5 ms·

I hate to agree with this. Web is the best way to cram loads of features into a limited amount of dev time. But still, whenever I use Teams, something like thi

I hate to agree with this. Web is the best way to cram loads of features into a limited amount of dev time. But still, whenever I use Teams, something like this happens: I click a button, nothing happens. I wait 10 seconds, because teams sometimes just needs a little longer. Nothing happens. I click the button again, it finally starts doing something. 5 seconds later, the thing I wanted appears. And every time it happens, I die a little inside.

HeckFeck 3y ago
MSN Messenger really was never that bad, was it? I keep hitting the RAM ceiling on my 16GB dev machine with the amount of electron crap I have to have open just to send messages to colleagues. Maybe it isn't noticeable when your app is the only one developed on your machine, but on a typical user machine these days the RAM guzzling is real. We could have it better, we had it better and I hate this.
- jwells89 3y ago
  I remember using Adium on my iMac G5 with 2GB of RAM, with its ability to connect to numerous networks, tons of features, and deep customizability of every aspect of the program with themes, icons, sound sets, etc and it only ever took up a small portion of that 2GB, even though its message view was implemented with a webview.
mozey 3y ago
> 5 seconds later, the thing I wanted appears Is this an intrinsic attribute of all web apps, or specific to an implementation?
matwood 3y ago
> whenever I use Teams Terrible software can be coded in any language.
- kamray23 3y ago
  Sadly, Microsoft and Electron seem to be magnetic to that type of software though. I experience seconds of lag between pressing a key and a character appearing in vanilla VSCode writing plain-text files. Forget plugins, I can't even use it to write text files. This laptop seems to run Dwarf Fortress and Factorio just fine, so I have no clue why specifically Teams and VSCode conk out other than the fact that both are Microsoft products built for the web and shipped with a security-lax stripped web browser. Have no issues with full Visual Studio either, so it's just that VSCode runs much, much, much heavier than actual Visual Studio. Isn't it meant to be light-weight in comparison?
  - Capricorn2481 3y ago
    I'm sorry, but there's something wrong with your computer at that point. Seconds of lag to type is ridiculous. This is not most people's experience with VSCode. Visual Studio is way more sluggish to me (and probably most people) Dwarf Fortress and Factorio are actually some of the least demanding games to run, by the way. I think a 2005 laptop could run Factorio. It's known for being easy to run
    - kamray23 3y ago
      Dwarf Fortress and Factorio are what I play. And while DF may be a graphically simple game, it's well known that many fortresses which don't succumb to fun succumb instead to FPS death, as the in-depth simulation eventually surpasses every computer as the fortress grows and sieges build up. It's certainly a demanding game, and towards the late game even on my perfectly working mid-tier PC it slows to a complete crawl. Factorio is easy to run, it's just that I mostly play things like Team Fortress 2, Factorio, Geometry Dash and Dwarf Fortress. I needed some examples and Factorio isn't from 2007, so I picked that. The most demanding one is of course DF.
ymolodtsov 3y ago
This definitely happens. At the same time, Superhuman (which is a web app) is insanely fast, and Apple managed to make the desktop version of Apple Music (which is supposed to be mostly native) insanely slow.
jacquesm 3y ago
You can program junk in any language. I've built a pretty neat real time web application using nothing but JavaScript and a little thinking. Could it be better? Yes, no doubt. I could have written it as a native application for all of the platforms that it currently supports (Desktop on Windows, Mac, Linux, mobile phones Android and iPhone). But I really don't have the time or the resources for that so this helped me to scratch my itch, helps a ton of other people as well and keeps the future options open. If you can do it as a web app you probably should do just that. I've a bunch of ideas on how to improve it that would require much more speed for raw computation, so for now that's off the table. Maybe one day it'll catch up, maybe there are some performance tricks that I'm simply not aware of that could make it happen today. But it's plenty useful as it is. Teams is typical bloatware. We had video-in-the-browser in 1995 and it worked, by 1998 we had audio as well plus a whole pile of people hanging off high volume events (Shuttle launches, F1 etc). Since then computers have become considerably faster. That there are alternatives to Teams that do not suffer from the same drawbacks makes me think that this is implementation dependent and that MS would really love you to download their native stuff. The web based Teams clients doesn't seem like it was ever priority #1. And because in any Teams meeting with more than five participants there always is at least one person using the web the impression is that the system as a whole just doesn't work.
- auggierose 3y ago
  For me only the web version works. The native macos version doesn't let me log in for some obscure reason. Teams is trash.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > And because in any Teams meeting with more than five participants there always is at least one person using the web the impression is that the system as a whole just doesn't work. That's me. Like with Slack, both native and web versions are junk, but the web version is leaner and snappier. And no, generally me using the web version didn't cause any issues to anyone on corporate calls.
- HeckFeck 3y ago
  NetMeeting managed live conferencing over 56k lines and on Pentium IIs. A tragically underappreciated piece of software, Skype before Skype with directories and the lot.
Gigachad 3y ago
Teams is just shit. Discord is also a web app and works great.
- HeckFeck 3y ago
  Discord's UI occasionally has me cursing but at least they've kept it consistent. And it is true that it doesn't have the same performance problems.
_fat_santa 3y ago
Teams has to be the poster child of “enterprise software”. I’m currently on contract at a large healthcare company and I’m starting to understand how an app as abominable as Teams could be built. The issue isn’t really with the tech stack, though electron is not the best, other companies like Discord have managed to build much better apps on top of it. The issue I see is organizational. What happens is you have a top down product vision where the features all come from the top and the engineers just have to figure out the implementation, they have no say in which features get pushed. So you get a scenario where every quarter, there are ever more features you need to cram into the app. All of this is feature work, no rework, no performance fixes. Once a team is done with this feature they don’t have time to go back and fix the tech debt because they have a new feature to implement. For any bug fixes and performance fixes the feature is shipped to another (probably offshore) team for maintenance, another quarter passes and more stuff gets thrown in to the app, a never ending cycle. It’s a vicious cycle where the app seems to be feature filled but every feature feels half baked with no attention paid to the details. Features are only added to and seldomly removed. Contrast this to smaller shops like Discord. I would imagine they follow a similar process but you have the same teams managing the building and maintenance of feature and more importantly, it’s not just adding new features but going back and reworking things to be more performant. In my mind these apps are actually ugly organizational problems that rear their head in the technology that the org creates.
- nottheengineer 3y ago
  This is what happens when there is no competition. If microsoft wasn't able to force their way into companies by bundling teams with all the other office crap that non-technical people want, I doubt anyone would seriously pick it over anything else. The amount of issues it has (and therefore the amount of work it causes) is insane. I have yet to see a streak of 5 calls without issues that require an interruption to fix.
- didntcheck 3y ago
  > other companies like Discord have managed to build much better apps on top of it Not to mention Microsoft themselves! VS Code is probably the shining example of what performance you can get out of Electron - with the caveat that it did take more engineering effort than I'd expect out of a chat app, and it's still more resource hungry than equivalent native editors/IDEs
stronglikedan 3y ago
It's funny that Teams web app works flawlessly for me in Edge browser, but I can't get the native client to even start properly. I can't say whether the web client is a parity match for the native client, but it suits my needs, so I just always use it instead.
jwells89 3y ago
And unfortunately, in the world of electron apps there’s far more leaning in the direction of Teams than in the direction of VS Code.

