It really is astonishing. I remember using Skype around 2004/05 on a horribly crappy Dell laptop and it (Skype) worked flawlessly. It sort of boggles the mind how far in to the ground it has been driven.

That would be when it was done by the Swedish founders, written in Pascal, by people who cared about users more than press releases.

It's like an artist who doesn't know when to stop painting.

It's more like a mediocre artist buying a great painting made by a master and the decides to "improve" it by adding more and more paint.

The software monkey christ

I think Skype was the first app that would allow to talk for free across the globe even on poor (modem) connections.

Not even close. Just off the top of my head, Roger Wilco is 5 years older, and TeamSpeak is also older than Skype.

In terms of mass adoption, with regard to Skype, is what I imagine he meant. Anyway, it was certainly true for me. I had to make a lot of calls to less developed parts of the world then, and it worked reasonably well.

I have high hopes for Discord video, which is coming out soon. Knowing the discord team and seeing the quality of the voice product, I'm finally going to be able to replace god-awful Google Hangouts.

Have you tried appear.in? It's become my go-to video conference. No logins, just make up an arbitrary link (ie appear.in/some-random-string) and voila. So far it's been more reliable than hangouts.

(I have nothing to do with them other than wondering why everyone doesn't use it)

I use it regularly, it's great.

I hope Discord Video uses less resources than Camfrog. If they can, then I'd finally switch to Discord, assuming Discord can handle many hundreds of video streams at once like Camfrog can.

Me too, the only thing missing from Discord apart from video for me is its spell checking...

What's god-awful about Hangouts, and does the new Hangouts Meet make things better?

https://www.blog.google/products/g-suite/meet-the-new-enterp...

Hangouts is a good piece of tech and the has a great UX with minimal UI. The only issues with hangouts are that:

1. It is a resource hog. Laptops spit fire when they run hangouts for more than 10 minutes 2. It can be buggy and unreliable. Almost every 3rd hangout meeting, someone on my team is unable to hear others or is unable to use the mic. Fix can range anything between restarting the computer to killing audio processes.

In my experience, it is much less reliable on OS X than Linux.

If they manage to make it reliable and reduce resource usage, it'll be the perfect video conference app.

Also, it doesn't currently work on firefox which is a pain.

Great UX? Are we using the same product? It’s not intuitive at all, you don’t know what an icon does until you click it. Text labels would be nice. Then they seem to alter it every few months so “where is the screen share” becomes a common question. Good UI should be instantly clear to even a new user – it shouldn’t require hovering or guessing.

Google Hangouts has serious UI problems. People can't find the chat even when it's pointed out to them. Chat should be more prominent.

At the moment, it's easier to send people to a Slack channel to chat during a Hangout than to use Hangout's chat.

Yeah, we use Hangouts for daily standups with all of our teams, so we do multi-way calls for several hours every day (mostly macOS actually, but some Windows), and it's consistently reliable for us. We migrated from Skype, which would always become flaky if there were more than four people on a call.

It really is good, at least on Chrome, but I worry that Google will let it stagnate.

Not to mention that it supports XMPP for person to person, but group chats no longer work, forcing me to use the browser client despite myriad XMPP clients existing. I understand that it's not XMPP expressly, but that was a feature that used to work on GChat that was removed for seemingly no reason.

Try sending an SMS via Hangouts (desktop), or searching past messages. The background pictures are nice and all, but that's not great UX.

are they trying to use the cheap built in mics/ A proper usb headset or even better an external sound card with a real mic e.g. a Shure SM58 the cheap entry level shures are also v good (bit more body noise though)

Using Safari for Hangouts on OS X does help with the resource usage some.

Why would anyone at this point go with Google's solutions for voice/video? Last time someone over at Arstechnica did a count they had 4 or 5 competing and largely incompatible solutions - they are NOT a serious player when it comes to producing, and perhaps more importantly - maintaining, a Skype replacement/alternative.

Almost as if Google internally use IM clients are proof of concept implementations...

> What's god-awful about Hangouts

Basically everything. It used to be the main communication tool of the Ingress community (precursor of Pokemon Go) due to it's integration with the game but 95% of all players have moved to Telegram because HO is a horribly broken piece of tech which becomes worse and worse after each update.

