God please don't make me use a non-zoom video conferencing tool!
I have used about a dozen over the years in my role as a consultant, and Zoom has been by far the most reliable. I’m hopeful lots of good can come from the scrutiny, but please Zoom get your act together so I don’t have to use some other buggy thing that doesn’t actually work.
> God please don't make me use a non-zoom video conferencing tool!
I have honestly lost track of the amount of software I've seen in the past 20 years, that people insist they absolutely must continue to use despite its well documented gaping security flaws. Because it has a better UI or makes their life very slightly more convenient in some way.
Versions of Microsoft Office from the early 2000s where an entire operating system could be pwned simply by opening an excel or word file with malicious vbscript in it were good examples. JPG parsing buffer overflows. People continued to not only not patch it, but use it in its out of the box configuration.
For reference, organizations that have now banned Zoom include google, NYC public schools, SpaceX and NASA.
> Because it has a better UI or makes their life very slightly more convenient in some way.
I think you've missed the point completely. It's not a question of convenient UI. It's the reliability of the video call. I've tried numerous video conferencing tools, and the differentiating factor is literally just whether or not the video quality is consistently good, whether the call is dropped or not, and whether the audio is audible.
Exactly. A lot of tools barely recognize webcams or desktop mics. You’re expected to dial in, which means being tied to whatever terrible audio quality the phone bridge provides for talking to 20 people.
wait what, are you using the DOS-zoom client? Or how is it, that everyone else got general drivers for their devices so applications can use standardized APIs and "just work"
If you've never been on a conference call where someone can't get their dial-in, audio, camera, screen share, or mute button to work, I'd suspect you've never been in a conference call. These recurring issues are fewer with Zoom. I spent 6 hours on zoom today (ugh), and every day I'm in a 25-to-50-person call that has consistently been buttery smooth.
They have this long long outstanding bug where if they deem the audio low-quality (despite the fact it's crystal clear) they gain the audio and it goes crackly and too loud. If you turn down the volume... they gain it again, and again, and again, till you need to restart the app. Only for it to happen again.
Personal opinion, you don't need video or talking heads to have a conference. Some combination of text chat to share documents with simultaneous good quality audio is sufficient.
The challenges related to audio sucking are mostly individual end users' audio stepping on itself, such as feedback from speakerphone configurations into its own microphone. Easily solved by good quality bluetooth headsets, wired headsets, or simply using something as basic as holding an android or ios phone up to your ear.
And I do put "video quality is consistently good" in the category of "makes peoples' lives slightly more convenient". It's not essential.
I disagree. To build connection, read body language, and show people are paying attention it’s important to see the person... we ask that of all of our internal remote calls.
oh yeah, let's try to look each other into the eyes. ooooh no, seems that doesn't work. And "show people paying attention": why do a conference at all if people have no stake in it?
Audio < Text when too many people are trying to communicate at the same time.
<rant>
We are supposed to be engineers here. I regularly see this attitude that one thing is always and inherently better than another. Life is (mostly) a zero sum game and it is our job to pick a solution for the problem at hand. And the more we can constrain that problem, the better, cheaper, more reliably we can deliver a solution. More information is not better. Maybe for interview body language is important but for deciding what story to pull or what commits you did? Not really.
Deciding what story to pull generally revolves around conversations during sprint planning or with a product manager. What commits you did means you're committing which means you probably (should) have had code reviews. Often times code reviews involve discussions.
If you're one of the few people that don't have person-to-person interaction on a daily basis - congratulations. However, that places you firmly in the minority.
On the other hand Microsoft Office is still used today - and is still the #1 office suite, especially with Excel. They've since cleaned up most of their security issues (I'm sure some exist, but it's not nearly as bad as it used to be).
The problem with Office and Zoom is that they are _the best_ at what they do right now. And that has a massive impact on what people are willing to give up to use it (money, privacy, risk, etc).
What are you advocating for? Either way business will continue; lock down security and people (and productivity) will suffer but still continue, ignore security and business will still happen. Different business will fail in each scenario, but the world won't end. Heck, force people to jump through hoops to support insecure software and work still gets done: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22804208
I hope Zoom gets their act together because their competitors, with way more time and resources, suck a lot more. I don't think it's because of the difference in security--maybe it's because competitors were focusing on Enterprise or because it wasn't their core business?
