Ask HN: Why is MS Teams so slow, do devs test Teams on less powerful machines?
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.
256 comments
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
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
Teams is like the most developer-hostile piece of burning rubbish that I have ever had the misfortune to have to use. Sending little code snippets is such an important part of development. If a company has mandated Teams for all communications, you know they cannot be “developer friendly”—some management level is making decisions about what the engineers need.
While we’re bashing Teams—why are their notifications some awful custom window that doesn’t respect your OS notification settings?!??!
While we’re bashing Teams—why are their notifications some awful custom window that doesn’t respect your OS notification settings?!??!
I love it when the teams "you have a meeting now" notification pops up in front of the meeting lobby window you already have open and blocks you clicking the join meeting button.
Or when you're trying to leave a large meeting and everyone is typing "goodbye!" and "thanks!" messages in the chat, blocking your hangup button
Teams at least is slightly better than Skype For Business, which would hijack copy paste to put the sender's name and for some reason insert zero-width characters between every space.
Copying in Teams is messed up similarily where selecting message content also copies the timestamp and sender name even thought the selection shows otherwise.
It is worse than this, sometimes it does, sometimes it does not.
Today when I started typing, my cursor remained in the leftmost position and all of the characters appeared one by one to the right, effectively reversing all the text. I can't make this up.
This is the behavior of the Unicode Right-to-Left Override character U+202E. Meant to embed Hebrew or Arabic text, it is most used by hackers to change their exploittxt.exe attachment to read exploitexe.txt
Negative Ghost Rider, this was teams being teams. I saw that post too. Not applicable here.
This has happened to me in Gmail before. May be a chrome issue?
You were able to copy in teams?? Tell me the secret!
It almost never works for me.
It almost never works for me.
"Skype for Business" is summed up by the fact that, AFAIK, it's just the old Lync codebase. Which was such a terrible product that they thought they'd be better off getting rid of its own branding and rubbing Skype on it.
It was so bad, even Microsoft couldn't make it work properly for themselves!
It also stomps on the .mimeapps.list file every time it starts (in Linux) up even if its already in the list. Annoying for me because mine is a symlink into the read only nix store in NixOS.
Not sure when, but on Windows at least, they finally integrated into Windows native alerts. You have to go find and enable the setting which is of by default...
The native windows alerts are pretty terrible also ..
We used Teams at my last job. It was unpopular and we didn't use it a whole lot since the building was small enough that we could just... ya know, yell.
Then MS introduced that weird semi-forced threaded discussion feature that make following conversations a nightmare and nobody, not a single person in the whole company, sent a message over Teams ever again. We kept running it to appear online, but literally nobody actually used it.
We did spend a fair amount of downtime talking about how much we hated Teams, though. And Azure DevOps. More than one person there considered it some of the worst software they've ever used, and they're right. It was a horrendous mess or awful UX (but tons and tons of charts for the managers to value far too highly).
That was a year and a half ago or so, maybe it's better now. But at the time, having switched to that from Gitlab, it was atrocious and we avoided it as much as we could.
Then MS introduced that weird semi-forced threaded discussion feature that make following conversations a nightmare and nobody, not a single person in the whole company, sent a message over Teams ever again. We kept running it to appear online, but literally nobody actually used it.
We did spend a fair amount of downtime talking about how much we hated Teams, though. And Azure DevOps. More than one person there considered it some of the worst software they've ever used, and they're right. It was a horrendous mess or awful UX (but tons and tons of charts for the managers to value far too highly).
That was a year and a half ago or so, maybe it's better now. But at the time, having switched to that from Gitlab, it was atrocious and we avoided it as much as we could.
I first had the pleasure of using Teams in 2016 or 2017, I forget exactly when, and at the time they didn’t have accessibility features. None. You couldn’t even increase the text size in the app. It was nigh unusable then. I left for a different job and within a year, Teams again reared its ugly head. I’ve thankfully moved on from that job too.
Whatever cost savings Teams affords, the difference is more than lost in confusion, miscommunication, and frustration across the workplace.
May I never have to use it again.
Interestingly, my team now uses Discord for communication and we really love it.
Whatever cost savings Teams affords, the difference is more than lost in confusion, miscommunication, and frustration across the workplace.
May I never have to use it again.
Interestingly, my team now uses Discord for communication and we really love it.
How do you deal with backscroll? That’s been my biggest hang up with Discord but I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t use it much.
What is your issue with/what do you mean by backscroll? I've been using Discord for a few months now but still new.
I’m not who you replied to but Discord has this terrible behavior in channels with a lot of content where scrolling up loads historical messages, but often sends you to a random location in history instead of smoothly scrolling through them in reverse chronological order.
