[discreditable]

When someone sends you a zoom invite, cancel the download, then click the having problems link to download again. Cancel it again. It will show you a link to join by browser.

A few other meeting apps have dark patterns like this. One of my favorite things about Hangouts Meet is it's web first.

[userbinator]

What I find irritating is this proliferation of meeting apps like these, all using their own proprietary variations of protocols and consuming huge amounts of system resources, when there has been a standard protocol for it that's been around since the late 90s, with a variety of different clients available: SIP. One could be sent a SIP URI for a meeting and it would work in any client.

Maybe it's like IRC vs all the other IM "solutions", except with an even larger difference in userbase.

Edit: looks like Zoom does use SIP too, but it's not that obvious how to use your own client: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201207626-Video-La...

[pfranz]

At a previous job there was no "blessed" app. We used Mac/Win/Linux and different apps seemed to work better depending on the situation (screen sharing, group chat, one-on-one video chat). Not only in resource usage, but if you had more than one open I'd see issues with sharing resources like video and audio.

[barbs]

Excuse my ignorance but is there a good implementation out there that uses this protocol? Jitsi perhaps?

[cassianoleal]

I have used Jitsi. Last week I did a few pairing sessions where the both of us were sharing our screens and still had our webcams on in the corner and it was awesome.

We tried to do a standup with (I think) 8 people and it was terrible - people would randomly not get any audio for stretches of time, video would get choppy or lost completely, it was not pleasant.

I will keep using it for pairing since I haven't found another tool that gives me that kind of flexibility and it was in fact very good. I believe the whole experience is limited by the connection quality of the worst participant.

[hjek]

I've been using Jitsi Meet a lot as well.

It has terrible Firefox support but works decent if all participants are using Chromium / Chrome[0]. Asking other people to install Chromium makes me feel dirty but I don't know any other login-free cross-platform open source easy-to-use video conferencing apps than Jitsi Meet.

[0]: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4

[cassianoleal]

That could have been the issue, I haven't asked to be honest.

It does tell you that Firefox is not supported when you log in though, so I'd have expected people to say something but hey ho...

[whoislewys]

Hopefully WebRTC becomes more thoroughly implemented cross-browser Chromium has waaaay better support since WebRTC is primarily maintained by a team at Google.

[pfranz]

I haven't used Jitsi, but different apps and approaches work better in different situations. Are you screen sharing? Audio chat? video chat? Large meeting with multiple people? Mac/Win/Linux? Is your connection bad? High latency? Low throughput? No solution was very robust and if you're working internationally and people have their own equipment it can be a mess. People are also get really familiar with one piece of software and hate installing yet another.

The churn between companies like Google and Microsoft (each offering, and deprecating multiple solutions) doesn't help.

[whoislewys]

Jitsi Desktop uses SIP (never used it)

Jitsi Meet (browser client) uses WebRTC, and is really nice!

[tympan]

The problem with SIP was that without a central directory there was no easy way to find someone. Plus the client interfaces were, quite frankly, fugly, and management decision-makers dismissed them in favour of Skype etc.

[tmpz22]

Well the best product usually wins in this space. Usually this means well-managed vanity features like sleek design, animations, emote, but also occasionally more heavy weight performance improvements like video quality and sound quality. Ultimately if the standards and protocols you mentioned provided for that, they'd have won, but they didn't so here we are.

[Godel_unicode]

Standards are distinctly not products. Also, the thing that tends to win in this space is lock-in and network effects.

[ebiester]

There is no real difficulty switching. At work, we use multiple solutions, including Zoom. Zoom has been the most reliable. If one was more reliable or had a killer feature, we could switch in an instant.

Slack has chat history that makes it difficult to switch. What does Zoom have?

[Godel_unicode]

Sounds like you don't work in a large organization with lots of standing meetings and extremely non-technical users. That must be nice.

Many large companies have lots of extremely valuable non-technical users who can just barely figure out how to follow step-by-step instructions to setup calls with even the most point-and-click interface. The switching cost there is extremely high.

[tympan]

What really wins is if management thinks the interface is pretty.

[madwhitehatter]

https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/uk-government-zoo...

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1585521/000119312519...

