It's ridiculous that you should have to install a third party plugin to do this. It's not that hard for Zoom to add this as a preference users can control.
Zoom has terrible UI/UX. Don't get me started on how other users sharing their screens changes MY window layout, or how clicking the button to open the chat moves the toolbar, so that clicking a second time (to try to close the chat) ends up requesting to record the meeting.
> Don't get me started on how other users sharing their screens changes MY window layout
I share your rage. Zoom is garbage, though I hear Teams is a close second. I know people hate on Google now, but Meet works fine in a browser with no fuss.
So interesting how different people's expierences are. Every time I've used Meet it feels like my system is trying to mine crypto and I find some thing I can do in Zoom that works 25% worse. At least we can all agree that we're glad it's not WebEx
It mostly works for me in Firefox but the screen sharing experience is degraded and I pretty much have to use Chrome if I don't want someome to tell me "your screen isn't updating anymore."
It is definitely my preferred meeting app though. You just give someone a link; no install, no fuss, no muss.
I had an interview on jitsi, my face was inversed and it put me off big time. I couldnt find a way to hide my picture too. It was the opposite of what I’m used to seeing in a mirror
The defaults, as far as I can tell, do work like a mirror. There's a "flip" option on the "..." menu, if you want to invert that. And there's a "hide self view" option, as well as an arrow to hide the small version in the corner.
And the AI-based noise cancellation that comes with Meet is incredible. It gets completely rid of even the worst mechanism keyboard noises without affecting speech quality at all, which no other solution seems to be able to do. Significant remote office quality of life improvement :-)
If you are on Windows and have a recent nvidia gpu, their "Broadcast" app is phenomenal at this. Their noise cancellation hides my treadmill sounds and clicky keyboard while I remain clear and, as a bonus, the background blur actually looks like real bokeh which seems to make people think I'm running a much higher end setup than I am.
Depending on who the meeting is with, at work I use Zoom, Teams, and WebEx. Teams is so much better than the other two that I can barely think of any complaints about it (note that Zoom is itself also a huge leap better than WebEx). The only one that comes to mind is that it doesn't play nice with Bluetooth devices.
Meet is by far the best UX of the bunch, but it’s a hell of a resource hog. Amusingly less so in Safari than Chrome, but even so it still turns my 16” MBP into a space heater.
Funny, zoom's a terrible resource hog for me (running the client via flatpak). It opens an incredibly high number of files and processes. Google meet is just a browser tab.
(Oh, plus zoom don't support screenshare in kwin-wayland yet, although I can't blame them for that.)
Those are literally the exact complaints I was thinking of when you said terrible UI/UX. It's so ridiculous that I have to mash escape when someone shares screen. I thought what my previous company used was not the best, but if zoom is the alternative I guess I misjudged.
> Don't get me started on how other users sharing their screens changes MY window layout
You might not like it, but that's exactly the sort of "just make it work at all costs" feature that made Zoom popular in the first place.
They're basically trying to minimise the "can everybody see this?" nonsense that video conferencing is famous for. I think it's a perfectly reasonable trade-off.
Is it Zoom or poor URI scheme handling on the part of OS/browser vendors? The leftover open tabs aren’t unique to Zoom.
I imagine an app vendor is in a tough spot. They need a URI that can open if the user has the app or not, open the right app version for different on prem installs, and offer a web version as a backup.
On the other hand, the Zoom or other app vendor page seems to recieve a signal that the app was launched as it often changes state. Maybe some marketing person thought a feedback page was more effective than window.close()?
Yes this is so annoying. My company provides professional development workshops for the specific field we are in (Language Interpreting & Translation), I am often the moderator of the workshop. I am pretty much familiar with Zoom and that kind of thing happens so often. I have to reposition the windows the way I want it and have to do that all over again. I found it best to use OBS with Zoom, this minimize the layout changes since I am only "screen sharing" to my OBS, and my OBS have various sources like PowerPoint slide and videos. I have not uses screen sharing in Zoom ever since I uses OBS. Zoom is using OBS Vitural Camera and I can transition to different scene in ease without worrying that Zoom change the layout again.
