aaccount 5y ago
I've been thinking the same thing. Considering how good discord is
reactspa 5y ago
When Dropbox updates itself, my work machine slows to a crawl for about 15 minutes.
eddyfromtheblok 5y ago
at one of my first positions in operations, the director who had years of experience at telecom companies in the 70s and 80s (i.e places like AT&T and Bell Labs) told us one of the tricks to getting developers to write fast code was to give them slower machines to work on. it would be nice to see this modern trend reverse.
culebron21 5y ago
Just two cents from one who has to use it in a university. In 2020 our university used Zoom for the graduation thesis presentations. In 2021, management decided to use MS Teams to authenticate both students and the committee members over university's SSO. The SSO is awful as hell. I failed to restore password, half of other non-staff members did not got through it either, and came as guests. When you install Teams, it requires you to register on MS website, -- which many of us also did -- and then you discover it won't work with uni's SSO. Most people use MS Teams only for the presentations, and everyone constantly gets lost in groups, calls, chats, etc. Teams seems to have uploadeable/browseable slides feature, where viewers can browse PPTs wherever they want. But only one person of 20 students found out how to use it. Others just shared their screens. So, the whole point of this switch was SSO (which many were unable to use) to somehow protect from academic fraud (write a work for a student and defend it for them).
chillage 5y ago
Weird, I use teams regularly and have no real issues. I've experienced some of the issues others describe here, but they aren't major and every software has some little abrasions here and there. I wouldn't single Teams out at all. I think it does what it's supposed to
autarchprinceps 5y ago
Well, what I can say that teams still hasn't got an ARM native version. Shouldn't be that hard, since Electron long supports it. Even OneDrive is there yet, the rest of office anyway. Definitively speaks for the priority of teams or its performance & customer experience. We use Slack mostly, thank god, and many other conference tools when a customer prefers one of them, they are all better. I wish we could just get rid of Teams.
bouke 5y ago
Given the overall Teams hate, what alternative is there for a business with both technical and non-technical users? It needs to have great chat: 1-on-1 and groups, voice and video calls. Low memory/cpu usage. Preferably a native application. Not self-hosted, but a SaaS. Great markdown support.
- culebron21 5y ago
  At my previous work we used Telegram. We almost never used video calls, but they're also available. CPU usage in calls is low (IDK for video calls). It has both desktop and browser version. Slack, at my current work, seems much less responsive, and doesn't support calls in Firefox.
austincheney 5y ago
> Why is MS Teams so slow It’s because leadership in software is rare and vanishing. That’s the real problem but it’s too broad. More specifically, in the absence of accountability developers will do whatever the fuck they want. If you want better performing software you have to enforce performance metrics as a delivery target. Most shops are just happy that any product ships at all, which is a shockingly low bar of acceptance. Why? Because in the absence of accountability developers will bitch and cry about how hard life is when any performance target is set of any kind. Accountability requires enforcement and liability. Normally, in software, leadership is intentionally absent because the goal is to maximize ROI by deliberately not training staff and maximize the frequency of hiring/firing with the lowest possible cost friction. In that essence software developers are overpriced commodities in a process of manufacturing. Unfortunately, the result is a shitty product that nobody cares about.
5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
It seems most apps/websites are built on top-end and not really tested on low end specs or maybe it's an electron/js app. I find them to be very unresponsive.
franzwong 5y ago
I heard they'd created v2.0 last year. How is it?
- denysvitali 5y ago
  AFAIK it's for "Teams for Life", aka the personal version of Teams. The business one didn't get a V2 upgrade (yet). You can get a nice error message on https://teams.microsoft.com/v2 https://teams.microsoft.com/v2 , so maybe something will happen there soon...
danhab99 5y ago
The worst part of teams is that it gets bundled with mudderfuccin Outlook. How is Microsoft a revolutionary tech company when everything they produce feels like they can't code. It's probably bc their whole architecture is written C# just to spite.
thewhitetulip 5y ago
Haha. I have 16GB DDR3 RAM, latest i5 processor and 500 GB full SSD hard drive. My work "Teams" team gets this exact rant by me every week at least 3 times 'how is 16GB RAM not enough for a bloody fhat app?' Entire Windows OS loads in literally less than 5 seconds. Teams? Takes more than a min, and bave to restart every other hiur so that I don't miss notification. I hear ringtone, I hear beep and see there is a notification but somehow notification isn't freaking visible. Last week I realised that their notification is there you just need to alt tab to see the freaking thing. Can't believe this is the same company that has built Office suite.
anotheryou 5y ago
On linux I can't even type a list without accidentally sending a message. If you type: - li it converts to ° li And you are stuck at a place where it is impossible to make a new line without sending the message %) I now started making lists with ". " instead of "- "
heroprotagonist 5y ago
It's the analytics. If you want to see it really go crazy, just swivel your mouse cursor around over its window. It's tracking all that movement, and your CPU will spike. If you want it to blow up completely, block the telemetry endpoint and it'll just keep your every movement in RAM until you have none left and need to restart it.
markus_zhang 5y ago
I think you can ask them directly on linkedin. Maybe it's not that difficult to find the persons who develop a certain product.

233 points by mmsimanga 5y ago

I have a laptop with an i5 processor and 8G of RAM. Hard drive is an SSD. It sometimes takes me a full minute and a half to get Teams open and ready to join a meeting. It is driving me crazy.

gnicholas 5y ago

The Mac application has never worked well for me — video fails often. It is very reliable in one respect: every time I open it, it installs itself in my Login Items, no matter how many times I have previously removed it. I now use the web app exclusively, both because it works better (at all) and because it doesn't act like malware.

markus_zhang 5y ago

One thing I strongly believe, ans have iterated it here a couple of times, is that MS uses peripheral software such as Teams to train their new hires. They knew the new hires need a couple of years to mature, and Teams are bundled with Office anyway, so they won't worry if someone messes with a release.

pjmlp 5y ago

I just use the Web version, it works good enough.

stuartd 5y ago
Me too, on my work PC which must be nearly 10 years old by now. I don’t get why people run an app that bundles a browser when they can run the app _in_ a browser? I must be missing something (only use teams with an external partner, and not often)
davewasthere 5y ago
Yeah, I've found this to be the least broken (and fastest) way of joining a meeting. No issues with any other meeting platform (Slack, Zoom, Discord etc... all work a treat), but the Teams client, on multiple machines? I've lost track of the number of times it's just not worked for me, or been an absolute dog. Hope that Microsoft give it some love, because it's definitely got room for improvement.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  I dream the day all Electron garbage is either a Web widget or a PWA.