The top of page 21 in the first set of SEC documents:

Quote " Many governments have enacted laws requiring companies to provide notice of data security incidents involving certain types of personal data. In addition, some of our customers require us to notify them of data security breaches. Security compromises experienced by our competitors, by our customers or by us may lead to public disclosures, which may lead to widespread negative publicity. In addition, we have a high concentration of research and development personnel in China, which could expose us to market scrutiny regarding the integrity of our solution or data security features. Any security compromise in our industry, whether actual or perceived, could harm our reputation, erode confidence in the effectiveness of our security measures, negatively affect our ability to attract new customers and hosts, cause existing customers to elect not to renew their subscriptions or subject us to third-party lawsuits, regulatory fines or other action or liability, which could harm our business. "

[guessmyname]

This is one of the reasons why I always join a Zoom call from my phone, by calling their international numbers [1].

Recruiters sometimes ask me to turn my video on during interviews… I politely decline and move on to other opportunities.

Their app is so privacy invasive, I cannot understand why people keep using it, specially considering 2018 vulnerability [2].

Feross Aboukhadijeh talks about Zoom security problems in Stanford’s CS253 Web Security course [3][4].

[1] https://zoom.us/zoomconference

[2] https://www.tenable.com/blog/tenable-research-advisory-zoom-...

[3] https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs253/

[4] https://feross.org/

[GuqLyr]

Looks like Zoom is discussed in Lecture 18: https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs253/lectures/Lecture%2018.p...

[ilikepi]

I tested "Join by Browser" recently. On macOS (Mojave), it only seemed to work in Chrome, and the video resolution of the other person was poor, but it did work. Also, I did not need to click a "Having problems" link before the "Join by browser" link to appear, so maybe this feature is being deployed more widely now.

Since you mentioned Google Meet, I recently tried that with a group of 6-7 people, and it only lasted about 10 minutes before multiple participants (myself included) started having issues. It seems like it needs more time to bake, but since we're talking about Google, it's probably unlikely to ever receive that time before they kill it and reinvent it a year later.

[colatkinson]

We've been using Google Meet at my work for daily "standups." Typically 4-6 people, lasting 15-30 mins. Been very smooth sailing, even using Firefox. Out of curiosity, what kind of issues were you running into?

[ilikepi]

It was a SaaS demo, so we had one person sharing their screen, several participants watching, and a couple dialed in via phone. I was one of the ones watching the presentation. About 10-15 in, a few of us, including myself and the presenter, were booted off the call. Attempts to rejoin were all met with vague error messages about there being some sort of network issue. (None of us were co-located at the time.) I was able to rejoin by phoning in, but the presenter was never able to reconnect on his computer. We eventually abandoned Meet and used WebEx instead.

This has been my only experience with Meet, but first impressions do tend to carry a certain weight. It's entirely possible this was an unfortunate coincidence, and that the service is typically as reliable as other solutions. My limited personal experience with Meet, and previously with Hangouts, does not support this however.

[Kaze404]

No Firefox support was my only complaint for Google meet. After that was fixed I never had issues again.

[saltcured]

There is an account preference option for the one scheduling new meetings whether the join with browser link is present in meeting landing pages. At least, that's how it works with our university license...

[jwr]

Whereby (https://whereby.com/) is also web-first and works really, really well. Simple, no fuss, people don't have to install anything to join your meeting. Highly recommended.

[smartbit]

> We in Whereby are committed to safeguarding the privacy of our users. Our business model is to provide a paid service to users who need additional features on top of the FREE version, and does not rely on widespread collection of general user data. [0]

Interesting. Thank you!!

[0] https://whereby.com/information/tos/privacy-policy/

[internalfx]

I use whereby as well, I highly recommend it.

[scarface74]

Knowing what I know about Zoom and being careful what I install on my computer, I use all such apps on my iPad except for Teams.

[therealmarv]

there is now a browser extension which does this automatically https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22659216

[lloeki]

there is a setting in the meeting creator's account to have the link right away

[madwhitehatter]

The one thing nobody ever mentions about this is the Chinese connection. Zoom is 100% developed in China. They have a datacentre in tianjin. Even states in their financial papers. The S1 form that one of the risks is the fact the product is predominantly developed in China. By PRC citizens.

Encryption is also off by default? why is this?

The Zoom App also collects screenshots and transcriptions of shared data. This is fine if you are Facebook or Google.

[chadlavi]

Thanks for this! I've just been refusing to use it

[tympan]

Discord seems to be better than most others

[INTPenis]

I'm surprised it was that complicated. I helped a friend out with Zoom last weekend and she had been using the browser exclusively until I pointed out they have an app. She's not very good with computers but zoom is fairly easy to use.

Also reading the EFF article on Zoom I feel like these are great usability features. The issue is if Zoom collects and stores the information.