Comment by jonathanlydall

Screensharing on a browser and trying to change tabs is a constant frustration; you have to wait for that overlay to get into the moveable state. Sometimes I have to switch between chats several times to get it to acknowledge that I've seen that latest message. When you add a code block at the end of your message, it's a toss-up whether you can type outside of it afterwards with the right or down arrow-key. If you can't and you need to, you just have to start over AFAICT. Making the codeblocks in the first place is usually a hassle even though parsing markdown is a solved problem. It has a lot of redundancy with Outlook and I often need to clear notifications from both. Search is unreliable. Sometimes I open an active conversation and it decides to scroll me back a month.

That covers what I'll encounter in a typical week. There are one-offs as well. It's not the worst software I work with, but talking to my team should really be zero friction.

I'm using teams at work and it's a laggy buggy mess, even with fairly beefy machines (eg. 64GB RAM, nvme ssd, workstation gpu). By this I mean when you click on a button or hover over something on the UI there is frequently more than 5 seconds for it to respond (eg. stuff like hovering over a button, it should show a hover state, but that won't appear unless you park the mouse over it for several seconds).

We have 5-6 different "endpoint protection" and security related pieces of software running on our machines at all times. We also have enterprise SSO via SAML2 which is constantly logging us out, saying we aren't logged in, re-prompting over and over to enrol the machine into some management policy which then hangs the program if you click yes, and makes you re-authenticate (eg redo login and MFA) if you click no.

It frequently just hangs when you click join on a call. Sometimes when you are talking it stops responding but other people can still hear and see you, which is annoying because if you un-mute or take over the screen in a large company meeting, but then get stuck with mic on or presenting, everyone can awkwardly keep watching you while you can't stop doing either of those for 45-60 seconds.

Many of these problems are probably just due to the machines being hampered by huge amounts of instrumentation/monitoring/interception, but teams is much worse than other electron apps. For example, Slack and vscode do not exhibit these problems on the same machine.

I'm at the absolute opposite end: Teams was Good Enough when it launched, but declined ever since: you can no longer fullscreen screen share, fat empty margins everywhere in the UI and it nags you about addons and AI stuff.

Apart from it being slow, a memory hog and having a shitty web-based UI that feels out of place regardless of what OS you’re using. It’s missing basic features.

One example is the inability to share only part of your screen. This is essential if you’re working on a large, ultra-wide monitor. There’s been a feature request for this on Microsofts feedback site for years.

Also, how embarrassing is it that the biggest software company in the world is not able to make a decent native app and has to resort to this html-app nonsense.

"Works for me, so it must for everyone else"