A running gag in the Ingress community was that the HO is to Google what Australia was to the U.K., e.g. if you did something stupid while working at Google you would be sent to work with the HO team as punishment.

Besides the fact that Hangouts doesn't work at all half the time (on the web or in-app), the other half of the time the quality and stability are so poor that video is just avoided completely.

That there is a new product using the same damaged brand inspires zero confidence. It's ridiculous to have all these separate apps that don't seem to be cohesive at all. For instance, nobody I know who travels even knows that Hangouts Dialer exists, even though it's incredibly useful while abroad.

Pretty much every product that Google makes is crap, or there is always a better alternative, or the product is virtually invisible, and most updates seem to be making each product harder to use or more unstable. They're not intuitive, features have no useful help reference in the app, and bugs are everywhere.

The worst so far was the new web UI for Google Voice. It doesn't show the most current messages. I've filed a half dozen bug reports for months with no feedback or fixes.

We're a shrinking bunch (sadly) but if you care about being able to use Firefox, Hangouts feels like Google's attempt to kill it. They apparently can't figure out WebRTC in Firefox.

Embrace-and-extend on WebRTC meaning that, despite 2 years notice when Firefox removed NSAPI plugin support, they still need a further 6 months to restore standards compatibility. That’s pretty god-awful.

Haven't used Meet, wouldn't know how as it's the first time I have heard of it.

As for what's awful about it, where to start? Slow, hard to join, doesn't play well with multiple Google accounts, bugs and crashes with screen sharing, ...

Possibly, complete lack of any desktop software?

Can't default to video off in calls.

WeChat, while excellent on iOS, is also a lifesaver on the desktop given that they provide true native apps for Mac and Windows (no Electron!) Video/voice calls, file sharing, group chat, stickers, everything is there, but the performance alone makes this more usable over other chat apps today.

It seems that over the years, their PM team is more confident (capable?) in keeping a good balance between core chat usability and all the "extras", perhaps because they are not playing catch-up in the market.

Does WeChat offer any thing over LINE? I ended up uninstalling WeChat because it was using up 20% of my daily battery despite only opening up the app once every couple weeks.

If you know anyone from China, it has everyone there on it. Otherwise, I don't know of any huge differences. Maybe more free stickers?

How do you get this fabled native WeChat desktop application? As far as I can tell, it's an Electron app. It sucks up tons of resources on my computers.

The version I have is from the Mac App Store

I'll start using it again. I might have been mixing up my memories of the web app.

Yep, previously they had a web app only (not even Electron, just a website). The MAS version came after that. We use it heavily day-to-day.

The closest thing to Skype is Tox.

But I hope for the return of XMPP. While the client development stagnated for the most part over the last years, there are a few which seem to catch up with the innovation of the last years (conversations, chat secure).

The problem with XMPP seems to be that it is stuck in extension hell. There is simply too many XEPs bouncing around.

The last great hope was back when both Facebook and Google used it, and you could connect one to the other.

Since then both have gone proprietary, and dragged their user base with them.

And Hangouts/Allo/whatever-it-is-this-week still doesn't work. Google Talk actually worked :(

There has to be a good desktop alternative or at least a good browser based alternative. Perhaps with WebRTC the best alternatives are now browser based, maybe discord or riot.im?

It is sad though that basically the only desktop based chat/voice/video communications app listed at alternativeto.net[1] is LinPhone which in theory is a drop in replacement for skype, but in practice it is not =.=

[1] http://alternativeto.net/software/skype/

Wire offers end to end encrypted and open source video calling (and audio calling, and chat, and file sharing). Even the server is open source, which is getting quite rare these days.

Wire.com -- I'm not affiliated, just a big fan. They're very new and need more publicity in my opinion.

discord is pretty good

The inability to use a different ID for different servers pretty much precludes professional use. I don't want to use my handle at work, I don't want to use my real name in random internet communities.

Does anyone know of of a calling site or calling software that works with mac 10.6.8? Even all the conference calling sites have abandoned support. I agree with the comment that backwards compatibility was and should be part of whatever utopian dream this internet world used to/could be.