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How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

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796 points _Microft | 18 comments | 31 Mar 20 11:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.624s | source | bottom
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aequitas ◴[31 Mar 20 12:29 UTC] No.22736838[source]▶
Not that I'm in favor of this practice, but the one key feature that conference software must have is: it just works™.

Nothing turns you off more from a conferencing solution than: any problem getting it working right now.

When there is just the slightest issue, one person not being able to join, one person not getting voice to work, bad audio, your entire team is blocked/distracted. Which results in a collective distain for the solution and video conferencing as a whole.

This extends to getting the solution working for greenfield installs as simple as possible. Because who knows which non-tech users from which department all need to join and can't figure out how to set the permission in their browser right or install/use the other browser that is compatible.

So sadly, from a functionality point of view, you want have the software be able to force itself onto the user in the most usable state it can.

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t0mas88 ◴[31 Mar 20 12:36 UTC] No.22736886[source]▶
I'm still curious why everyone thinks Zoom "just works" while others don't. Because in an enterprise context it is often hard to download an executable and run it with sufficient permissions. While Google and Microsoft both offer a product that "just works" with only a browser. What makes Zoom more "just works" than that?
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1. aequitas ◴[31 Mar 20 13:01 UTC] No.22737051[source]▶
We just had a corporate presentation with around 250 people. Normally we use Teams or Slack for internal communication, this was also stated by management, that Zoom should only be used for 'big' meetings like this. I think they know the other solutions will not work as well for bigger groups. I've not had issues with using either solution for small group meetings.

Actually I have to go out of my way to run Zoom in the browser instead of using the installer. I have to use Chrome instead of Firefox, download but not install the app and wait for the "or run in browser" link to appear after that.

I really don't like macOS installers anyways and passionately hate them as "installing" and App on macOS should be nothing more than moving the .app from a zip or disk image into your /Applications folder. I just don't trust them in not placing additional crap like auto updaters or kext's when I don't need them.

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2. lukevp ◴[31 Mar 20 13:09 UTC] No.22737111[source]▶
Why not use Teams Live for this? We have been using zoom and Teams alternately and Teams performance and ease of use has been much better in my experience, but we have yet to do a 200+ all hands so I was curious if there were some footguns with teams live that you may know about. Teams live works on a lot of platforms and also has a web version.
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3. reaperducer ◴[31 Mar 20 13:27 UTC] No.22737290[source]▶
Why not use Teams Live for this?

My wife was on a Teams videoconference last week. 125 people in four locations from New York to Southern California.

An hour into it, half of the people were simultaneously dropped, and not from any particular geography. It was random. And nobody could reconnect for a very long time. It took 45 minutes to restart the meeting.

The company is no longer using Teams.

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4. freehunter ◴[31 Mar 20 13:50 UTC] No.22737492{3}[source]▶
To be fair I’ve seen the same thing happen with Zoom. During a 2 hour meeting with a client, about half of my team was dropped and couldn’t get back into the meeting for several minutes.
5. specialist ◴[31 Mar 20 14:27 UTC] No.22737819[source]▶
App installation should always just be a file copy. Deinstallation should always just be a move to Trash (or ~/Disabled equiv).

IMHO.

I'm even uncomfortable with config scattered everywhere. The continued need for those 3rd party uninstallers is an admission of failure.

Source: released products ported to misc Windows, classic Mac, modern Mac. Our dev, QA, Test, tech supp was always so much easier on Mac. Not least because we could have multiple current versions installed. Which allows troubleshooting, rollbacks, etc.

Caveat: I personally use package managers and am curious to see if Nix becomes the norm. So I may change my mind in the future.

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6. mgkimsal ◴[31 Mar 20 15:07 UTC] No.22738220{3}[source]▶
have only recently started using teams with one client. small group (max 6 folks I think) and... we've had issues with it - someone's video freezing, audio garbled/dropping, etc - twice in 2 days. but... I'm sort of chalking it up to potentially overloaded/bad net connections in the wake of all the WFH and remote meeting stuff being used. We had issues with connecting to zoom (and their phone numbers) last week as well, so I'm not ready to pull the plug on teams entirely until we have more experience under our belts.
7. alasdair_ ◴[31 Mar 20 16:37 UTC] No.22739352[source]▶
The only Teams Live meeting I've ever tried to join, we had two people who gave up because their web version didn't support Safari without having to manually go deep into their preferences and change settings from the default.
8. basch ◴[31 Mar 20 17:03 UTC] No.22739661[source]▶
The predecessor, Skype Broadcast allowed completely anonymous viewing, basically a twitch or youtube stream. In the name of growth hacking, the Teams team decided to force people to the app, you couldnt watch the video stream from a mobile device without the teams app. Which is a huge amount of friction for a mobile workforce that isnt using teams.

Maybe this has changed since I last talked to Microsoft, but even their own team was unhappy with it. But if you still have access to broadcast.skype.com, it still works, until they decide it shouldnt.

9. enedil ◴[31 Mar 20 17:12 UTC] No.22739780[source]▶
In fact, if you change URL from /j/CONFERENCE_NUMBER to /wc/join/CONFERENCE_NUMBER you won't be needing to wait for that link.
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10. Wowfunhappy ◴[31 Mar 20 17:22 UTC] No.22739893[source]▶
> Normally we use Teams or Slack for internal communication

> to run Zoom in the browser [...] I have to use Chrome instead of Firefox.

Just a note, Slack and Teams calls also won't work in Firefox. It's really annoying.

Hangouts works fine in Firefox though, somewhat unexpectedly.

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11. johannes1234321 ◴[31 Mar 20 17:43 UTC] No.22740176[source]▶
If the file is only moved to trash it will keep configuration and other artefacts around or not support such features or the file ahs to be mutable, which is questionable from a security pov
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12. aequitas ◴[31 Mar 20 18:32 UTC] No.22740812[source]▶
I don't know of any, but our teams uses Slack, not Teams. Barely any complaints about Slack video chat btw, but that's all small sessions anyways.
13. mynameisvlad ◴[31 Mar 20 19:17 UTC] No.22741340{3}[source]▶
Teams live events (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-live-e...) which the parent comment was refering to is actually a specific feature in Teams that is only available for certain levels AFAIK but supports vastly more people than a standard Teams meeting.
14. cpeterso ◴[31 Mar 20 19:27 UTC] No.22741460[source]▶
Here are the Firefox bug reports for Slack calls:

https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/12975

And Teams calls:

https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/25070

Slack originally relied on non-standard, Chrome-specific WebRTC behavior and now is prioritizing development of their Electron app over web support.

There is a Firefox extension to spoof Chrome's User-Agent string for Teams. I haven't tested it, but it appears to work for people: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/teams-phone-f...

15. aequitas ◴[31 Mar 20 20:16 UTC] No.22742016[source]▶
There is also a browser plugin a saw floating by a couple of days ago that would just enforce this step, but can't find it anymore.
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16. snowwrestler ◴[31 Mar 20 20:54 UTC] No.22742456[source]▶
My employer has used Teams Live for all-hands meetings from home the last couple weeks and it worked great for ~350 attendees.
17. borgel ◴[31 Mar 20 21:57 UTC] No.22743112{3}[source]▶
From another commenter on another HN thread https://github.com/arkadiyt/zoom-redirector
18. specialist ◴[02 Apr 20 16:16 UTC] No.22760608{3}[source]▶
Thanks. I've been chewing on your reply. I didn't get very far. It finally occurs to me that macOS (or equiv) could implement iOS (or equiv) style sandboxing. Maybe that's already in progress. As a dev and former power user, I'm sure it'll be uncomfortable.