jguzmanjr 5y ago

It’s Microsoft. What else did you expect ?

aliswe 5y ago
Some software is really nice though, their todo app for example (im serious)
- outside1234 5y ago
  What todo app? This one? https://to-do.office.com/tasks/today https://to-do.office.com/tasks/today
  - aendruk 5y ago
    Yes, i.e. Wunderlist (RIP): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wunderlist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wunderlist
    - vymague 5y ago
      Google told me Wunderlist had natural language support. Microsoft To Do doesn't.
- vymague 5y ago
  I guess the Wunderlist team is more competent than their Teams one.
  - randomsearch 5y ago
    Yep they’ve managed to make a product that is only a little bit worse than Wunderlist, after buying Wunderlist
    - vymague 5y ago
      I just checked it. Kinda surprised that Microsoft To Do doesn't have natural language support like Wunderlist.

urbandw311er 5y ago

MacOS or Windows?

shrimp_emoji 5y ago

Not only slow, but the most buggy IM I've ever used. (Both web and native.) We have a decades-long history of IM platforms, and I've never seen one where messages were randomly deleted from DM history or tell me "we lost your picture; please attach it again" when editing a message (extra fun when it was a temporary snippet from the clipboard[0]). 0: Extra extra fun considering Windows doesn't have clipboard history like Linux DEs have for years.

david_allison 5y ago
> Extra extra fun considering Windows doesn't have clipboard history like Linux DEs have for years. Windows + V allows you to enable it.

apostle36 5y ago

Jitsi is the best. Open source and free but all the dinosaurs use teams because it belongs to micro$oft. I installed it today because a client is using it and surprise: it works only with Google Chrome and Edge! No Firefox, no Brave.

netizen-936824 5y ago
Since when does teams not work on Firefox? I've been using team running in Firefox for ages
- GuB-42 5y ago
  Last time I tried, voice calls were unsupported.
- gnicholas 5y ago
  I think GP was talking about jitsi, not teams. I used teams in Brave just today, can confirm it works.
- gnabgib 5y ago
  Teams voice/video chat doesn't work on Firefox. Likewise Jitsi recommends using Chrome[0] (it does run in Firefox, they suggest if enough users are on Firefox the performance will be poor).. something to do with the WebRTC implementation. Source: Click the voice/video chat button in teams on FF and get the popup: "This feature isn't available yet for your browser. Try the web app with Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome, or switch to the desktop app." Since Jitsi suggests it's engine related, Opera/Edge/Chrome/Chromium/Brave probably all work fine for Teams (unless they user agent sniff) [0]: https://community.jitsi.org/t/software-unusable-on-firefox-why/22143 https://community.jitsi.org/t/software-unusable-on-firefox-w...

hbn 5y ago

At my company, the developers are all on fairly powerful MacBook Pros, and everyone else in the company has Windows laptops (I think generally Surface devices) For the developers, Teams works... as good as Teams can. So not great, but it works most of the time (for me, anyway). For everyone else though, I hear nothing but issues. Constantly having to restart to make Teams work. And again, this is on Surface devices, so Microsoft is making the app, the OS, and the hardware! Even aside from the performance, I just think Teams is laid out horribly and it stifles communication. The redundancy between chats, group chats, and Teams channels (which are like a message board?) is just bizarre and constantly causes confusion. It's so much worse than Slack (which we used to use, and I used at a previous job) where all communication channels are listed along the left side, and you didn't have to dig through menus and trees of categorization to get to certain places to talk to your coworkers. And since Teams channels are sectioned off behind another screen from your chats (where you'll probably be most of the time), the only way to be aware of when someone posts in one of the channels is to turn on notifications for it. Which is very annoying! edit: oh also a recent update made it so when you paste a code snippet into the plaintext editor thing (whatever it's called, you activate it by typing 3 backticks), it strips all the whitespace from the left, meaning you lose all the code indentation. Just great

mxuribe 5y ago
> ...The redundancy between chats, group chats, and Teams channels (which are like a message board?) is just bizarre and constantly causes confusion... Oh yeah, I'm with you! I'll admit that Slack's UX and UI is not my favorite either, but at least any challenges are in a single dimension (not like Teams in multiple, challenging dimensions)...Meanwhile Teams' is just awful. I mean, the Teams "rooms" (I guess i call them "rooms" because its annoying to call them "Teams Sites"?) almost exist like channels/rooms in good ol' IRC...but then Teams has channels underneath Teams Sites/rooms...?...Plus, if i want to chat with an indiviodual, those live in the separate "Chat" area...Ugh! To the valid point about slack, at least its all there on the left. I guess i could sort of see if there was drastically different functionality between Chats and Rooms/Sites...but i dont think so. So, why then separate them? As much as i dislike Microsoft as an organization overall (for their historic corporate behavior), they often don't jhave the worse UX ideas...But for Teams, ugh! I'm gpoing to pivot a little to matrix, and specifically the Element client...which is the most popular matrix web client. I'm an admitted matrix fanboy, so clearly i'm biased...but even Element has areas that are simpler for me to comprehend and utilize...Also, Element in my mind is still waaaaay early in its evolution, and still very much far from their UX being topnotch. But even in Element's infancy is leaps abovew what Teams is now after several years. I acknowledge that Teams "does more" (like embedding Office software, etc.)...and of course the underlying matrix protocol is NOT limited to chat...But, wow, is Teams sucky.

marknote 5y ago

Similar experience on MacBook Pro m1. Sometimes it uses more than 2g ram. Crazy.

sirwhinesalot 5y ago

One of the most awful pieces of software I've ever had the displeasure to use. It's decent for calls, that's the only positive I can name. The chat experience is by far the worst I've ever had to deal with: - My sidebar is riddled with old meetings chats nobody cares about anymore. Makes it hard to find actual important direct conversations with people. - The text editor is absolute jank, I've yet to figure out how to get out of a quote after starting one, lists constantly glitch out, it keeps "bold/italic" state like office but with no easy way to remove it. - Because it connects to sharepoint you get to enjoy all the lovely permission bullshit when trying to share a simple freaking file. Half the time I post a picture it glitches out for me and I can no longer see it. Or I can see it but not if I make it fullscreen. Honestly the abysmal performance is just the cherry on top...

