Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act

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

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.

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.

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

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.