HeckFeck 3y ago

MSN Messenger really was never that bad, was it? I keep hitting the RAM ceiling on my 16GB dev machine with the amount of electron crap I have to have open just to send messages to colleagues. Maybe it isn't noticeable when your app is the only one developed on your machine, but on a typical user machine these days the RAM guzzling is real. We could have it better, we had it better and I hate this.

jwells89 3y ago
I remember using Adium on my iMac G5 with 2GB of RAM, with its ability to connect to numerous networks, tons of features, and deep customizability of every aspect of the program with themes, icons, sound sets, etc and it only ever took up a small portion of that 2GB, even though its message view was implemented with a webview.

mozey 3y ago

> 5 seconds later, the thing I wanted appears Is this an intrinsic attribute of all web apps, or specific to an implementation?

matwood 3y ago

> whenever I use Teams Terrible software can be coded in any language.

kamray23 3y ago
Sadly, Microsoft and Electron seem to be magnetic to that type of software though. I experience seconds of lag between pressing a key and a character appearing in vanilla VSCode writing plain-text files. Forget plugins, I can't even use it to write text files. This laptop seems to run Dwarf Fortress and Factorio just fine, so I have no clue why specifically Teams and VSCode conk out other than the fact that both are Microsoft products built for the web and shipped with a security-lax stripped web browser. Have no issues with full Visual Studio either, so it's just that VSCode runs much, much, much heavier than actual Visual Studio. Isn't it meant to be light-weight in comparison?
- Capricorn2481 3y ago
  I'm sorry, but there's something wrong with your computer at that point. Seconds of lag to type is ridiculous. This is not most people's experience with VSCode. Visual Studio is way more sluggish to me (and probably most people) Dwarf Fortress and Factorio are actually some of the least demanding games to run, by the way. I think a 2005 laptop could run Factorio. It's known for being easy to run
  - kamray23 3y ago
    Dwarf Fortress and Factorio are what I play. And while DF may be a graphically simple game, it's well known that many fortresses which don't succumb to fun succumb instead to FPS death, as the in-depth simulation eventually surpasses every computer as the fortress grows and sieges build up. It's certainly a demanding game, and towards the late game even on my perfectly working mid-tier PC it slows to a complete crawl. Factorio is easy to run, it's just that I mostly play things like Team Fortress 2, Factorio, Geometry Dash and Dwarf Fortress. I needed some examples and Factorio isn't from 2007, so I picked that. The most demanding one is of course DF.