> ...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.
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.
Teams is bad, but Element/Matrix is the only chat app I've used in maybe 10 years (outside of SMS) where I miss messages. I get a notification, want to read the entire message, open the app and it isn't there. I'm 99% sure it didn't get deleted, but I'll never know what it said. And since iOS makes the notification go away when you tap it, I can't even see what it was.
Discord should just sell a white label version or start a subsidiary to sell to enterprise. Slack will probably get smushed by Salesforce, and short of Satya Nadella's personal laptop bursting into flames because of Teams, I doubt they'll slim down the client.
Discord should just sell a white label version or start a subsidiary to sell to enterprise. Slack will probably get smushed by Salesforce, and short of Satya Nadella's personal laptop bursting into flames because of Teams, I doubt they'll slim down the client.
I use Element on Android and it works perfectly.
I don't say that lightly, I'm pretty hard to please in general. Element is one of the few pieces of software that I don't have a complaint about.
I don't say that lightly, I'm pretty hard to please in general. Element is one of the few pieces of software that I don't have a complaint about.
Actually I just thought of the single problem that I have with it - it doesn't support multiple identities.
https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/2320
Other than that it works great though.
https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/2320
Other than that it works great though.
Teams is moving away from electron in v2.0, which may go some way towards slimming down the client but won't solve any of the architectural issues that come with a lack of focus.
https://office365itpros.com/2021/06/25/teams20-webview2-repl...
https://office365itpros.com/2021/06/25/teams20-webview2-repl...
We treat missing msg bugs in Element as a top priority red alert for obvious reasons. I’m only aware of one recently, which was iOS specific and matches your symptoms - but very rare indeed. It got fixed in https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-ios-sdk/pull/1359 and was a leftover from the nightmare of iOS changing how push worked. Sorry that you got bitten by it. The fix is released in Element iOS 1.8.0.
You can see previous notifications by swiping up on the lock screen.
> ...Element/Matrix is the only chat app I've used in maybe 10 years (outside of SMS) where I miss messages...
That sure is odd...and not my experience at all.
> ...short of Satya Nadella's personal laptop bursting into flames because of Teams, I doubt they'll slim down the client.
Sadly, i think you're right.
That sure is odd...and not my experience at all.
> ...short of Satya Nadella's personal laptop bursting into flames because of Teams, I doubt they'll slim down the client.
Sadly, i think you're right.
So there is hope, the Teams dev team may just be able to accomplish this
My introduction to Teams was creating a chat room, trying to add someone not on our actual org team into it, and Teams telling me that I couldn't have non-Team members in that kind of chat.
Which... was bizarre, coming from Slack.
As parent phrased it, "the redundancy between chats, group chats, and Teams channels" is mind-bogglingly stupid.
I can't actually imagine a user who would desire that. Maybe someone from HR worried about secrets being shared in a chat?
Which... was bizarre, coming from Slack.
As parent phrased it, "the redundancy between chats, group chats, and Teams channels" is mind-bogglingly stupid.
I can't actually imagine a user who would desire that. Maybe someone from HR worried about secrets being shared in a chat?
Welcome to MS Teams...The chat platform for *YOUR* people, and not *Those Others*! lol
> ...Maybe someone from HR worried about secrets being shared in a chat?
Your phrase there immediately made me think of that Catbert evil HR director character from Dilbert...which is exactly the kind of thing he would want to have setup! :-)
> ...Maybe someone from HR worried about secrets being shared in a chat?
Your phrase there immediately made me think of that Catbert evil HR director character from Dilbert...which is exactly the kind of thing he would want to have setup! :-)
> Welcome to MS Teams...The chat platform for YOUR people, and not Those Others! lol
This is very true, and hugely problematic. As a consultant I have to use Teams with 3 separate clients right now, which means signing in to 3 different Teams tenants - Microsoft SSO does not like that at all.
I have a personal hatred for MS because of their long history of building shit like this, but I hoped that working for a different cloud provider would keep me away from that ecosystem - it was legitimately a positive benefit I perceived about this job when thinking about the move. Alas, the cancer of MS software gets everywhere by virtue of being effectively free for anyone using Office.
This is very true, and hugely problematic. As a consultant I have to use Teams with 3 separate clients right now, which means signing in to 3 different Teams tenants - Microsoft SSO does not like that at all.
I have a personal hatred for MS because of their long history of building shit like this, but I hoped that working for a different cloud provider would keep me away from that ecosystem - it was legitimately a positive benefit I perceived about this job when thinking about the move. Alas, the cancer of MS software gets everywhere by virtue of being effectively free for anyone using Office.