calmoo 5y ago
Teams was a not-insignificant reason for leaving my last company. My day to day stress levels immediately plummeted after going back to using Slack. People say Slack is terrible, but I tell them go to use Teams and then come back to me. It is by far the biggest dumpster fire software I've had the displeasure of using. It's the only software that has made me consistently angry. All of the issues you described I have experienced. One of the most plaguing issues was actually viewing new messages. When clicking a channel to view new messages, 50% of the time the screen would be blank and I would have to click away and back to render the chat.
- sirwhinesalot 5y ago
  That blank screen issue has happened to me as well. The pandemic massively increased how much I needed to interact with Microsoft Teams, and let me tell you, it did not make me happy. Not one bit. Perhaps it's a giant ploy by Microsoft to try and get people to hate remote work. How do you screw up a chat program this badly?
  - hackerfromthefu 5y ago
    Another neat blank screen issue is sometimes people video doesn't work on a call, but it can be fixed by disabling the network card in device manager for a few seconds then re-enabling the network .. at which point the video works. Mindboggling

aliswe 5y ago

Its very annoying. The SSO is so bad as well - the popup telling you to login doesn't have a window title either, or lock to the teams window, so it comes across as a completely anonymous prompt. Phishing attack anyone? Closing the login prompt only opens it again. I hope youre not offline and on mobile - prompt will open, close, open, close, tens of times per second. And lets not forget the dark pattern of soft forcing me to login on Windows with a Microsoft account after I successfully logged in. Need to click that text link - the CTA and primary button logs your machine in! Start writing a message and then choose a message to reply to. Voíla, reply quote comes after the message. Wysiwyg constantly gets formatting wrong, sometimes without possibility to restore it by deleting text. Its like it gets stuck in a table or wonky css or something. Deletes newlines of pasted text. Click a chat that you havent opened in a while and quickly start typing while its loading. Your text will come out garbled as the input gets selected and the text position marker reset to 0 after finished loading the history. Wanna send an image from slack, to teams? Well you will need to either take a a screenshot or download it - Teams doesnt understand the clipboard if you right click and copy the file. Neither does copying an image from Teams paste into either Slack or Paint. (99% sure on that last one) Dont try calling someone when youre already being called on mobile. The app wont let you call, but it fails to tell you that someone is in fact calling you. If you try sending a voice message when on a call, even when muted, the app bugs out. I guess theres more to report if only someone would seem to care about the application.

sebow 5y ago

Element, Jitsi, even Threema business... Hell even Telegram has way more usable (and dare i say one of the best records in terms of stability of cross-platform clients along the years). Now i get why in a company environment one wouldn't use free services from matrix/discord or telegram, but at the same time there are self-hosted options or cloud ones that are relatively cheap and still way better than MS/Zoom.A company choosing a service because of promotional plans from big corporations is not a good deal, it's a red flag.

tentacleuno 5y ago
> ... Hell even Telegram Telegram's UX blows Element out of the water for me. IME, Element is slow, buggy, and most of the time just refuses to launch telling me I'm "offline" (a quick peek at Developer Tools shows it is connecting to the home-server fine). I always groan when I have to open Element to do something. Telegram's UX is amazing.
- sebow 5y ago
  Well once again I agree, Telegram has been the gold-standard of how a client implementation of an IM app should be done in Qt(frankly it blows everything else that exists as far as I know).To explain why i said that particular phrase is because some might jump with the 'telegram privacy' argument which somewhat is a legitimate one when it comes to messaging in a company environment, whereas Element gives the option of connecting to a self-hosted instance.

laughingpine 5y ago

Not that this will help at all, but from my experience it really seems like the product has degraded in quality over the last few years. Originally we only had a few folks using Teams, and the client was pretty snappy and just seemed to work. Then over time more features were added, and things started breaking. For example: On my desktop client, images will not load when clicked unless you back out of a conversation then come back in and click the image. This is not something I experience on the web client. Also on the desktop client, I cannot for the life of me do formatting any more. Bullet or numbered lists are out! The web client seems to work better for me, but will start to chug near the end of the day, which requires a quick reload of the app.

nikau 5y ago
Ahh I thought the image not displaying thing was just for me. Other "how did this shit ship?" bugs: Cant seem to handle simple `blocktext` half the time Pasting tables ends up with black on black most of the time Changing chats takes multiple seconds Scrolling through chat history lazy loads for each screen worth with a few seconds delay each time. It's dogshit.

roebk 5y ago

What has been broken for months is viewing images. When I click the thumbnail to enlarge it, the image viewer appears but the image doesn’t load. Rinse and repeat 3/4 times and I can eventually see the image. Other members of my team experience the problem. I cannot fathom why MS has not prioritised that bug fix. One colleague who’s on a modern desktop with an i7 and 32GB of ram waits the upwards of 20 seconds to load a conversation. In the past couple of years Teams has sores in popularity and perhaps the dev work has been focused on scaling. It’s clear to me MS need to allocate some developer for getting the fundamentals right.

gnat 5y ago
Can confirm. All the complaints people have here are about experiences I've seen myself: images not loading, resource-hungry to the point where anyone who needs to run Teams with another app (eg to screenshare) needs a non-Microsoft laptop, sidebar full of ancient chats, pants notifications, pants reauth flow. It's brutal, coming to Teams from Slack. It makes you sad.
kenny11 5y ago
I run into the incredibly annoying image not appearing problem dozens of time per day as well. One interesting thing about being based on Electron is that they've made the bugs cross-platform as well - the image loading bug happens just as often on the Mac version as on the Windows version.
watmough 5y ago
Interesting! I get this on the Teams Preview for Linux (CentOS 7) all the time. It is infuriating. Other than that, I sometimes need to reboot to pick up my Logitech webcam correctly, when working at home. Otherwise, it really seems pretty decent. This is on a 2019 Razer Blade 15" with 40 GB dram.

sangupta 5y ago

I had a similar issue but with an i9/16GB RAM/SSD. Teams would open really slow, hang a lot and the best, drop off meetings in between as soon as I activated other applications. I use Slack/Outlook a lot and this aggravated the problem. Solution was to upgrade to latest Macbook with 32GB RAM. It now runs though I still have issues - just the audio goes out between meetings. I was lucky to have the work laptop upgraded. In short, Teams is crap. My daughter uses Google Meet at school and its so fast/fun/easy on an old 8GB laptop.

jug 5y ago

Yes, it's because it's shipping with an entire web browser. Although I agree with others here this is only part of the problems with MS Teams. It's not a very fun application to use, honestly. Everything is sluggish and many UI decisions are not great. But at least the performance should get better some day. Microsoft has now made the "personal" edition of Teams that is shipping with Windows 11 into one that instead of shipping a browser, uses Edge as a renderer (WebView2). Since that's probably already cached in RAM anyway, it launches near instantly and consumes much less RAM than the clunky edition that doesn't share resources with anything else. However, MS Teams for Business still does not exist in such an edition although I assume they are working on it.