I think each of those companies that have banned it make sense, even if that means the average person should continue using it. Zoombombing elementary school children because of a misconfiguration (or just because of the media reports) isn't a great idea and the security concerns warrant the rest. I still don't see much of an issue for other business and most personal use.
I am specifically advocating that organizations with important data to protect take a more cautious and measured approach to installing software on their workstation computers.
If the very slight productivity hit from having slightly-more-blocky video chat in a slightly-more-awkward GUI client (google hangouts meet for gsuite, for instance, or Teams) is the make-or-break line between a company's continuing success, or not, with everyone working remotely, something else is fundamentally wrong that has no relation to any software package.
That sounds like an appropriate response. I do think the BYOD push over the past 10+ years has improved Enterprise experience for end users and I expect things like Zoom and the current push for work-from-home does the same for working remotely.
I hope both Zoom improves their practices and other enterprise tools step up their game, too. It's been a joke that the first 15m of a meeting is spent getting things working for decades now.
Zoom seems to have spent time in some areas almost completely ignored by most others: Linux, more than a handful of simultaneous users, and poor connections (I feel like Zoom has other benefits, but these are egregiously bad with competitors). At my previous job it wasn't just slightly-more-blocky video chat in a slightly-more-awkward GUI client. We used our own equipment (and mostly used Linux in-house) and were spread all over the world (some countries had poor connectivity). We also had our company meetings via Zoom. We often tried other software and didn't bless any one of them, but I don't think any other single software would work. Without Zoom I imagine we'd do most meetings via voice--likely over POTS.
This is one of the places where FOSS has a great role to play, vendor neutral infrastructure code. Any thing from one of the FAANG companies or even a startup is constantly going to have to find a way to create value for the company and inevitably that leads to data harvesting and sales.
What I have observed is that FOSS folks like to pick poor names for things which limits their ability to penetrate into the world of the non-computer geeks. Case in point, Jitsi. WTF? My parents are never going to remember what something named "Jitsi" does, ever. Call it "GNU Video Conferencing System (GVCS)" or just "Video Conferences" please.
Ah the days of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_NetMeeting
I recall them so well. Desktop videoconferencing and whiteboard interaction was all about to go mainstream back then by many a manager evangelistic eye just far enough of the base of reality that it was almost believable. Yet still such things have to find a champion that rings true for all, let alone interoperability. Which is a shame as many standards out there matured over time.
I've been using WebEx in enterprise/corporate environment for couple of years intensively, and it "just works". I can download desktop client, but I can also just run it on browser.
Zoom always wants to install weird clients that violate policies and cause my corporate laptops to refuse or bork.
I recognize my experience may be a minority one, but I'm surprised, genuinely, at this perception that it's "the one video conferencing software" that works.
The issue is that WebEx might just work for you, but if there is one person for whom it doesn't work then that is the limiting factor.
What people struggle to understand is that Zoom made it easy accross ALL operating systems. While Webex might "just work" on a subset of Windows and Mac hosts.
I use Linux as my day to day OS and WebEx is a nightmare (which sticks well to the stereotypical enterprise tool from Cisco).
Many solutions don't require a local software. That's an onboarding hurdle. Zoom's dial-in system also requires host approval, which lead to mayhem across every Zoom call I've been forced to join today. Most importantly, someone inviting me to a Zoom call says something about how they value security.
Zoom's audio quality is better. But it's not irreplaceably better. In terms of UX and reliability, it's been a mixed bag. In terms of security and branding, it's awful.
or is the difference that any other tool runs in the browser (which might be old or locked down), while Zoom childishly just gets admin-privilege to turn the tables in its favour?
Zoom is worse across most operating systems. It is worst of all on MacOS, where it downloads an installer without asking me. I then have to click a link saying that it didn't work, whereupon, it will download the installer again without asking me before finally giving me the option to join the call without installing that buggy app.
The Zoom client works really well, Webex works okay for me most of the time but not all the time and has a lot of little problems I find annoying.
- Overall webex UI is very slow/laggy, subjective - yes, but I think it'd be obvious to any regular person.
- It makes my self-view a tiny floating box (this drives me crazy, I want it to be the same size as the others).