Ouch, that's quite painful the way that you're experiencing Teams. My sympathies! :-)
I agree 100% with your review
I work for an institution that has gone balls deep with MS products and it's driving me crazy considering they are always worrying about budgets and saving money.
When I started everyone was communicating with email. Drove me nuts. I convinced the team I was assigned to, to drop emails and switched to hipchat ( loved it) then slack ( meh ) When covid hit, everyone needed to be on chat. Top brass told us we were not allowed to use anything but MS Teams. The devs hate it. It's run by the main IT dep so we have no control over how it works.
I want to stage a revolt and install mattermost on one of our servers lol
I work for an institution that has gone balls deep with MS products and it's driving me crazy considering they are always worrying about budgets and saving money.
When I started everyone was communicating with email. Drove me nuts. I convinced the team I was assigned to, to drop emails and switched to hipchat ( loved it) then slack ( meh ) When covid hit, everyone needed to be on chat. Top brass told us we were not allowed to use anything but MS Teams. The devs hate it. It's run by the main IT dep so we have no control over how it works.
I want to stage a revolt and install mattermost on one of our servers lol
Matter most really sucks. It’s a really immature pruoduct. Discord can run circles around it and it’s not even very good
The code formatting is so badly broken now. It simply cannot have been tested. i just can't believe they want it to work like that. i also really hate that copy and pasting into a chat preserves the styling/formatting of the original. why would i want that? and the search... oh the search!
If you run teams on light mode and copy paste to someone who's running on dark mode he simply can't see your message cause it's text color is black on black background.
The fact that this happens on a piece of software which natively supports dark mode tells a lot of the amount of testing that teams is getting before being pushed to users.
The fact that this happens on a piece of software which natively supports dark mode tells a lot of the amount of testing that teams is getting before being pushed to users.
Wait until you discover that copy and pasting from the chat might introduce no-break Unicode spaces that looks like spaces in most diff tools! I did the hard way.
Seen this. Docker Compose YML files with invisible spaces, because copied from a code block. That's the point of code blocks. No formatting. <pre> and all that. Caused us much pain.
> The redundancy between chats, group chats, and Teams channels (which are like a message board?) is just bizarre
It really is, why do I get notifications in chat sometimes and not the Teams room that everyone is a part of?
Why are people referencing others in these chat channels when that's what we discuss in the Teams channels?
And I'm a senior software engineer!
It really is, why do I get notifications in chat sometimes and not the Teams room that everyone is a part of?
Why are people referencing others in these chat channels when that's what we discuss in the Teams channels?
And I'm a senior software engineer!
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Favorite terrible teams UX: it only allows you to be logged in to one account but when you click log out, it takes you to a separate screen with all 1 of your sessions and asks you to select which account you'd like to sign out of as a separate step.
Back when I was using Ubuntu for work, teams used to crash my whole system 2-3 times a week. I know it was teams because it'd start with the mouse lagging, and then a few seconds later would just completely freeze up, but if I were fast enough to notice I could right click the teams icon and exit out of it before it had the chance, and then I'd be alright...for another day or so.
Now I'm on Windows, and it doesn't seem to be a problem anymore (or at least it doesn't crash my system anymore, its still always top of the list for memory usage), but it is very irritating to use
Now I'm on Windows, and it doesn't seem to be a problem anymore (or at least it doesn't crash my system anymore, its still always top of the list for memory usage), but it is very irritating to use
From what I get, they are pushing users to use the "advanced editor" a.k.a. the format button. A few things ONLY work there:
- Lists: A few months ago you can simply use markdown style lists in any chat and hitting enter would create a new list item instead of sending the whole message off. A few updates since Nov slowly stripped off this option for Chats, and then Channels. The only option to send lists is to use the format button.
- As you said, code snippets, now they stripped off all indentations if you are not using the format button (and have to go through a tedious process to insert code)
- Lists: A few months ago you can simply use markdown style lists in any chat and hitting enter would create a new list item instead of sending the whole message off. A few updates since Nov slowly stripped off this option for Chats, and then Channels. The only option to send lists is to use the format button.
- As you said, code snippets, now they stripped off all indentations if you are not using the format button (and have to go through a tedious process to insert code)
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...
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...
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.
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?
How do you screw up a chat program this badly?
>> "How do you screw up a chat program this badly?"
By having the highest-level-goal be: make it look like the competition and give it away for free.
Whether it actually works like the competition was deferred until some later date.
If the competition perishes in the meantime, well, then there's no need to fix.
By having the highest-level-goal be: make it look like the competition and give it away for free.
Whether it actually works like the competition was deferred until some later date.
If the competition perishes in the meantime, well, then there's no need to fix.