Also annoying when sharing a screen, why mess with my layout when I have multiple screens and zoom is on the screen I'm not sharing? I'd like to not go through hoops to see those I'm talking with, and having to find the stop sharing or mute buttons on a completely new (and hidden) spot.
Still, my new employer uses Google Meet which is even more shit. Grinds the computer to a halt, especially if not using Chrome.
It is (on most clients anyway, I think maybe only recently added on their Linux client) but the default is wrong. Unbidden surprise fullscreen is a terrible idea.
The problem with manually having to close the tab is not the effort required to close it but then mental hiccup it causes when my brain opens my browser and now has to figure out which tab I was trying to go back to
My issue with browser extensions is, even if the author and code are trustworthy now, what's to stop the extension from being sold to unscrupulous folks years in the future?
That's fair, but the actual extension <https://github.com/kskashyap94/zoom-auto-close> is like ten lines of code. If you don't trust it not to change into something malicious, create a local copy.
It's just closing tabs after a bit of time, and scoping that code to Zoom URLs...
That said their browser implementation is even worse than the app. I mean I can't even change to a gallery view when using the browser. I'm really amazed how zoom became the quasi default for meeting software. While I'm not a big fan of teams, it works much better for this use case. Jitsi had some issues with firefox and safari at the beginning, which I think caused many people to dismiss it.
I think you're misunderstanding what GP is saying. They're not saying you can join arbitrary meetings that you aren't invited to; they're saying that if you're invited to a meeting, you can join through the browser instead of using the desktop app.
Certainly true, but amusing. Presumably the primary rationale for a no-WebRTC policy is to avoid WebRTC leaks? In which case installing Zoom is a case of preferring "the devil you know over the devil you don't know".
> Presumably the primary rationale for a no-WebRTC policy is to avoid WebRTC leaks?
I doubt corporate IT departments even care about "WebRTC leaks" (ie. your LAN IP getting leaked). Knowing that your computer is at 192.168.1.123 doesn't help attackers much. What's far more likely is that their networks only allow TCP connections, because that's all their firewalls/middleboxes/proxies support.
> Knowing that your computer is at 192.168.1.123 doesn't help attackers much
One can reconstruct your subnet scheme with a handful internal IP addresses, allowing them to locate potential targets faster once they get into your network, making attacks more efficient ("oh, so these guys have some vulnerable clients in this /16, it's probably dev, and I see there's another /24, which looks like prod").
What's amusing about that? Preferring a whitelisted set of programs rather than allowing users to run code from any source is precisely how most security policies work.
Prefix your code lines with four spaces instead of backtick fences for monospace on HN. That said, thank you for this! It drives me crazy that it reshuffles my windows.
People here seem convinced this is negligence or malice on Zoom's part, but how do you propose they fix it? window.close() doesn't work in a tab. Launching the external app doesn't always succeed so if they did it all with redirects they couldn't tell you when it failed. And since Zoom links are usually opened from some other app that uses target=_blank there's going to be some tab open anyway, better the zoom tab than some confusing blank tab.
I'm annoyed by then too, but it isn't Zoom's fault.
They could fix it by improving the UI for joining a meeting so that the indirection through the browser was not the best choice. For example, the Zoom application could easily accept the URL directly on drag-and-drop or copy-paste.
That tab can be useful if you need to relaunch the zoom meeting (after a free 30m meeting ends, after accidentally exiting, or if you have a more complicated a/v setup and the audio devices didn't take). Simply remove "#success" at the end of the URL, and hit enter; it will relaunch without you having to go back into your calendar to find the meeting invite.
Interesting how the screenshot is Safari on Mac-OS, whereas "Just install an extension called Zoom Auto Close. It's available for Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Firefox."
I've used a few variations of this in the past and seem to run into a similar issue with Firefox: if you go to a different vanity URL (someothercompany.zoom.us), the tab will close before you can authorize the site to open the zoommtg links (the specific DNS address gets approved instead of *.zoom.us)
Zoom has terrible UI/UX. Don't get me started on how other users sharing their screens changes MY window layout, or how clicking the button to open the chat moves the toolbar, so that clicking a second time (to try to close the chat) ends up requesting to record the meeting.
Oh, and then there are the privacy concerns.