- Gallery view doesn't work well, sometimes the speaker is duplicated in sharing content speaker view and again in gallery view.
- Audio switching doesn't work as well between putting airpods on and off.
- More video/audio failures than Zoom in general (enough to be annoying).
I'm not sure why Zoom is the only one that does Gallery view right - the others all seem to mess this interface up (maybe because they can't handle the traffic?)
I've used Webex for 5 years or so, and haven't experienced the issues you have.
Also, when I was evaluating conferencing systems for my micro-ISV, I tried several - the screen sharing on Zoom was laggy as hell, moreso than I saw with anything else. It was 1-2 years ago, so things might have changed since then.
WebEx on MacOS will, if left open and idle, randomly tell my headset that a phone call is starting, then it will disconnect it shortly after. Sometimes it disconnects two calls in a row (my headset announces when a call ends).
And every so often by virtue of being open in the background, WebEx manages to somehow crash my BT headphones.
Go into the Preferences, Video Systems (last item), uncheck "Automatically discover nearby devices"
The default behavior of Webex is to grab the microphone and keep it always-open looking for audio signals from Webex-compatible hardware.
I found this because I was bothered that even though I wasn't on a call Windows was telling me that Webex was actively using the Microphone, so I dug in. IIRC the post that guided me to this, on Apple devices with their earbuds it apparently also significantly degrades the sound due to some codec issue (or did in the past).
Yeah, Webex's background app has a weird habit of holding onto the microphone on Windows also. Why do they even need a background app? I have a calendar already. Just be a client when I need you.
I knew I would get downvoted. But folks seriously don’t remember the pain before Zoom. And the current pain anytime we have to use a GoToMeeting, Google Meet, Webex or other tool that barely functions.
Human interaction that actually works right now is so important. And I simply have a hard time trusting another product to actually do the call reliably
Google Meet is the only one of these that has always worked reliably for me. Doesn't require any strange clients, works in most browsers, never randomly fails to move just some person's audio and so on.
Disclaimer: I work for Alphabet, but already held this opinion before I did.
We use Google Meet and it struggles to keep up with meetings with more than 10 people. It seems that the common hack is to ask each attendee to disable their camera. On the plus side, it is the only one that reliably works from a browser only.
I couldn't get it to work in Firefox ESR on Debian 10, and audio was consistently choppy for me in Chromium 80 after I went through their forced account creation process. Zoom wouldn't use my camera either in Chromium :c
Jitsi and Google Meet worked by following a link and clicking one popup. Much easier UX
Same here - often it'll tell me I'm waiting for other people to show up but the other people will never see I'm there. It works somewhat better with Chrome but I loathe having that installed on my Mac. Rarely I do have to do so, but am forced to spend time removing its tendrils afterward (it's not just deleting the app!).
Almost all problems on video conferences are on the user's end. What Zoom excel at is to mitigate most of those user issues by trying to figure out all the corner cases that the user might be in.
Yeah, probably. But what should I do about it. It’s unusable for me. Doesn’t work with Chrome, doesn’t work with Firefox. Zoom works for me every single time.
Edit: Maybe if I could receive some support from Google to find out what my problem is, I’d be able to fix it. But that ain’t going to happen.
I gave up on Google Meet/Hangouts/Whatever. When chatting with Googlers, it is really nice. But their products available to me as a non-Google employee suck and change quite a bit. Just trying to debut issues with participants was frustrating it it would vary based on how they clicked the link, what they had running, etc.
I wish Google would just provide the internal tool and sell that. It’s the opposite of dogfooding their product. They eat the good stuff and product a lesser product to their customers.
When I tried it years ago, the GSuite version could not dial out to an external phone number to join them in. Is this now available to gsuite users?
I tried looking up the features on the Wikipedia page [0] and didn’t see a really comprehensive list. I reviewed Wikipedia because when I searched for google meet, Google’s top result (that seems like their product page) [1] just had an “open” button that linked out to the App Store to install “Hangouts Meet by Google.”
It's missing too many features to be usable. No remote control. The speaker detection is terrible. Audio quality is bad. We only use it because we are cheap and it comes free.
only skype worked for us meeting group to group over single feed and open speakers, skype seems to work well doing audio google meet hasn't fixed it for ever. personal audio on most works for me, unless you have like less than 2-3megabit for video.