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
Whether a company uses the Microsoft suite is definitely a factor when I look for jobs. I simply won't put up with Teams or Windows - not unless the salary is at least 2x what I can get elsewhere. I know I'm not alone in this. Developers want to work with good software.
I've had to put up with it before and I won't do it again. I can almost feel my cortisol levels rising just thinking about it.
I've had to put up with it before and I won't do it again. I can almost feel my cortisol levels rising just thinking about it.
The chat is so bad people end up @ing the whole team in the team channel just to get people to see it. It fails at its most basic purpose.
There are seemingly countless different ways to start a chat. You could start a thread in a channel (or is it team?), or just start a new channel/team, or invite people to a group chat. There ends up being a forever growing list of chats/rooms/whatever because people can't find the previous one so just make a new one.
People are forever accidentally starting a new thread instead of replying to the current thread. Most stupid UI ever. I find 99% of the time people just want flat chat and find whatever the easiest way to get that is.
And why the hell do you need to give me a top level notification that won't go away when someone "reacts" to the thing I've just said in the chat I'm still viewing?!
Oh, and the random breakages. It seems every other week they break code pasting. Currently viewing images is broken for me. I just have to keep retrying until on the tenth time it finally works.
There are seemingly countless different ways to start a chat. You could start a thread in a channel (or is it team?), or just start a new channel/team, or invite people to a group chat. There ends up being a forever growing list of chats/rooms/whatever because people can't find the previous one so just make a new one.
People are forever accidentally starting a new thread instead of replying to the current thread. Most stupid UI ever. I find 99% of the time people just want flat chat and find whatever the easiest way to get that is.
And why the hell do you need to give me a top level notification that won't go away when someone "reacts" to the thing I've just said in the chat I'm still viewing?!
Oh, and the random breakages. It seems every other week they break code pasting. Currently viewing images is broken for me. I just have to keep retrying until on the tenth time it finally works.
The reacts are my biggest pet peeve. Someone just simply wants to register they received my message/instructions and it created 4 additional clicks for me to address.
I have an external monitor with USB audio, but no volume in macos there because reasons. It's hooked up to a hardware amp with a real hardware volume control. Every. Single. Teams. Call has a dialog box saying I might not be able to hear because I'm at 0 volume. And it comes back every single time the window maximizes.
If I share a window on one screen, the teams call carefully placed on the other monitor helpfully minimizes to a floating window in front of what I'm trying to share. So then I have to re-maximize because I sometimes like to see the reactions when I'm sharing stuff.
One person I call, I can't. He has to call me back. Every Time.
It's not the worst video chat I've used. That's either skype or any of the pre-facetime real-video things that never really worked. But it's not good either.
If I share a window on one screen, the teams call carefully placed on the other monitor helpfully minimizes to a floating window in front of what I'm trying to share. So then I have to re-maximize because I sometimes like to see the reactions when I'm sharing stuff.
One person I call, I can't. He has to call me back. Every Time.
It's not the worst video chat I've used. That's either skype or any of the pre-facetime real-video things that never really worked. But it's not good either.
I randomly miss out alerts of notif and calls
The stuoid thing keeps ringing denoting that I am getting a call but I can't see who is calling u less I have their chat window open then it shows a Join button
Legitimately irritating as it happens several times a day
Root cause? Their notification is generated but we can't see it unless we do alt tab
Legitimately irritating as it happens several times a day
Root cause? Their notification is generated but we can't see it unless we do alt tab
I hate the text editor. Sometimes, it just doesn’t work, so I don’t rely on it for advanced WYSIWYG features.
Worst of all, it will open all links in edge, unless you configure Edge to Not do it. WTF? Why is this even possible?
Worst of all, it will open all links in edge, unless you configure Edge to Not do it. WTF? Why is this even possible?
Someone got a nice bonus for the edge feature.
Why do companies use Teams? At all? What is the promise of that software?
To me it looks like another failed attempt to solve communication without really giving it a good thought - resulting in an incomprehensible mess.
To me it looks like another failed attempt to solve communication without really giving it a good thought - resulting in an incomprehensible mess.
> Why do companies use Teams? At all?
It’s included and integrated with Office.
It’s included and integrated with Office.
+1 there's no way to mark all chat as read is there. I dread the day I miss an important message because it's hidden amid junk I don't want to open.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Interesting thank you for the writeup! I tried to find a comparison of sound latency for old phones, modern mobile and e.g. MS Teams, but couldn't find any.
I didn't know there were echo cancellation in old time phones: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_suppression_and_cancell...
Is it maybe the background noise filters that mess up sound latency in Teams?
I used to play with friends over a privately hosted Ventrilo server back in the days, and the conversations were always crystal clear and felt like instant.
