from Hacker News

Microsoft rebuilt Teams from the ground up, promises 2x faster performance

by mmq on 3/27/23, 3:36 PM with 133 comments

  • by pelagicAustral on 3/27/23, 4:18 PM

    I wish we could just move back to native apps and stop using the pile of crap that is Electron or any other attempt at bringing web stacks to the desktop.

  • by bastard_op on 3/27/23, 5:01 PM

    "Mac support is coming later this year." That means proper Linux support is coming some time between never and when hell freezes over. It can't be a proper general service when the vendor simply won't properly support other operating systems as they do their own.

    They had the electron Teams drivel for Linux that at least worked slightly better than the web version, but even that got relegated to be scrapped by M$, telling everyone to just go use the crappy web version, which never really works right for me under Linux/Firefox.

    Even when I used native Teams on a Windows VDI instance for customers, it is still horrible for resources, requiring a ram upgrade just to use it, with audio randomly working, restarting the client several times a day when I was using it to restore audio, Windows or Linux, and was quite painful. My last customer wanted to move their existing telephony (Cisco) to Teams - I said good luck and riddance with that and left them to their folly.

    At the same time, I used zoom for anything I tended to schedule, and I NEVER have those problems with the Linux client there. Same with Google's conferencing, and WebEx, only Microsoft remains as the most commonly broken thing I use for conferencing or communications in general.

    It's amazing the stuck-in-their-ways enterprise Micrsofties out there so used to broken Microsoft things that they just stick with the default checkbox Teams as an "easy" telecommunications solution. M$ gives it away like crack to enterprises for a taste, first hit is always free, everyone feels good for a bit, then they hit with the up sell tax.

    Then you realize it has limits and problems... Friends don't let friends use Microsoft.

  • by seper8 on 3/27/23, 4:34 PM

    This thread is probably going to be filled again by perfectionistic engineers who fail to understand the tradeoff between quality and quantity. Microsoft won the work from home game by delivering more features even though the quality admittedly suffered. Quality over quantity. Your perfect engineering mindset loses to the reality of doing business in a competitive market.

  • by iamben on 3/27/23, 4:30 PM

    "Mac support is coming later this year."

    Sigh. My heart sinks when I get a Teams invite. 60 minutes of hairdryer fan? 4 minutes of waiting for the video feeds to kick in? Video that flickers enough to give me an epileptic fit? But don't worry about all that core usability stuff - at least I can use 'together mode' to make everyone look like they're sat outside! Thanks!

  • by overthrow on 3/27/23, 4:10 PM

    2x faster? So it will load in 7.5 seconds instead of 15 seconds?

  • by mgreenw on 3/27/23, 4:04 PM

    Great, but the design and usability is still terrible compared to Slack. Not sure that can ever be fixed.

  • by claytongulick on 3/27/23, 4:09 PM

    I don't really compare teams with slack, since I do chat with mattermost.

    I'm generally exposed to it via the video meetings, and it lags far behind Google meet.

    To the point where I groan when I see a meeting invite come in with a teams link.

    I know it's going to be a mishmash of difficult auth, slow loading, failure to load, refreshing and teeth grinding to get into the meeting.

    Once you make it into the meeting everything seems fine and quality is generally pretty good.

    It feels like there were different teams that worked on the actual webrtc meeting bits and all the other stuff.

  • by LeSaucy on 3/27/23, 4:31 PM

    I dont care how fast it opens, how about dont use 20% cpu just being open/idle? My macbook battery lasts almost double when i close teams.

  • by zokier on 3/27/23, 4:19 PM

    Great that they are at least trying to improve, but even the improved almost one second channel switch time is imho still order of magnitude too much. How many ms did it take to switch window in irssi?

    Edit: it's even worse. For some reason chat switching did barely improve at all and still take >2s on "low-end" hardware. Wtf. https://research.gigaom.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/1/2023/...

  • by nicoco on 3/27/23, 4:27 PM

    Anyone in here knows a lib, preferably python, to interact with the msteams API? I'm interested in developing an alternative client (or more accurately, an XMPP gateway).

  • by stronglikedan on 3/27/23, 4:14 PM

    Hopefully it can keep my camera going on through an entire 30 minute meeting now, like all the competition can easily do, but not Teams for some reason.

  • by solarkraft on 3/27/23, 5:49 PM

    They need something like 10x and maybe a single person that cares about the resulting product.

    You can't embed videos. Embedding images is extremely janky. Layout keeps glitching. Calls without windows I can click to accept them. You can't forward messages.

    Maybe the reason for the neglect was the work on the new Teams, which they'll actually care about? Let's see, my expectations aren't high.

  • by filereaper on 3/27/23, 4:24 PM

    Looking forward to the improvements to Teams, just so that it'll put more pressure on Slack both on the business front and technical front.

    Slack has been slacking (pun intended) on performance for a long time now, I'm honestly not sure what exactly it is that they're working on but nothing that I use daily is improved.

  • by kornhole on 3/28/23, 2:11 AM

    Speed and performance has never been an issue I noticed with Teams on my work machine. UX is also fine. Most competing apps are at feature and performance saturation IMO. They all do what we need except for some nitpicky things. I have switched to using self hosted Nextcloud Talk and sometimes Mattermost and Jitsi because of the sensitivity of some of my meetings. With Teams and similar services on some far away server I cannot assure participants that nobody else including AI is listening in.

  • by cprecioso on 3/27/23, 4:45 PM

    I'd be embarrassed to show a video of an app of mine taking 20s to launch in the old version, and even more embarrassed to show it take 1s to change channels as an improvement.

  • by llimos on 3/27/23, 7:47 PM

    If your organization hasn't enabled it, you can get it from here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ItzLevvie/MicrosoftTeams-m...

  • by atum47 on 3/27/23, 4:33 PM

    Can they ask someone to take a look at the client for Linux? It's a mess and I need for my job

  • by marak830 on 3/27/23, 8:12 PM

    Can I have the ability to paste @ mentions, have the text I pasted parsed and the name link work?

    I regularly deploy to 50+ client systems at once and the ability to paste pre formatted comments would save me a lot of time -.-

  • by wankle on 3/27/23, 4:29 PM

    I used Teams on Linux recently in Chrome since Microsoft doesn't seem to offer a native client download any more and it ran fine, audio and video. I didn't notice any sluggishness.

  • by bigtex on 3/27/23, 4:48 PM

    They need to get the team who makes the Mac Azure VPN Client to make the Teams version. It usually opens in under a second and establishes a connection after a few seconds.

  • by tschellenbach on 3/27/23, 4:02 PM

    well it cant be worse than before

  • by blibble on 3/27/23, 4:41 PM

    if you could fix the bug where it randomly selects different audio devices for each and every meeting that would be greeeaaaaaaaatt

  • by jetsetk on 3/27/23, 4:14 PM

    2 * 0 = 0.

  • by sershe on 3/28/23, 5:11 PM

    So instead of taking 5/4 cores for a simple video call on my surface it would only take 2.5? Good stuff!

  • by Justin_K on 3/27/23, 4:24 PM

    Maybe they could have added multiple accounts + switching support?