Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act

Is Zoom the best though? Google Hangouts seems to be just as good.

I use both at work, and Hangouts has less features and struggles more noticeably with bad connections. I consider Hangouts worse

For me, zoom consistently has far better A/V quality than hangouts.

So we have two anecdotes now I guess.

I tried Google Hangouts on Firefox on Linux but couldn't get it to work at all. It just errored out before starting the call.

"Seems". Some people reported that Zoom handle gracefully more participants than Hangouts and performs better on a slow connection, see this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15717701 and this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16155155

There are probably a couple of others you can find here and there.

Edit: Well, this thread also.

Everyone mentions Jitsi on HN but I'm guessing AV quality isn't as good as Zooms...

Try it at 12 people.

Try it when you want to control who is speaking and when.

Try it when you want to co-ordinate hundreds of participants and still want to track who has a question so you can hand the virtual mic / airtime to them.

Try it when you want breakout groups and to determine who is in which group, and after a set time for the groups to return to the main space.

What is good enough for 2 people facing each other, and appears to work perfectly well for a group of 5 or 6... doesn't quite scale to a company all-hands, or giving a lecture or seminar.

Tools fit a scale, and Zoom is excessive for the small and simple use-case but excels at the large and complex.

Ah yes, in my case it doesn't agree with firefox at all. I have chrome installed pretty much for hangouts only.

We just used it at work with 500+ people. After all the various teleconferencing crap we paid $$$ for, we couldn't use them because they couldn't handle it. Zoom worked flawlessly.

Jitsi is nice for just video chat with a few participants (I use it where possible). Zoom is the more polished product, with more features and better scaling (Zoom calls with 90 attendees just work in my experience, I'd not trust Jitsi with that)

I can’t say what happened there (Hangouts works fine for me in Firefox), but Zoom won’t let you use Firefox at all if you want audio.

Which is a long way of saying that Zoom is one the few companies that has been around long enough to deal with all the edge cases. Throw a few devs in a room for a bit and you'll get a perfectly usable video chat for 1-1 or a small group, but you won't get Zoom.

? I'm literally on a zoom conference in firefox with audio right now.

I appreciate listing the areas in which Zoom beats competitors. It helps people understand where work should be done on alternatives.

My company has been remote-only for about 1.5 weeks now and we have 4 different conferencing systems that people are using. It's interesting that everyone has their preferences, but for small meetings nobody is using Zoom as far as I've seen.

...huh. When I was trying it yesterday, it told me I couldn't use my computer's microphone "in this browser" and would have to either download the app or join by phone. It did let me use my webcam though, which seemed a bit bizarre.

> Try it when you want breakout groups and to determine who is in which group, and after a set time for the groups to return to the main space.

> or giving a ... seminar.

Zoom is good for large, hugely interactive, video conferencing and meeting.

I am unaffiliated, just a user who has used most of what is out there.

Tried it literally 2 hours ago. Didn't work, had to switch to chrome.

(Windows 10, if it matters. IIRC I had the same experience on linux)

Try it at 600 people, with at least 50 unmuted. (Not a made up example. Zoom worked, last week, for us.)

Download the client.

Be aware that allowing everybody to continue following their preferences will result in the same proliferation that you see with text editors, email clients, and programming languages. Based on having only 4 different systems, I might predict that your company size is ~100-200 people (though that's a napkin estimate based on a single integer). There are at least 10 systems available, and certainly many more that are only accessible to technical people.

No.

I've been using Firefox on Fedora for both Zoom and Hangouts for at least two years. No problems.

Slack, on the other hand, can go to hell.

They just (like yesterday) fixed a bug that prevented Meet from working in Firefox in some cases, such as when privacy.resistFingerprinting was set to true. Give it another go.

They just (like yesterday) fixed a bug that prevented Meet from working in Firefox in some cases, such as when privacy.resistFingerprinting was set to true. Give it another go.

I just tried and it does seem to be working now.

My experience with google hangouts over the years has been that it's a poorly made product. It does work "ok" for 1-1 but the video quality would frequently drop or not connect at all. Zoom just "works".

Either they are A/B testing something new on you or you misunderstand what people mean by doing it in Firefox. They mean without any native client or browser extension being installed.

I haven't tried it this week, but that was the first thing I encountered when my university switched us to Zoom. I could join by browser in Firefox and see screenshare and video, but I would have had to also dial in to hear audio via phone. In chromium, I could get audio and video together. But, it is a more limited interface than the native client in terms of seeing attendee information. This week, I also tried chromium and saw severe audio quality issues. Joining the same meeting with the native client worked much better.

I understand that our university is consolidating and it apparently works for large lectures etc. For my own use, with small technical groups, we were happy with bluejeans before. It worked by Firefox using just webrtc functionality, AFAIK. What I've read is that Zoom is doing their own streaming and codecs, not using browser webrtc functions.

As an aside, I also encountered sudden SSO login problems in Zoom this week on Fedora. They seem to be defaulting to an embedded qt5-webengine browser and this was not working right at all. Editing their config zoomus.conf file to turn off the embedded SSO browser was the only way I could get logged in again.

> or browser extension being installed. Did you just mention this as an example, or is there a browser extension that makes Zoom work in Firefox?

I think I'd prefer an extension to installing their client.

And just to make sure, you're certain you haven't installed Zoom's client?

I'm very confused now, because there have been multiple comments in this thread both confirming it doesn't work in Firefox, and confirming that it does.

Wikipedia says Zoom was founded in 2011. Google Hangouts has been around for about the same amount of time, and Skype predates them by quite a bit.

I don't quite understand why Hangouts and Skype aren't more robust than they are. I'm sure this is indeed a hard problem, but the utility of getting it right is obvious, and these are massive companies.

Not that I know of. There is (or was?) an extension to tighten the integration between the browser and native client, i.e. for use with calendar and email.

I like Hangouts overall, but the killer feature that's missing is a good gallery view where I can see more than 4-6 participants at a time. Zoom is really good at this.