ymolodtsov 3y ago

This definitely happens. At the same time, Superhuman (which is a web app) is insanely fast, and Apple managed to make the desktop version of Apple Music (which is supposed to be mostly native) insanely slow.

jacquesm 3y ago

You can program junk in any language. I've built a pretty neat real time web application using nothing but JavaScript and a little thinking. Could it be better? Yes, no doubt. I could have written it as a native application for all of the platforms that it currently supports (Desktop on Windows, Mac, Linux, mobile phones Android and iPhone). But I really don't have the time or the resources for that so this helped me to scratch my itch, helps a ton of other people as well and keeps the future options open. If you can do it as a web app you probably should do just that. I've a bunch of ideas on how to improve it that would require much more speed for raw computation, so for now that's off the table. Maybe one day it'll catch up, maybe there are some performance tricks that I'm simply not aware of that could make it happen today. But it's plenty useful as it is. Teams is typical bloatware. We had video-in-the-browser in 1995 and it worked, by 1998 we had audio as well plus a whole pile of people hanging off high volume events (Shuttle launches, F1 etc). Since then computers have become considerably faster. That there are alternatives to Teams that do not suffer from the same drawbacks makes me think that this is implementation dependent and that MS would really love you to download their native stuff. The web based Teams clients doesn't seem like it was ever priority #1. And because in any Teams meeting with more than five participants there always is at least one person using the web the impression is that the system as a whole just doesn't work.

auggierose 3y ago
For me only the web version works. The native macos version doesn't let me log in for some obscure reason. Teams is trash.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
> And because in any Teams meeting with more than five participants there always is at least one person using the web the impression is that the system as a whole just doesn't work. That's me. Like with Slack, both native and web versions are junk, but the web version is leaner and snappier. And no, generally me using the web version didn't cause any issues to anyone on corporate calls.
HeckFeck 3y ago
NetMeeting managed live conferencing over 56k lines and on Pentium IIs. A tragically underappreciated piece of software, Skype before Skype with directories and the lot.

Gigachad 3y ago

Teams is just shit. Discord is also a web app and works great.

HeckFeck 3y ago
Discord's UI occasionally has me cursing but at least they've kept it consistent. And it is true that it doesn't have the same performance problems.

_fat_santa 3y ago

Teams has to be the poster child of “enterprise software”. I’m currently on contract at a large healthcare company and I’m starting to understand how an app as abominable as Teams could be built. The issue isn’t really with the tech stack, though electron is not the best, other companies like Discord have managed to build much better apps on top of it. The issue I see is organizational. What happens is you have a top down product vision where the features all come from the top and the engineers just have to figure out the implementation, they have no say in which features get pushed. So you get a scenario where every quarter, there are ever more features you need to cram into the app. All of this is feature work, no rework, no performance fixes. Once a team is done with this feature they don’t have time to go back and fix the tech debt because they have a new feature to implement. For any bug fixes and performance fixes the feature is shipped to another (probably offshore) team for maintenance, another quarter passes and more stuff gets thrown in to the app, a never ending cycle. It’s a vicious cycle where the app seems to be feature filled but every feature feels half baked with no attention paid to the details. Features are only added to and seldomly removed. Contrast this to smaller shops like Discord. I would imagine they follow a similar process but you have the same teams managing the building and maintenance of feature and more importantly, it’s not just adding new features but going back and reworking things to be more performant. In my mind these apps are actually ugly organizational problems that rear their head in the technology that the org creates.

nottheengineer 3y ago
This is what happens when there is no competition. If microsoft wasn't able to force their way into companies by bundling teams with all the other office crap that non-technical people want, I doubt anyone would seriously pick it over anything else. The amount of issues it has (and therefore the amount of work it causes) is insane. I have yet to see a streak of 5 calls without issues that require an interruption to fix.
didntcheck 3y ago
> other companies like Discord have managed to build much better apps on top of it Not to mention Microsoft themselves! VS Code is probably the shining example of what performance you can get out of Electron - with the caveat that it did take more engineering effort than I'd expect out of a chat app, and it's still more resource hungry than equivalent native editors/IDEs

stronglikedan 3y ago

It's funny that Teams web app works flawlessly for me in Edge browser, but I can't get the native client to even start properly. I can't say whether the web client is a parity match for the native client, but it suits my needs, so I just always use it instead.

jwells89 3y ago

And unfortunately, in the world of electron apps there’s far more leaning in the direction of Teams than in the direction of VS Code.