3 ms·

Daily Teams user and I agree with you. Maybe the scope is too broad. But the UI is the worst part. I have around 50 chats open and switching from one to another

by thefz 4y ago

Daily Teams user and I agree with you. Maybe the scope is too broad. But the UI is the worst part. I have around 50 chats open and switching from one to another usually takes more than 10 seconds. Joining a large-ish meeting takes 30 seconds of hearing audio and no response from the UI. Usually the day to day experience is really, really bad. I wish they got rid of this js-on-the-desktop crap and rewrite it in a decent desktop language like C or C#.

garren 4y ago
Be careful what you wish for. I recall when Visual Studio switched to from native to managed (VS 2005?) and it was brutal. It was sluggish, crashy, with weird WPF UI bits thrown in here and there to support some oddball feature. As for C, maybe you meant C++? Kicking out a modern, complex, desktop, web/network-centric application in C is just begging for trouble. Particularly given all the headline grabbing research MS has done into how error prone manual memory management has been in their organization [0][1] Actually, it doesn't really seem like a language issue, does it? You can have a terrible app in C/C++/Rust/Go/JS, any language, you name it. Even electron seems a little like a scapegoat - e.g., VSCode and (previously) Atom are examples of "js-on-the-desktop crap" that are surprisingly solid. It's not the language that's the problem, and it's not (arguably) the underlying framework. The app just sucks. If Teams were written from the ground up in C# or C and had the same functionality (or lack of functionality), it would still suck. Teams, as a product, is just sub par compared to other offerings. Even so, it's good enough for the majority of Microsoft's enterprisey and/or locked-in customer base since it's so well integrated into everything else they offer. [0] https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/07/18/we-need-a-safer-systems-programming-language/ https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/07/18/we-need-a-safer-s... [1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-70-percent-of-all-security-bugs-are-memory-safety-issues/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-70-percent-of-all-se...
- thefz 4y ago
  I don't think it "just sucks". Functionality is there and it is very well integrated in its ecosystem. For what I use it every day, it works and has never crashed on me or let me down. I just wish the UI was more responsive, which is a specific concern that can and will be addressed by its developers. That said, JS still has no place on the desktop in my opinion, and the world is full of Electron applications that have horrible performance. You can hack up an UI in bash too. But should you? For products that _vertically_ suck, well, try Cisco WebEx. Thank you for the lesson, though.
0xbadcafebee 4y ago
The UI is so bad. The whole interface feels like some borderless desert. The list of channels is a jumble of bold and not-bold text, free-floating in space, with no icons or colors or meaningful sorting. And then 20 "hidden channels", which... why are they hidden, and why do I have to unhide them individually?? And why is the "Chats" window literally a jumble of random chats from random Teams and individuals??? Why are Teams and Chats the same content but in different panes?? Why is the "Feed" just a new view of the same Teams / Chats windows? I feel like they had to try hard to make it this unintuitive and ugly.

by thefz 4y ago

garren 4y ago

Be careful what you wish for. I recall when Visual Studio switched to from native to managed (VS 2005?) and it was brutal. It was sluggish, crashy, with weird WPF UI bits thrown in here and there to support some oddball feature. As for C, maybe you meant C++? Kicking out a modern, complex, desktop, web/network-centric application in C is just begging for trouble. Particularly given all the headline grabbing research MS has done into how error prone manual memory management has been in their organization [0][1] Actually, it doesn't really seem like a language issue, does it? You can have a terrible app in C/C++/Rust/Go/JS, any language, you name it. Even electron seems a little like a scapegoat - e.g., VSCode and (previously) Atom are examples of "js-on-the-desktop crap" that are surprisingly solid. It's not the language that's the problem, and it's not (arguably) the underlying framework. The app just sucks. If Teams were written from the ground up in C# or C and had the same functionality (or lack of functionality), it would still suck. Teams, as a product, is just sub par compared to other offerings. Even so, it's good enough for the majority of Microsoft's enterprisey and/or locked-in customer base since it's so well integrated into everything else they offer. [0] https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/07/18/we-need-a-safer-systems-programming-language/ https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/07/18/we-need-a-safer-s... [1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-70-percent-of-all-security-bugs-are-memory-safety-issues/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-70-percent-of-all-se...

thefz 4y ago
I don't think it "just sucks". Functionality is there and it is very well integrated in its ecosystem. For what I use it every day, it works and has never crashed on me or let me down. I just wish the UI was more responsive, which is a specific concern that can and will be addressed by its developers. That said, JS still has no place on the desktop in my opinion, and the world is full of Electron applications that have horrible performance. You can hack up an UI in bash too. But should you? For products that _vertically_ suck, well, try Cisco WebEx. Thank you for the lesson, though.

0xbadcafebee 4y ago

The UI is so bad. The whole interface feels like some borderless desert. The list of channels is a jumble of bold and not-bold text, free-floating in space, with no icons or colors or meaningful sorting. And then 20 "hidden channels", which... why are they hidden, and why do I have to unhide them individually?? And why is the "Chats" window literally a jumble of random chats from random Teams and individuals??? Why are Teams and Chats the same content but in different panes?? Why is the "Feed" just a new view of the same Teams / Chats windows? I feel like they had to try hard to make it this unintuitive and ugly.