Maybe the VOIP providers just timeshare calls too much in their servers or have bad routing of packages.
I didn't know there were echo cancellation in old time phones: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_suppression_and_cancell...
Is it maybe the background noise filters that mess up sound latency in Teams?
I used to play with friends over a privately hosted Ventrilo server back in the days, and the conversations were always crystal clear and felt like instant.
Maybe the VOIP providers just timeshare calls too much in their servers or have bad routing of packages.
I used a wired headset it work and notice no lag. However, Bluetooth earphones are the absolute worst! The lag is really noticeable, almost 500ms!
Hmm ... maybe that was my problem too. Someday I will hook up my oscilloscope to a microphone somehow and measure round trip latency for different setups.
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.
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.
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.
This thread is much needed therapy. Teams is truly awful on so many levels.
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.
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.
The only solace in using Teams is being able to bond with other people who have experienced the same pain.
+1 for that.
Recently in W10 MS is requiring to login with your personal account only and not a work account to the apps store. Can't get the logic behind that.
I don't know how attributable your problems are to Teams; what you're describing sounds more like a general problem of misunderstanding AzureAD. But maybe you're right; it can feel like everyone has to be in the tenant for things to work. Have had many problems with _EXT clients.
Not being able to use multiple accounts is a severe disadvantage that they claimed they were working on.
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.
Everyone knows that it runs like poop, but there are other priorities, and no performance regression tests.
They know about performance issues don't dont want to fix or introduce performance tests? Nice.
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...
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...
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.
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.
> Moreover, teams target audience is not people in HN.
Yep. I believe, the key in Microsoft success was Bill Gates realizing a simple truth:
- Users of office software are not those who decide to buy it, that's their manager who are.
From the very beginning, Microsoft product had all boxes checked, were very easy to install and to do trivial things with them. Being convenient to do some real work? Very low on priority list.
Yep. I believe, the key in Microsoft success was Bill Gates realizing a simple truth:
- Users of office software are not those who decide to buy it, that's their manager who are.
From the very beginning, Microsoft product had all boxes checked, were very easy to install and to do trivial things with them. Being convenient to do some real work? Very low on priority list.
I partially disagree, VB pre-NET and .NET tooling are only outperformed by Delphi, C++ Builder and Java.
Anything else doesn't really match being convenient to do some real work.
The UNIXy competition, with exception of Java, doesn't really get the "Developers" mantra.
Anything else doesn't really match being convenient to do some real work.
The UNIXy competition, with exception of Java, doesn't really get the "Developers" mantra.
The thing is that we're really talking about different types of developers.
One type of developer wants to get shit done as quickly and painlessly as possible, so they can clock out and do something else. That's the traditional MS crowd.
Another type of developer likes to mess with stuff "just because". For him (because it's a him), excessive complexity is a value, since it provides "rep" once mastered. This is the unixy crowd, trained by a lifetime messing with Linux just to boot up - that's also where I come from, before people accuse me of disparaging people. MS steered hard towards that crowd with Nadella because they had lost them for a generation. That didn't necessarily result in a productivity increase for the first crowd, or even in general.
The thing is that really the "developers" mantras for these two crowds, are very different.
One type of developer wants to get shit done as quickly and painlessly as possible, so they can clock out and do something else. That's the traditional MS crowd.
Another type of developer likes to mess with stuff "just because". For him (because it's a him), excessive complexity is a value, since it provides "rep" once mastered. This is the unixy crowd, trained by a lifetime messing with Linux just to boot up - that's also where I come from, before people accuse me of disparaging people. MS steered hard towards that crowd with Nadella because they had lost them for a generation. That didn't necessarily result in a productivity increase for the first crowd, or even in general.
The thing is that really the "developers" mantras for these two crowds, are very different.
I definitely don't miss tinkering with Autoexec.bat, config.sys or xmodeconfig/fvwmrc for that matter.
Thanks to OS X killing the market for desktop UNIX, Nadella realised that many developers don't really care about Linux, they are more than happy for whatever runs their POSIX toys, and since UNIX for better or worse won the cloud war, then it should be in the box.
The irony that OS X and a Linux based VM on Windows are the winners for running UNIX stuff on laptops.
Thanks to OS X killing the market for desktop UNIX, Nadella realised that many developers don't really care about Linux, they are more than happy for whatever runs their POSIX toys, and since UNIX for better or worse won the cloud war, then it should be in the box.
The irony that OS X and a Linux based VM on Windows are the winners for running UNIX stuff on laptops.
I agree, Delphi and C++ Builder alumni here!
However I find .NET to be the only really good things about modern Microsoft. Even Windows itself has so many anti-features these days that I pity the average user who can't lock it down.
