To be frank, if Zoom was a web only app (or maybe web plus web-in-a-electron like eg Slack and WhatsApp) there'd be a vocal HN crowd complaining that there was no proper native app.
Last I checked you didn’t have to install anything. I’m not sure about more advanced usage like screen sharing or how many timing options their are, but for generic “see me, see you” it works fine in the browser.
All of the apps that use WebRTC seem to have worse quality and latency than Zoom. Including the semi-hidden web version of Zoom.
This could just be a coincidence, but I suspect it's not. For all of its faults, Zoom calls are just much better than all of the other mainstream solutions I've tried, particularly with large groups.
WebRTC still requires you to implement your own signalling layer, which is where most of these problems occur. Using XMPP for signalling in combination with WebRTC is very common.
Unfortunately, Zoom deliberately cripples their web app to the point of being unusable. If your employer uses Zoom, there's no way to avoid the native app.
Sitting in a meeting and saying a few words is like 10% of what Zoom can do - there's webinars, breakout rooms, Q&A, polls, moderation, and a lot of other smaller features which are incomplete or unavailable on the web client.
There's a YC company that tries to make starting and scaling WebRTC super easy, which is far from trivial for a variety of clients/browsers or with 5+ participants simultaneously: https://www.daily.co
One company has piss poor security; but there have been hundreds of native apps doing teleconferencing before, which were native.
Nothing to do with native or not; and pushing everything to a web-browser makes a really complicated bit of software with weird quirks and potential hidden bugs. Yes it’s more tested, but when your code paths are literally infinite- “more eyes” isn’t going to help.
Browser sandboxing is more battle tested, and probably a lot more researched, and with more fuzzing performed on it.
I know that at least X11 is not sandboxed with snap/flatpak/etc., and there is no sandbox for macOS/Windows Zoom client, so using web client is infinitely more isolated.
Browser vendors push sandboxing technology and everything else kinda follows behind by years. It's unlikely you'll find a more powerful sandboxing approach than what's in Chrome.
I’d assume teleconferencing. And tbh, I’m not sure I disagree. WebRTC has some issues and certainly isn’t the greatest, but it feels like every teleconferencing solution goes through basically the same problems over and over again. I know some swear up and down that Zoom is better than any WebRTC solution and I am going to have to hard disagree, it has a larger featureset than say, Google Meet, but I don’t know anyone in my current org that isn’t disappointed in Zoom’s reliability or security issues. In my case the security issues I’ve personally heard of are less serious (mostly random people somehow getting into meetings — never witnessed that with Meet or anything else for that matter) but to be honest, I have zero trust in Zoom. If I could run it with less privileges than a browser tab I would.
I’d really prefer a world where people don’t have to deeply distrust software, but still adhere to principle of least privilege where it is reasonable to do so. I feel like if I have to install software natively, it better be software with a decent track record from a trustworthy team. However we’re really at a worst of both worlds situation with Zoom. I don’t trust it at all, and it gets a ton of privileges that are only checked in the sense that there might be some scrutiny from researchers.
Not saying I never had issues with the WebRTC solutions, but honestly, at worst I just found myself refreshing the tab and going on my way. Meanwhile I’ve been warned against even trying Zoom for Linux as apparently it makes the old Skype for Linux look like a solid product.