[ragtagtag]

Interesting stuff! One of my clients uses Daily.co and it's a great system: much easier to use and more reliable than Zoom, especially since you're not forced into downloading software. It'll just run in your browser. I'd love to see it get broader fame.

[remram]

Zoom runs in the browser just fine (as long as that browser is Chrome, at least).

[kwindla]

Zoom is great, but I'd quibble with "just fine."

Zoom's browser client doesn't use the browser's underlying WebRTC implementation for encoding/decoding and bandwidth management. Instead, Zoom cross-compliled their proprietary h264 and network stack to web assembly, and that does the heavy lifting.

Which is a really, really cool hack. But the wasm instruction set is much more limited than what you can do in natively compiled code, and access to the browser's networking internals are similarly constrained.

The Zoom web client doesn't -- and probably won't ever, with this architecture -- be able to do a good job with calls with more than 4 or 5 participants, or be able to handle the full range of real-world network conditions that are necessary to achieve what I'd call "just fine" for broad use cases.

Conversely, Zoom's desktop client defines call quality for all of the rest of us working on this stuff. Our goal at Daily is explicitly to get to as good as Zoom, for all use cases, running in the web browser. For "normal" video calls up to about 12 people, we're there now. For larger calls, especially on low-end hardware, there's still work to do.

[ggggtez]

In my experience, this is not true. The web version is missing features that the desktop version has.

Zoom also uses dark patterns to try to get you to install the desktop app, even if you could join via browser.