100% agree but I'm tentatively hopeful that alternatives to Zoom have caught up. Zoom raised the bar and I have seen that other products have improved. Meet is decent right now and Jitsi (in my very limited testing so far) seem actually pretty great, possibly better than Zoom (they mix audio more smoothly when two people are talking over each other in a way that is less jarring, not sure but that's my current theory of why it "feels" better). Even historically awful alternatives like Webex really are honestly improved. Anyway, Zoom is getting outed as being a seriously a-hole company - there are definitely alternatives better than selling out just for convenience of not switching or even trying to find an alternative.
Yes. I find jitsi one-on-one audio call is better than zoom. Screenshare is equivalent to skype if you set the fps to 15. zoom is better for videos if it involve large number of users.
I'm surprised to hear that google meet doesn't work well for others. We've used it exclusively with all our clients for the past 5 years simply because its integrated into google calendar, but we've never had any reliability problems with it. Most problems we have are based around people trying to figure out how to unmute their conference room mic.
Yep I’ve been working nearly 100% remote for five years and have several WebEx conferences every day and Zoom doesn’t perform any better or more reliably than WebEx.
Teams is awful. Skype is worse. WebEx is just fine. So is Zoom.
So has Google Meet and Hangouts. So was Skype, when I used it about 5 years ago.
Perhaps I'm just used to them as a remote worker, but they were never all that janky to begin with. Or, rather, more janky than the other tools available at the time.
Right. I've worked almost only remotely for several outfits over more than ten years although conveniently I am currently unemployed. I have used WebEx, Skype, Hangouts, Slack's built-in video conferencing, Zoom and I'm sure I'm forgetting others. If you have a sane setup all of these work fine.
I hadn't used Jitsi until this current situation meant friends wanted to "meet up" drunkenly on Friday evenings but it's the same.
The main obstacles are hardware. The cheapest correct working solution for a single individual participant is a headset and a webcam. Can you use lapel microphones, or (as two of my Youtube creator friends do for Friday evenings) sit in front of a huge professional microphone with filters? Yes, yes you can but that's not for most users. Can you plug a high-end SLR that's focused dead on you into a converter and stream that instead of a webcam? Yup, but again most people either don't own an SLR or don't want to set it up just so they can be a bit clearer and brighter when drunk.
And the thing about hardware is that we abstracted this away entirely. Zoom doesn't have different hardware support from Hangouts or Skype or any other tool.
"Which VC tool should we use for this meeting?" is a bike shed discussion at the best of times. Chances are good either you didn't need a video conference at all, or any of the tools would have been fine.
I'm baffled by the amount of people claiming zoom to be painless or working, even. Don't you know any linux users? Zoom is utterly broken beyond comprehension on any variant or flavour, even when `sudo`ing everything: installer, running, audio setup (pavucontrol) to try to figure out why it refuses to work, etc
I concur. I haven't tried Zoom on any other platform yet, but it has been 100% reliable on my Ubuntu machine. Nothing else even comes close. I've had hundreds of Zoom calls over the past 8 months, from 1:1s to all-hands with ~500 participants. Audio, cameras, screen sharing all worked every single time.
We have two Linux users (myself included) that it works great for. Better than pretty much every other video conferencing tool I've tried on Linux. I do use the flatpak installer so that dependencies aren't a problem.
Linux user here. I have tried them all and Zoom is not perfect but is multiple levels above any of the competitors. Don't even get me started with WebEx.
I share you pain using other products, I really do. I'm stuck with Skype for Business and Webex. However Zoom's attitude to security is unacceptable, and therefore I will not accept it. Full Stop. Every now and then I'm on a company call that, if made public, could do serious harm to the company. My children do video calls with their friends from their bedrooms without adult supervision. In neither of those scenarios am I willing to trust Zoom right now.
I have to agree. I deal with vendors a lot, so I've used a bunch of different ones: GoToMeeting, BlueJeans, WebEx, Skype. And the experience of using those ones is painful. Zoom is a joy to use. Its not perfect, and I have my complaints (when I'm sharing a screen why can't I make the gallery view large so I can see everybody on a second screen??) but it has been rock solid.
I just switched to GoToMeeting and they have improved significantly since the last time I used them (before Zoom). New interface, transcription, unlimited recorded meetings in the cloud, great audio so far, I’m happy.