Analemma_ 5y ago
"It's slow because it's Electron" is a lousy excuse: Discord is an Electron app with more or less the same purpose and it's perfectly snappy. Hell, Microsoft's own VSCode is considered the gold standard of how to do Electron apps well. It's fast as shit, assuming you're not opening huge files. It baffles me that the Teams org isn't begging the VSCode org for some of their performance mojo.
- jamil7 5y ago
  > It's fast as shit Why does this keep being said about VSCode? Electron has it’s benefits and so does VSCode but it’s in no way fast or “fast as shit” as far as editors and even IDEs go, sorry but it’s slow.
  - bodge5000 5y ago
    YMMV but I'd never describe vscode as slow. Maybe not fast either, but pretty much normal. I've never noticed much about its speed, which would imply its not blindingly fast or painfully slow, just normal
- sirwhinesalot 5y ago
  I wouldn't call Discord snappy, not even close, Telegram is way snappier for example... But Teams is certainly on another league (for the worse). VSCode isn't that snappy either but it's decent enough. If every Electron app was like that "It's slow because it's Electron" wouldn't be such a meme.

prima-facie 5y ago

Teams is not meant to be good, friendly or performant. Teams is meant to check boxes in executive meetings, and to beat the competition's price when purchased in bulk.

mistrial9 5y ago
you forgot "spy on you"
- g8oz 5y ago
  I assume you mean Viva Insights...I'm curious as to what managers can see about your activities when that is enabled. The euphemism is "Organisational productivity reporting".
can16358p 5y ago
Classical Microsoft vision. If only they focused a little of their budget to design and actual your feedback...
Corrado 5y ago
100% agree! I suspect that Teams is just a fancy front-end to Sharepoint, so it was "easy" to build. Just fire up Electron and duplicate Sharepoint features. Oh, and tack on a chat function while your at it. Done!

matthall28 5y ago

I am upgrading from an 8GB M1 Macbook Air to a 16GB M1 Max Macbook Pro just because Teams makes my laptop unusable

spaetzleesser 5y ago

I feel Teams is thrown together by a few interns that are trying out Scrum to be "agile". Every few days a button moves to another place or some weird bug is introduced. The latest is that the left and right cursor keys stop working after a while. Makes me wonder what they are doing to have such issues and not notice and why isn't that fixed quickly? Search is basically useless. The built-in wiki isn't searchable at all. It''s just all out terrible. The only thing that works well is calls, voice and video. I am sure they have plans to destroy that too :-)

EvanKnowles 5y ago
That left/right cursor key bug is the worst. I'd assumed there was just something wrong with my keyboard until my colleagues also reported seeing it.
- fian 5y ago
  It is related to italics. I often use _phrase_ to italisise. This seems to trigger the left/right arrow key bug semi-regularly. This fix is to find the Teams icon in the Taskbar, right click and Quit. Then restart Teams.
  - hbn 5y ago
    Alternative solution: > find the Teams icon in the Taskbar, right click and Quit. ...and never open Teams again!

anonymousiam 5y ago

I doubt anyone would be using Teams if it had not been produced by Microsoft. It has so many shortcomings that I know I will miss some, but here's a gripe list anyway: 1) Echo cancellation. This is a solved problem and pretty much every other conferencing app does it right. Microsoft probably rolled their own which is why it does not work right. 2) I have Teams installed on my desktop, Android phone, and iPad. (Unfortunately, my company wants us to use it.) Regardless of the notification settings in the apps, if I was on the desktop but switched my KVM away, my phone and iPad will not notify me of incoming Teams calls, messages, etc. 3) Editing a document using the collaborative environment is painfully broken. Sometimes it will take many seconds to register a keystroke (on a gigabit-class CONUS connection). Sometimes edits will disappear completely, or sometimes just temporarily. Change tracking doesn't work right. Google Docs had collaborative editing perfected over 10 years ago. 4) Moving files in/out of Teams "Folders" can be painfully slow. 5) Interoperability between the desktop Teams app and govcloud/non-govcloud users is hosed, but it seems to work fine on phones and tablets. Desktop users must access meetings via browser if their "home" Teams account govcloud flavor does not match that of the meeting originator, but no such restrictions exist on phones & tablets. WTF? 6) The Linux desktop version of Teams does not operate with govcloud at all. 7) Depending on the platform, users cannot share their desktop when using the browser-based version. Chrome actually supports this better than Edge.

rightbyte 5y ago
> 1) Echo cancellation. This is a solved problem and pretty much every other conferencing app does it right. Microsoft probably rolled their own which is why it does not work right. I don't know if Teams is worse or not, but my take is that it is impossible to do right for conversations since it introduces too much lag. I sincerely prefer echoes. Old time phones worked just fine and it felt like you stood next to the person you were speaking too instead of speaking through some filter group delay.
- toast0 5y ago
  Old timey phone systems did have echo cancelation. One of the tones in high speed (hah!) modem handshakes is intended to disable the echo cancelers, so that the modems can do it better, but the system echo cancellers usually worked well for actual voice communications. They also had a whole heck of a lot less latency. Sure, routes were probably less direct, but if you had an honest to goodness analog line, the only added latency was from amplifiers and multiplexing equipment, neither of which added significant latency. More likely your call would be digitized and sent as part of a T1 or similar circuit; but that doesn't add a lot of delay, because a T1 is multiplexed as one sample per line, 8000 samples per second per line. Where your is connected at digital telphone switches, there would need to be a buffer to match up timing, but it only needs to be one sample long. There's not likely to be that many switches on a call, so total added latency is going to be a few sample lengths, and maybe around 1ms. (This is in addition to the transmission delay, of course) In contrast, modern computers have meaningful audio sampling delays, and transmitting each sample would kill your network, so you batch a few samples (usually 10-40ms worth), there's delay from the encode/decode, and packet switched networking also adds delay in waiting for a send slot. Echo cancelling with all that latency is even more important, cause the echos are hard to tune out when they come back so late.

ardit33 5y ago

Microsoft doesn't pay their devs. that well, that's why. With second rate engineers and designers, you are going to get second rate products.

randomsearch 5y ago

Had a call today. Shortly beforehand I realised it was on Teams and immediately began closing down other apps on my laptop. I paused for a moment and thought about how insane it was that i was automatically freeing up resources to cope with Teams. It’s almost the only app that causes my fan to run. It must be so frustrating for coders on that product, surely everyone wants to craft something great.