However I find .NET to be the only really good things about modern Microsoft. Even Windows itself has so many anti-features these days that I pity the average user who can't lock it down.
They sell features. Businesses don’t really care about hard to quantify things like performance.
So two questions:
1) what other priorities?
2) has anyone that worked on teams actually used it? It has one of the worst UX's ever.
1) what other priorities?
2) has anyone that worked on teams actually used it? It has one of the worst UX's ever.
Interesting, so all development is done on remotely on VDI or RDP instead of local machines?
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 :-)
The only thing that works well is calls, voice and video. I am sure they have plans to destroy that too :-)
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.
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.
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.
Alternative solution:
> find the Teams icon in the Taskbar, right click and Quit.
...and never open Teams again!
> find the Teams icon in the Taskbar, right click and Quit.
...and never open Teams again!
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.
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.
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.
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!
Classical Microsoft vision. If only they focused a little of their budget to design and actual your feedback...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
VSCode is clunky but almost usable. I like that it's multiplatform, free, and relatively capable, but I dislike its clunky and very non-snappy user experience.
VSCode really needs better competition than clunky Java IDEs from the likes of JetBrains or Eclipse or platform-specific native IDEs like Xcode.
VSCode really needs better competition than clunky Java IDEs from the likes of JetBrains or Eclipse or platform-specific native IDEs like Xcode.
Xcode is abysmal, I would honestly feel sorry for Apple devs if not for how much money they make. Last time I used it even autocompletion was broken (it would write the text 1 character ahead).
But yeah there's clearly room for a snappier LSP-based editor, preferably one with a toolbar.
But yeah there's clearly room for a snappier LSP-based editor, preferably one with a toolbar.
I've been using Xcode every working day for over 12 years and on the whole it has been excellent. It definitely has some quirks but it is a feature rich workhorse.
It has integrated docs, simulators, unit/UI test functionality inc coverage reports, live UI debugging, tons of profiling tools, and I can use it to upload my apps straight to App Store Connect. Starting with XCode 13 I also have built in CI/CD. I can build, profile, test and deploy a whole app on multiple platforms from scratch with it. And its free.
It has integrated docs, simulators, unit/UI test functionality inc coverage reports, live UI debugging, tons of profiling tools, and I can use it to upload my apps straight to App Store Connect. Starting with XCode 13 I also have built in CI/CD. I can build, profile, test and deploy a whole app on multiple platforms from scratch with it. And its free.
Every release of Xcode has been a buggy mess. Every. Single. One. It certainly has lots of features but I'd much rather it had less features and more polish. The worst sin a tool can make is to be unreliable and that's the best word I can use to describe Xcode.
“Every. Single. One.”
There have been some bugs here and there, but it’s really not the mess you’re claiming it to be.
The Apple App Store likes to show reviews that are tied to a country, but at least for the ones I see Xcode sits at a proud 2.6 stars, with hundreds of 1 star reviews complaining about bugs and crashes.
Certainly reflects my experience as well. When the text editor of a development environment doesn't work right, I mean, shouldn't that be job number 1? Search google for "Xcode bugs", you'll see thread after thread of complaints.
I can find major complaints of bugs and crashes going all the way from 9 years ago to the latest Xcode release, no other development environment has this many complaints. It is by far the most buggy and crash prone development environment available today. People _happily_ pay for AppCode for a reason.
Certainly reflects my experience as well. When the text editor of a development environment doesn't work right, I mean, shouldn't that be job number 1? Search google for "Xcode bugs", you'll see thread after thread of complaints.
I can find major complaints of bugs and crashes going all the way from 9 years ago to the latest Xcode release, no other development environment has this many complaints. It is by far the most buggy and crash prone development environment available today. People _happily_ pay for AppCode for a reason.
You're right, XCode is full of bugs are here AND there.
Ideally it would be here OR there, ie much less of them!
Ideally it would be here OR there, ie much less of them!
The last few are actually alright but there did seem to a be period where it broke every release and dropped highlighting and completion as sourcekit would crap out. Word is internal apple devs were also annoyed and complaining frequently.
I love Xcode and wish it offered support for more languages.
Hence why people still prefer to use Emacs and Vim.
If you’re talking about Telegram Desktop it’s written in C++ with Qt for the UI, I don’t think it’s even really comparable to Discord in that regard
VSCode was only praised because it was compared to other Electron apps and Atom. It surely is fast enough. But it isn't best of Native Apps fast. Sublime, Coda, or BBText. And again everything is relative. For those who went through some DOS minimal latency era even the so called fast Native Apps today is barely on par.
That said the bar for different people varied a lot. I am latency sensitive.
That said the bar for different people varied a lot. I am latency sensitive.