I've only used Zoom in recent times and while it has seemed fairly solid, I also can't say I've noticed any major differences from Google Meet.
We use it internally at Xero, more than ever currently with working from home, and it's been solid from what I've experienced.
Given we also use Google Calendar, joining a meeting is pretty straight forward, as a Meet link is populated in each event, and shows up on the home screen for meet.google.com
Usually the only mic issues that occur are people using their own headsets with audio gain set too high or flaky bluetooth connections
Running in Firefox, it works great for the most part although sadly it breaks every few months. It'll tend to drop me from the lobby a few seconds in with "Network Error" or something along those lines. I would get frustrated but given it's a work tool, a few days to a week using Chrome (just for calls) and Firefox is back in action again.
We also conduct our postmortems via Google Meet and it generally seems to support 50+ person calls fairly well. That said, we use Hangouts Streaming for All Hands type of stuff so I couldn't speak on performance with hundreds of users at once
Purely anecdotal but my coworker has an older HP laptop (specs are still a respectable 8GB ram, presumably quad core CPU) and finds that he can't be on a Google Meet call while also doing development as his fans will flare up too much.
I would actually quite appreciate a Google Meet desktop app (that's not electron) but I guess the premium userbase tend to have enough specs to throw at web-based products
Oh yeah, I do appreciate that Zoom presumably doesn't require any fancy logins because running Google Meet on a phone requires a device policy in order to connect to a call.
I can either install it on my device plainly (requiring a pin to login going forward vs say, a fingerprint) or I could install it in a work profile. The latter is cleaner but then I have an entire second set of apps just to join a call on my phone once in a blue moon :(
At least you can dial into meetings but I find the audio is kinda wonky at times.
Having said all this, I can respect the product but I'm always happy for a non-Google entity to win in any given space ;)
Zoom just showcased this back to back to back to back in a few weeks time). They played tricks with the words. "we wrote ABC but what we really meant is XYZ" is a shitty response to any type of audit/scrutiny.
This is a public company. They have an Internal Audit. What the hell were these guys been auditing in security audits??? The color of the background????
As someone who demos software frequently, GoToMeeting is the only one that ever held a candle to Zoom for me. Webex does weird shit to screen shares on Windows, and don't even get me started on Teams/Skype. The rest are pretty obviously not designed to be used for screensharing.
I loved BlueJeans but I don't think they have a free option either.
It was really nice to just send a URL to someone and then have them pop into a BlueJeans meeting without a pre-installed client.
We have this or skype for b as approved. 10% of all meetings in skype bugs out and at least one person can not hear the rest or gets kicked out or can not see the others in the meeting. Or someone is presenting and a mandatory update is being rolled out and computer restarts but this is more related to the OS.
Zoom just works and you hear each others so much better. Stable and working. Lets hope all these new features makes it more secure.
"The AES-128 keys, which we verified are sufficient to decrypt Zoom packets intercepted in Internet traffic, appear to be generated by Zoom servers, and in some cases, are delivered to participants in a Zoom meeting through servers in China, even when all meeting participants, and the Zoom subscriber’s company, are outside of China."
Zoom said that their meeting data is no longer routed through China's servers. That's not what citizenlab's complaint was, and also not what the original poster stated.
>There is the thing that all Zoom keys are kept and maintained in China
Their complaint was about zoom's encryption key generation and distribution practices. The post you linked has nothing about the key distribution scheme zoom needs to implement so they actually have end-to-end encryption.
Without proper encryption, it doesn't matter if all participants in a meeting only connect to zoom servers since you don't know what zoom could be doing inside their network. Are they actually routing data without any storage, or any they storing the data and sending a stream out the back door to interested parties? But with true end-to-end encryption, it doesn't matter what zoom does with the meeting data since only the participants can decrypt it.
Not to mention that for a sufficiently interested actor, they don't need to access zoom's network to intercept a copy of a meeting as it makes its way through the internet to a zoom server. End-to-end encryption also ensures they only get junk.
I actually have no idea what argument youre making.
OP: all Zoom keys are kept and maintained in China
me: got a source for that claim?
you: quote citizen lab, sometimes zoom keys are sent to china
me: i didn't ask if keys were sometimes sent to china and that's not what OP said
you: not what the original poster stated.
this is where you lost me
> But with true end-to-end encryption, it doesn't matter
i never said it mattered. i don't care if zoom is e2e encrypted or not, which is why i didn't bring it up.