INTPenis 5y ago

Sounds like something is wrong with your setup. I'm using the Teams Electron app on a Ryzen 5 with 16G RAM and nvme disk, I can't complain about load times at least. I just wish it had better bluetooth audio support and wayland screen sharing on Linux. Some day maybe. The most positive thing about Teams is that we finally have an app that EVERYONE uses. From my co-workers, to vendors, to clients. Monopoly is great when it allows me to connect with people easily.

sawmurai 5y ago

Teams is what made me turn in my windows notebook for a MacBook at work. On Mac, it still hangs and is glitchy, but at least I can switch chats in less than 2 seconds. And even while having a call. Hell, I can even search in the chat history now!

JJMcJ 5y ago

Everything MSFT produces seems terribly slow. Windows design issues? Coding standards incentivize slow code? Something I'm missing completely?

can16358p 5y ago
I'd say company culture. They don't care about design, they don't care about performance or efficiency. They want to sell their stuff to enterprises, no matter how inefficient their systems are in every way. The classic Mac vs. Windows PC at its finest. Apple cares about design and thinks from actual user perspective to make life easier and enjoyable and sell beautifully designed products to make money (as a company they have a lot to be criticized of course, but that's not the topic of this thread). Microsoft is a boring company that ONLY cares about money and enterprises.

0xbadc0de5 5y ago

Most likely because the Teams developing it are either not competent or not empowered to improve it. Probably some combination of the two. I've used it daily for years and it's never been a good experience - desktop, mobile, web (FF, Chrome, Brave)... they are all trash. Although as others have pointed out, it has gotten noticeably worse over the last year.

atonse 5y ago

I can't express how much I hate teams, and two years into a remote work revolution, they honestly don't have any excuse. My teams client is CONSTANTLY confused about this "work account home account" garbage. Holy crap Batman it's a disaster. Clicking on teams links causes my teams client to freeze up with a blank screen sometimes for minutes. So I've been late to many meetings because the Teams client just doesn't connect. I'm yet to hear a SINGLE instance of someone using teams other than "we already bought it" or "we have some strategic partnership with MS, so we have to use it" – some BS that's shoved down people's throats. The multi-account stuff is something slack and discord got right from day one. And years into it, MS still hasn't figured this out. It's appalling how bad Teams is, years later. Anytime I see a teams link in a calendar event, I groan loudly.

dariusj18 5y ago
Not being able to use multiple accounts is a severe disadvantage that they claimed they were working on.
sideshowb 5y ago
Aaaah yes you just reminded me I have similar issues switching between teams in different organizations. This thread is much needed therapy. Teams is truly awful on so many levels.
- calmoo 5y ago
  The only solace in using Teams is being able to bond with other people who have experienced the same pain.
- cge 5y ago
  There are a few conferences in my field that, for some reason, use Teams, and a number of UK universities seem to have been pushed into using it. It is bad enough that one warned everyone that, if their university used Teams, to please provide a non-university email address, because the university using Teams would likely prevent the university email address from being used to log in to the conference. For the actual talks, of course, most of these conferences use Teams to send out Zoom links. Using Teams for those would be a disaster.

nanidin 5y ago

MS Teams is slow because it is a loss leader that exists so that decision makers can tick off the “company wide instant messaging that meets regulatory data retention requirements” box in the process of paying for an Office package. No one is paying for Teams intentionally, so MS will not see any return on investment in improvements (except for the eventual retention problems that come up when people finally decide they’ve had enough.)

smcleod 5y ago

MS Teams is honestly one of the worst pieces of software I've had to use in my 17~ years in tech, it's slow, bloated (thanks in part to Electron) and the UX is absolutely horrendous.

outworlder 5y ago

M1-based Macs: runs flawlessly, UX considerations aside. Older Intel Macs (where Zoom, Chime and Google Meet runs fine): can't even share a screen. Turning off GPU accelerations may or may not help.

kube-system 5y ago
The only software that stresses my M1 more than Teams is when I ran some benchmark software. I've had a couple crashes recently too :(
ipython 5y ago
Have they released an ARM native version of the client? I find the web version superior on my M1 Mac since last I checked the native client was intel only

deleted 5y ago

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herbturbo 5y ago

It is so cathartic to read this thread and know I am not alone in my disdain for this garbage product. I also got force-updated to the new and improved Outlook today which now looks much worse. I love my job but I hate the infusion of Microsoft's mediocrity into my life.

kzrdude 5y ago
The only reason I liked teams was that I had to use "Skype for Business" before it, and it was even more rubbish
- sideshowb 5y ago
  That's yet another weird combination isn't it: teams, Skype, Skype for business, 3 calling products from the same company and still not compatible?
  - tanseydavid 5y ago
    You forgot Yammer...but that's understandable because Yammer was very forgettable. (chat-only)
Braini 5y ago
At least for Outlook I could still switch back this time, which I immediately did.

alkonaut 5y ago

I have a few issues in teams (keyboard nav in input text, copy paste some times failing, editing pre/code blocks stinks, images not opening etc). Performance feels perfectly acceptable. It’s by no means snappy but it’s not something I wish the Teams devs should focus on instead of other features and bug fixes. I have never had it take more than a couple of seconds to start, seen no crashes, find audio and video working 100% (at least as good as zoom, for example). You probably want to get a log of what takes time at startup (if that’s possible). That’s not normal.