I donate to Sublime, even though I hardly use it, because VSCode really needs proper competition to stay in business.
You know how far we've fallen when we consider VSCode or Discord desktop apps with good performance
Truth! Delphi had this all sorted out 20 years 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.
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.
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
Discord's slow and heavy and glitches or crashes constantly. My group of friends landed on it for some activities over the pandemic, because most of the other options were on-balance worse for what we needed, but it's heavy and not high-quality.
... Ok I have to know what else is running on your PC because aside from needing to kick it once or twice when there was a major outage to get back in, it's been smooth.
Not just me, all ~8 of us using it. Mac and Windows both. Every single session (2-3 hours, usually) at least one person's client simply crashes. [EDIT] more typically, it's like one crash every 30-45 minutes, but I don't think we've ever made it through without at least one crash.
[EDIT AGAIN] I'd guesstimate its person-hour-of-use crash rate at at least 20x that of Slack, from what I've seen. Maybe quite a bit higher.
[EDIT AGAIN] I'd guesstimate its person-hour-of-use crash rate at at least 20x that of Slack, from what I've seen. Maybe quite a bit higher.
Not everyone has a Core i7 made two years ago. Discord takes 10 seconds to start up on my unloaded Core i5-6200u and a full 30 seconds when I'm playing a video game. Mumble, which is not written in Electron, starts up in 2-4 seconds while playing a game.
Chat needs like 100mb tops to function...discord comes in im the half gig range that serious AAA games used to fall into 10 years ago, nevermind the abominable snowman Teams...
Once you run more than one chat in Discord even on recent PCs you see the suck.
Once you run more than one chat in Discord even on recent PCs you see the suck.
> 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 takes 10-15 seconds to start up on my work machine. That's not "fast as shit" by any stretch of the imagination.
It takes 10-15 seconds to start up on my work machine. That's not "fast as shit" by any stretch of the imagination.
VSCode is only usable, because in reality many plugins are external processes written in a mix of C++, Go and Rust.
Discord is snappy? Is this the level of desktop applications in 2022? :P
Agreed. My main problem with Electron apps is just how slow it loads, even on an M1 Mac (~20 seconds loading time vs the normal 1 second or less). Discord is certainly no exception to it, and even steals focus twice while loading.
Personally I have to quit Discord to keep myself from getting distracted, so it’s way worse when you have to wait so long just to reply to a notification.
Personally I have to quit Discord to keep myself from getting distracted, so it’s way worse when you have to wait so long just to reply to a notification.
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Super snappy for me (with countless of crowded servers constantly bombarding messages).
Post your specs. Discord takes 10 seconds to start up on my unloaded Core i5-6200u.
The average user does not have a gaming or workstation CPU.
The average user does not have a gaming or workstation CPU.
> 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)
That's not shipping an entire browser. That's shipping an entire bloody OS! (edge is still stupidly deeply integrated, and I'd bet there's still old ie MSHTML gubbins in there for the enterprise crowd to cling to.)
That's not shipping an entire browser. That's shipping an entire bloody OS! (edge is still stupidly deeply integrated, and I'd bet there's still old ie MSHTML gubbins in there for the enterprise crowd to cling to.)
Roblox's UWP Microsoft Store app, for instance, still uses the old legacy EdgeHTML based webview.
... While I mention Roblox, let me just let it be known that the win32 Roblox app, the one that Roblox pushes, uses an incredibly insecure IE webview. Roblox simply doesn't listen to feedback.
... While I mention Roblox, let me just let it be known that the win32 Roblox app, the one that Roblox pushes, uses an incredibly insecure IE webview. Roblox simply doesn't listen to feedback.
And actually, Microsoft's own MS Store used the UWP webview which is EdgeHTML for a long time until they recently replaced it with a native frontend.
It probably uses Edge WebView2, which is based on Chromium and can be updated on its own.
ZeroTier uses it for its control panel, and installs it on first launch which caused me some confusing as to why i always had to launch it twice to make it appear after a new install.
ZeroTier uses it for its control panel, and installs it on first launch which caused me some confusing as to why i always had to launch it twice to make it appear after a new install.
So it will be a lot better because the runtime ( Edge WebView 2 ) is integrated into Windows 11. I see this as lowering memory usage only because I thought Edge is still very much just chromium hence performance will be similar?
And if they ship Webview 2 cross platform to Mac and linux I assume it is not that much different to shipping electron ?
And if they ship Webview 2 cross platform to Mac and linux I assume it is not that much different to shipping electron ?
Browsers start up quite fast, that's not it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That should be a fast machine, and 13 seconds is an eternity in my workflows.
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.