> Not to mention that for a sufficiently interested actor, they don't need to access zoom's network
people get away with this internet boogeyman argument because its technically true, but what percentage of internet traffic inside the continental US is actually being monitored and exfiltrated to APTs? compromises happen internally. i cant remember any stories of a data breach occurring with data in transit, as opposed to data at rest.
> During a test of a Zoom meeting with two users, one in the United States and one in Canada, we found that the AES-128 key for conference encryption and decryption was sent to one of the participants over TLS from a Zoom server apparently located in Beijing, 52.81.151.250. A scan shows a total of five servers in China and 68 in the United States that apparently run the same Zoom server software as the Beijing server. We suspect that keys may be distributed through these servers.
We need more details about this, ideally from Zoom, as this is not really a lot of detail, and includes a lot of "apparently", "we suspect", etc.
It’s not so much what you store, but what someone listening in on might be storing, or learning.
A number of our hospital customers were diving in head first with Zoom, but are now backing off. I am curious to hear if there is any legal fallout from any of this.
If my livelihood depends on interacting with people, I need a super compelling reason to switch. Not to mention considering whether the hassle of using/maintaining Jitsi myself is worth billable rate doing work I’m actually interested in
Well, I was also instructed by my company to uninstall Zoom clients. And Zoom deliberately make the "use the web version" as obnoxiously difficult to use as their native client is easy. (Why would that be, I wonder? Hmm...) Is "I need to talk to someone at one of the dozens of companies that have forbidden Zoom" a good reason to switch to Jitsi, which is 1) open source 2) entirely browser-based 3) runs anywhere Chrome runs without any extra plugins / installation?
Jitsi hasn't been great for my team. Our company switched to Whereby and it is worlds better than jitsi/zoom and whatever else. Only thing I'm not sure about is sharing on-screen audio.
My experience: On one computer it froze Firefox. On another computer it crashed Firefox. On my phone (Jitsi Meet via F-Droid): I once had a big meeting where it seemed like only call-in users could hear me, another time during a rather large meeting the application crashed, and recently I had a successful conference with 4 people.
The phone application had a few updates between the failures and the success, so perhaps everything's sorted out. I also need to give the desktop native application a try.
I'm rooting for them, I really hope we get a viable free software option. But we should be honest about the state of things right now.
Not the person you asked, but I personally really dislike Jitsi for the following reasons:
* We run into so many issues screen sharing, usually it's just that the persons screen doesn't show up, but it's also often way to compressed to read
* Even just 1 on 1 it makes my laptop cry, with 5 or 6 people in a conference I have to minimize the application or I cannot use my laptop at all because of the CPU load, and at 12+ people even with the application minimized it was maxing out my 2017 Macbook Pro CPU
* For comparison, I recently was in a 230 person Zoom conference, laptop hardly noticed
* I often have audio issues and it requires restarting the application or chrome before it fixes itself
* Really the performance of it is the biggest reason I hate it, we tried having a "lounge" where people join it and just chill while working, but we stopped because once a few of us got on it our computers just became unusable
I've got probably about a half dozen data points with each, and they seem about the same to me -- my laptop (2018 Macbook Pro) heated up about the same for the 12-node Zoom conference as the 12-node Jitsi conference (neither so badly that it affected the rest of the system or made me worry about anything); people seem to have about the same rate of technical issues / bandwidth issues.
I have to reboot if I want my laptop back after a Jitsi meeting. It sends the Windows audio driver into a resource-consuming tailspin from which it does not recover. In all fairness I've had issues with the audio driver before on this laptop but that's the only application that has this particular effect.
If you avoid firefox and stick to either Chrome or the unofficial (but perfectly working) electron app I've had zero issues. Using the free service (not a self hosted instance) I've had several calls with 10-20 (all video) people and not a single hiccup.
If you are using firefox you will encounter issues
I have used about a dozen over the years in my role as a consultant, and Zoom has been by far the most reliable. I’m hopeful lots of good can come from the scrutiny, but please Zoom get your act together so I don’t have to use some other buggy thing that doesn’t actually work.