JamesAdir 5y ago

I still can't figure out what MS want me to use. with office 365 I can get Teams, Yammer and Skype for business. Why not have one product for like Zoom that clearly works out for consumers and business a like.

amanzi 5y ago
Skype for Business is effectively end-of-life, although there is a current supported version of Skype for Business Server that some businesses are still using. Yammer is like "Facebook for companies". Teams is for your all your collaboration/communication needs.

austincheney 5y ago

> I have a laptop with Hardware will never solve for poorly written software by people who don't know what they are doing. This isn't a technology failure. It's a leadership failure.

winkeltripel 5y ago

Ex office dev here. Actual dev work is done on i9 workstations running 64 gb of ram, and usually located very near an Azure data center, regardless of where the dev works. The result is that it's fast for us. Everyone knows that it runs like poop, but there are other priorities, and no performance regression tests.

foolproofplan 5y ago
They know about performance issues don't dont want to fix or introduce performance tests? Nice.
- toyg 5y ago
  It's Microsoft. Corporations of that size don't really have to worry about technical details that much - the competition can eat their lunch here and there and they'll still survive. They know they can crush any small fish any time. I mean, look at this very thread: Slack effectively invented this "modern IRC" bullshit, but still, when MS decided they had to have an answer, they cloned it and effectively imposed it to millions of users, no matter how inferior a product it might have been - in just a few years. They can throw hundreds of millions in the fire and they'll still be okay. No need to rush for a few perf tickets...
  - xtracto 5y ago
    Moreover, teams target audience is not people in HN. My wife works for a huge transnational manufacturing company (like Foxconn) which not long ago migrated from Google cloud to all-things-Microsoft. I cannot imagine the amount of win for the SDR that won MS that account. Now, teams allow IT drones to tick the 'online chat' checkbox, its (crappily) integrated with Office365 and basically does most of what the Financial, HR, Business, operations and Sales department need. Nobody gets fired for buying Microsoft. That's the target audience. And that audience only needs 'good enough ' software. And, being it IT, what better than computers that keep breaking, so that their job is guaranteed.
    - 5y ago

faebi 5y ago

Interestingly, the interaction latency goes down from 1-2 seconds to near instant when I switch from the native Mac App to the web version with Firefox Nightly. I am using a fancy fast M1 Pro. It's ridiculous that Firefox is faster and not slower than their own app.

Tade0 5y ago

The other day, while trying to build a docker image from inside a VM running Ubuntu(temporary setup due to issues with getting a Docker Desktop license), I had a moment to pause and reflect on how no matter how fast hardware becomes, humanity always manages to make it slow. The reason for this is related to the way development of browser-based applications (be it Electron apps or just web apps) is scaled. In order to make 20+ people work on such a project effectively you need loose coupling, so the codebase is divided into those small, independent modules - each making its own API calls. And herein lies the crux of the issue. Chrome/Chromium/Electron etc. currently have a hard limit of 6 HTTP requests being processed at any given moment - the rest is queued(or "stalled"). Notice how weirdly slow is gmail to load? It's making a total of 200+ requests. No matter the network bandwidth that's going to take a while. Same goes for banking apps, or any kind of back office application. As usual, in order to make development faster they're making the app slower.

obtino 5y ago

Half the reason it's bad is because it uses SharePoint as the back-end. Another awful product that Microsoft tries to sustain.

argella 5y ago
My company is forcing a move away from confluence to sharepont and teams. The ms stack is awful.
- dx034 5y ago
  I hated Sharepoint while I had to use it, but learned to love after switching jobs where I now have to use alternatives. Sharepoint is extremely complex but also super powerful if you know how to use it. And it integrates really well into other Office products. I'm not sure if it's possible to create a software with that much complexity made for business requirements of thousands of companies all over the world, while keeping it simple. I must say I really like the Office suite and it's integrations despite all their faults. Not saying that about teams though, luckily never had to use it.

vnxli 5y ago

the ironic thing with Teams is that the one thing on the label - managing teams- is AWFUL. I'm sure company culture comes into this, but for an app that sells itself on the idea that it makes little teams for people to join, it's awful at letting you manage the teams. i'm a member of like 80 some odd teams and maybe 3 of them give updates. All the rest are silent. it's a disaster. it's fine for voice/video calls, but it's slow and not fun to use in the app on my dev machine (i7/32GB RAM)

rayiner 5y ago

I strongly suspect Microsoft has trouble getting decent developers to work on Office. There is no other explanation for why their new stuff is such a regression from the old stuff. New Outlook, for example, is a joke. It's a facelift of Oulook for Mac and Windows, but for some reason doesn't have tasks, which Outlook has had forever. Instead it opens up the web version of MS Todo. New OneNote has been out for years and again has a fraction of the features of Outlook 2016.

toyg 5y ago
I don't think developer quality is necessarily the issue. Actually, the opposite: I think MS is letting its developers run wild. What do developers do, when left to their own devices? They'll reinvent the wheel here and there. Why maintain a crusty C++ codebase, when it can be scrapped and replaced with a new and fashionable JavaScript monstrosity? A coherent and integrated suite of battle-hardened desktop products requires boring technology and a "visionary Cerberus" at the helm - who can whip devs into fixing bugs rather than reaching for The Big Rewrite. But that also implies that devs will let themselves be whipped, which might be a problem in this market.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Given the trend to put JavaScript everywhere, and now even pushing for Blazor inside MAUI, I think they are having quite some problems with hiring really. Latest example, Windows 11 new settings UI is a React Native application! https://microsoft.github.io/react-native-windows/blog/2022/02/11/settings https://microsoft.github.io/react-native-windows/blog/2022/0... Who on their perfect mind can justify this as a good idea?
  - hackerfromthefu 5y ago
    Totally! They just don't pay enough compared to the SV ecosystem.
  - toyg 5y ago
    At this point a problem like "too many JS React devs" is a bit of a chicken and egg problem - everyone pushed so much for people to skill up in that direction, including Microsoft, that everyone is swamped in JS devs.

vidanay 5y ago

The only solace I take from using Teams is that it's not Skype for Business.

aae42 5y ago

completely un-usable on linux as well, i had to keep the "native" electron app as well as a browser window open at the same time to be able to actually use the software since i'm required to use it on my day-to-day, and use zoom for personal stuff, which is also super broken on linux, i'm back to Win11 now with 100% of dev work in WSL. I guess their strategy is working.

amanzi 5y ago

I'm surprised to see just about all comments here agreeing with you. I was sure there would be a whole bunch of people saying that Teams is fine for their use, but I guess I'm in a minority as I actually don't mind using Teams and performance is fine. For reference, I just exited Teams and re-opened it and it took 13 seconds to open, log me in, and update my status. I do have an i7 CPU and 16GB RAM, but I wouldn't describe my laptop as performant - it's just a small and light ultrabook.

mmsimanga 5y ago
The 8G or RAM I have is more than the standard 4G of RAM for none developers. All these are company issued laptops. So an i7 with 16GB RAM is a powerful machine in my world.
- dx034 5y ago
  Do companies still buy laptops with 4GB ram? I partly have to work on a horribly slow work laptop with a crappy CPU, but even that one has 16GB memory.
- mmsimanga 5y ago
  Ah man. I am in Africa and don't work for an IT company. So I presume those two factors given the cost of hardware here probably results in many people running on machines with 4GB of RAM. My anecdotal observation is that there is that price of hardware practically doubles from a machine with 4GB or RAM to one with 8GB of RAM. Thereafter increase isn't as jarring but I think it is enough to deter companies from buying 16GB machines.
hackerfromthefu 5y ago
That should be a fast machine, and 13 seconds is an eternity in my workflows.