The only reason I liked teams was that I had to use "Skype for Business" before it, and it was even more rubbish
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?
You forgot Yammer...but that's understandable because Yammer was very forgettable. (chat-only)
At least for Outlook I could still switch back this time, which I immediately did.
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.)
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.)
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.
In short, Teams is crap. My daughter uses Google Meet at school and its so fast/fun/easy on an old 8GB laptop.
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.
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.
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.
Like in many product teams, I bet that they know, problem is management.
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.
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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
> jail time
Might as well go straight to the death penalty.
Might as well go straight to the death penalty.
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.
Besides, if it was a hard requirement, they would have turned off the other chat channels.
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.
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.
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.
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/2022/0...
Who on their perfect mind can justify this as a good idea?
Latest example, Windows 11 new settings UI is a React Native application!
https://microsoft.github.io/react-native-windows/blog/2022/0...
Who on their perfect mind can justify this as a good idea?
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.
Totally!
They just don't pay enough compared to the SV ecosystem.
They just don't pay enough compared to the SV ecosystem.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's probably bc their whole architecture is written C# just to spite.
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.
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.
Half the reason it's bad is because it uses SharePoint as the back-end. Another awful product that Microsoft tries to sustain.
My company is forcing a move away from confluence to sharepont and teams.
The ms stack is awful.
The ms stack is awful.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> ... 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.
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.
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.
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)
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)
It’s Microsoft. What else did you expect ?
Some software is really nice though, their todo app for example (im serious)
I guess the Wunderlist team is more competent than their Teams one.
Yep they’ve managed to make a product that is only a little bit worse than Wunderlist, after buying Wunderlist
I just checked it. Kinda surprised that Microsoft To Do doesn't have natural language support like Wunderlist.
I also prefer Outlook to all other email software I used (including GMail). At least to me it's always been fast, powerful, programmable, configurable, etc. Same goes for Excel, a great piece of software with more impact on the business world than probably any other software.
How is Outlook programmable? (asking) Is it still via vba or something newer?
Visual Studio (normal one on Windows) used to be great before they packaged it with bloaty extras that slow everything down.
Vscode is great yet with each update it gets more buggy than its fixed. Let's see how many years will take Microsoft to turn Vscode into crapware too.
Vscode is great yet with each update it gets more buggy than its fixed. Let's see how many years will take Microsoft to turn Vscode into crapware too.
What todo app? This one? https://to-do.office.com/tasks/today
Yes, i.e. Wunderlist (RIP):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wunderlist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wunderlist
Google told me Wunderlist had natural language support. Microsoft To Do doesn't.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Now it's just a buggy dungheap of a product.
Yep. Microsoft hardware. Microsoft OS. Microsoft app.
Still runs like shit. Quite a feat
Still runs like shit. Quite a feat
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.
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.
I now use the web app exclusively, both because it works better (at all) and because it doesn't act like malware.
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.
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.
Slack, at my current work, seems much less responsive, and doesn't support calls in Firefox.
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.
So it's not all negative.
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.
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.
Everything MSFT produces seems terribly slow.
Windows design issues?
Coding standards incentivize slow code?
Something I'm missing completely?
Windows design issues?
Coding standards incentivize slow code?
Something I'm missing completely?
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.
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.
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!
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.
Since when does teams not work on Firefox? I've been using team running in Firefox for ages
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-w...
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-w...
Last time I tried, voice calls were unsupported.
I think GP was talking about jitsi, not teams. I used teams in Brave just today, can confirm it works.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :(
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
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 "- "
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 "- "
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Extra extra fun considering Windows doesn't have clipboard history like Linux DEs have for years.
Windows + V allows you to enable it.
Windows + V allows you to enable it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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"...
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?
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.
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.
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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.
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.
I think you can ask them directly on linkedin. Maybe it's not that difficult to find the persons who develop a certain product.
I just use the Web version, it works good enough.
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.
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.
I dream the day all Electron garbage is either a Web widget or a PWA.
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)
I am upgrading from an 8GB M1 Macbook Air to a 16GB M1 Max Macbook Pro just because Teams makes my laptop unusable
I don't have those issues on mac, teams is very fast. Maybe more troubleshooting might help?
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.
When Dropbox updates itself, my work machine slows to a crawl for about 15 minutes.
The only solace I take from using Teams is that it's not Skype for Business.
Similar experience on MacBook Pro m1. Sometimes it uses more than 2g ram. Crazy.
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
I've been thinking the same thing. Considering how good discord is
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.
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.
I heard they'd created v2.0 last year. How is it?
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 , so maybe something will happen there soon...
You can get a nice error message on https://teams.microsoft.com/v2 , so maybe something will happen there soon...
MacOS or Windows?