screye 5y ago

Teams feels like a product made a 'move fast and break things team'. At its core, I really like it. The UI is intuitive. The separation between Chats, group chats and teams is neat enough, and honestly not that big of an issue. It is more than feature complete and more or less does everything. And for the things it does not do, it has 3rd party extensions. BUT MAN IS A SLOW AND BROKEN. I actively dislike using it purely because of how slow it is. My PC grinds to a halt and I literally never user the criminal in app-browser. My video calls also crash randomly and everything has a latency of a lifetime. I also have no idea why MSFT decided to brand the personal-chat-app as teams as well. It is confusing for no good reason. There is a lot of potential here. But, I genuinely feel like they should spend some time making performance and stability improvements before adding more stuff to it.

winrid 5y ago

Related fun story: At one engineering organization, the CEO said we are switching to Teams due to better Office integration. The whole engineering org, like 30+ people, just ignored it. I was a manager during this time and was also asked to switch my team to Teams. I think I just said everyone had it installed and checked that OKR... So for like six months Eng was on Slack and the rest of the org stayed on Teams, and then the CEO left and I am not sure if anyone is still using Teams there...

gtvwill 5y ago
Man pending on what services your company provides or what industry your in. Shit like that would result in jail time/company crushing fines if caught out.
- axiosgunnar 5y ago
  > jail time Might as well go straight to the death penalty.
- winrid 5y ago
  It was purely because the CEO wanted to use Office instead of Gsuite. No privacy/security related reasons. Besides, if it was a hard requirement, they would have turned off the other chat channels.

gtvwill 5y ago

Not slow here. Most problems tend to be pebkac. Tbh love teams. It shits on discord/slack as you can gear all your business ops to run from it. Need a form for yo job? Launch it in teams. Need access to a site wiki? Under the teams channel for that site. Teams rocks. Would suck trying to migrate aged business processes to it tho.

tremon 5y ago

On the other hand, Teams is the reason our entire org is now using 16GB ram as the minimum for all new laptops. Getting a developer laptop with 32GB was like pulling teeth before, now it's quickly becoming the standard, all you need to say is "I'm a developer". So it's not all negative.

Havoc 5y ago

Yep. Microsoft hardware. Microsoft OS. Microsoft app. Still runs like shit. Quite a feat

_8j50 5y ago

I don't have those issues on mac, teams is very fast. Maybe more troubleshooting might help?

akmarinov 5y ago

My favorite teams mishap is while I’m on a call, my Microsoft ecosystem access token would expire, prompting me to login and do the 2FA dance, wait on the text with the code, etc But if I’m to go back to Teams, I get a BLOCKING window that lets me know that I’ve been logged out and NEED to log back in. You can’t interact with the call at all, even though you’re still connected and can hear people talking. There’s no way to unmute and say “i need to drop so that Teams can relog me in”, EVEN THOUGH I’m on the call already… From the other people’s perspective I just hang up the call without saying anything. Worst call software I’ve used.

bandq 5y ago

Teams is like many other MSFT products, written / designed by comittee, not enough testing and questionable UI choices that will never be revisited. I've experienced a myraid of issues that others here have mentioned, not limited to meetings never ending, resources spiraling out of control, poor organization of conversations (no segmentation between 1:1 or group conversations vs. conversations from a meeting). I wouldn't hold my breath that things will get better. People have complained about Lync/Skypes for a DECADE with little to no improvement...

hestefisk 5y ago

Boy, how I wish the MS product team would read this thread. I use MS Teams every day at work (consulting), and it’s a steaming pile of hot mess. 1) Chats in three different locations. It’s so confusing and causes so much mental overload. Just simplify and out in one place. 2) Speed. It’s begrudgingly slow on my very beefy Lenovo X1 with 32 GB ram and i7 cpu. 3) Screen sharing is abysmal and hogs resources. 4) Intermittent crashes when enabling web cam, requiring me to reboot the entire machine. This happens especially when using the MS Whiteboard inside of a Teams call. Whiteboard is quite nice, but it causes Teams to crash often. What I like: Files in one place, collaborative editing (#1 killer feature). Everything else is piss poor.

pjmlp 5y ago
Like in many product teams, I bet that they know, problem is management.

dunco 5y ago

I'm told there is a lot that is good about teams for collaboration, but our company does not use exchange, so despite paying for teams I am unable to schedule meetings. Do they really not care about the entire market for people who do not use exchange?

_nickwhite 5y ago

I’m ordering a grip of employee laptops to refresh our fleet and expand some departments. Because Teams is such a dog, my #1 requirement is 16GB RAM. Maybe Microsoft _wants_ Teams to be piggy to drive hardware sales? On another note I think Teams is actually an Electron app? I do think it runs better on my Intel MBP than my new Surface Laptop. But it’s still pretty buggy for such a high profile app.

LennyHenrysNuts 5y ago

When it first came out, I really liked Teams. It did what it was supposed to do, and did it well. Now it's just a buggy dungheap of a product.

anotherevan 5y ago

I regularly do group calls on Meet, Zoom and Teams, and find Teams the worst. For some reason the propensity to speak over each other is a lot higher in Teams than the other two.

ipiz0618 5y ago

Compared to Slack (on Windows), Teams is decent. Slack freezes many times a day for me, misses important notifications, and sometimes just crashes. There's also no group video calls, although I find huddles very useful at times...but looking at the comments, maybe I just forgot it's awfulness since the last time I used it was 2 years ago

destroy-2A 5y ago

How MSFT Squandered the opportunity they had with Skype, remember when Skype was used for everything by everyone way back... any broadcast on CNN or the like that involved a VC with some expert in far away lands had the skype logo on the VC. It was a lightweight app and you could VoIP just fine in terrible internet conditions. Something happened when MSFT purchased it - from that point on it just go progressively worse I don't think I remember them improving a single thing, then they came up with MS Teams... screwed it so bad and opened the door for an entire industry that wouldn't have existed at all if they didn't screw it over so bad.

ChymeraXYZ 5y ago
When you look at the audio routing in Linux "teams" is no where to be seen. It's all "skype". So apparently they just took Skype and made it "enTeRpRise"
- hackerfromthefu 5y ago
  Well to be fair they have destroyed Skype as well. It used to work well, now it's a joke with messages often not delivered for random long time periods, call not getting through when both people are online, and just generally failing at the basics. But before MS rewrote it, then it worked very well.

StefanKarpinski 5y ago

Startup time for Teams is hilariously bad. If I start trying to join a Teams meeting when it starts I have to warn people I’m going to be a few minutes late. My computer is not especially slow. I’m sure everyone at Microsoft has it running all the time and doesn’t have to wait for it to start but I don’t because it’s not my only or even my main meeting software.

r00tanon 5y ago

The most inscrutable UX possible. It's almost like an on purpose design that puts the most useful or frequently needed things under meaningless icons wrapped in burger menus and the least useful things in large space sucking parts of the screen. But hey it's "free"...

dopylitty 5y ago

If this is a general Teams gripe session now how about there not being any debounce on mobile notifications? I have many colleagues who for some infuriating reason send small sentences one after another rapid fire. I get a vibration on my watch for Every. Single. Message. It’s incredibly stressful and makes me think something is on fire, especially if I accidentally turn off personal focus after hours and suddenly get a deluge of messages. I can’t turn off notifications entirely because they aren’t always reliable on the desktop client. Adding a debounce to notifications was a very popular suggestion on Microsoft user voice but I can’t find it on the site that replaced user voice.

aaccount 5y ago

I've been thinking the same thing. Considering how good discord is

reactspa 5y ago

When Dropbox updates itself, my work machine slows to a crawl for about 15 minutes.

eddyfromtheblok 5y ago

at one of my first positions in operations, the director who had years of experience at telecom companies in the 70s and 80s (i.e places like AT&T and Bell Labs) told us one of the tricks to getting developers to write fast code was to give them slower machines to work on. it would be nice to see this modern trend reverse.

culebron21 5y ago

Just two cents from one who has to use it in a university. In 2020 our university used Zoom for the graduation thesis presentations. In 2021, management decided to use MS Teams to authenticate both students and the committee members over university's SSO. The SSO is awful as hell. I failed to restore password, half of other non-staff members did not got through it either, and came as guests. When you install Teams, it requires you to register on MS website, -- which many of us also did -- and then you discover it won't work with uni's SSO. Most people use MS Teams only for the presentations, and everyone constantly gets lost in groups, calls, chats, etc. Teams seems to have uploadeable/browseable slides feature, where viewers can browse PPTs wherever they want. But only one person of 20 students found out how to use it. Others just shared their screens. So, the whole point of this switch was SSO (which many were unable to use) to somehow protect from academic fraud (write a work for a student and defend it for them).

chillage 5y ago

Weird, I use teams regularly and have no real issues. I've experienced some of the issues others describe here, but they aren't major and every software has some little abrasions here and there. I wouldn't single Teams out at all. I think it does what it's supposed to

autarchprinceps 5y ago

Well, what I can say that teams still hasn't got an ARM native version. Shouldn't be that hard, since Electron long supports it. Even OneDrive is there yet, the rest of office anyway. Definitively speaks for the priority of teams or its performance & customer experience. We use Slack mostly, thank god, and many other conference tools when a customer prefers one of them, they are all better. I wish we could just get rid of Teams.

bouke 5y ago

Given the overall Teams hate, what alternative is there for a business with both technical and non-technical users? It needs to have great chat: 1-on-1 and groups, voice and video calls. Low memory/cpu usage. Preferably a native application. Not self-hosted, but a SaaS. Great markdown support.

culebron21 5y ago
At my previous work we used Telegram. We almost never used video calls, but they're also available. CPU usage in calls is low (IDK for video calls). It has both desktop and browser version. Slack, at my current work, seems much less responsive, and doesn't support calls in Firefox.

austincheney 5y ago

> Why is MS Teams so slow It’s because leadership in software is rare and vanishing. That’s the real problem but it’s too broad. More specifically, in the absence of accountability developers will do whatever the fuck they want. If you want better performing software you have to enforce performance metrics as a delivery target. Most shops are just happy that any product ships at all, which is a shockingly low bar of acceptance. Why? Because in the absence of accountability developers will bitch and cry about how hard life is when any performance target is set of any kind. Accountability requires enforcement and liability. Normally, in software, leadership is intentionally absent because the goal is to maximize ROI by deliberately not training staff and maximize the frequency of hiring/firing with the lowest possible cost friction. In that essence software developers are overpriced commodities in a process of manufacturing. Unfortunately, the result is a shitty product that nobody cares about.

5350-uiop-1130 5y ago

It seems most apps/websites are built on top-end and not really tested on low end specs or maybe it's an electron/js app. I find them to be very unresponsive.

franzwong 5y ago

I heard they'd created v2.0 last year. How is it?

denysvitali 5y ago
AFAIK it's for "Teams for Life", aka the personal version of Teams. The business one didn't get a V2 upgrade (yet). You can get a nice error message on https://teams.microsoft.com/v2 https://teams.microsoft.com/v2 , so maybe something will happen there soon...

danhab99 5y ago

The worst part of teams is that it gets bundled with mudderfuccin Outlook. How is Microsoft a revolutionary tech company when everything they produce feels like they can't code. It's probably bc their whole architecture is written C# just to spite.

thewhitetulip 5y ago

Haha. I have 16GB DDR3 RAM, latest i5 processor and 500 GB full SSD hard drive. My work "Teams" team gets this exact rant by me every week at least 3 times 'how is 16GB RAM not enough for a bloody fhat app?' Entire Windows OS loads in literally less than 5 seconds. Teams? Takes more than a min, and bave to restart every other hiur so that I don't miss notification. I hear ringtone, I hear beep and see there is a notification but somehow notification isn't freaking visible. Last week I realised that their notification is there you just need to alt tab to see the freaking thing. Can't believe this is the same company that has built Office suite.

anotheryou 5y ago

On linux I can't even type a list without accidentally sending a message. If you type: - li it converts to ° li And you are stuck at a place where it is impossible to make a new line without sending the message %) I now started making lists with ". " instead of "- "

heroprotagonist 5y ago

It's the analytics. If you want to see it really go crazy, just swivel your mouse cursor around over its window. It's tracking all that movement, and your CPU will spike. If you want it to blow up completely, block the telemetry endpoint and it'll just keep your every movement in RAM until you have none left and need to restart it.

markus_zhang 5y ago

I think you can ask them directly on linkedin. Maybe it's not that difficult to find the persons who develop a certain product.