Jitsi supports multiple videos, I've had at least 6 people before.

We use GoToMeeting at work, and many times have 20 people with video, plus screen sharing (there's also gotowebinar which supports thousands of viewers).

With GTM I love that you can seamlessly share without disabling your video. The web browser experience is hands down better overall then everything else I've used (Zoom, MS Teams, Slack, Jitsi, WebEx). Camera views are just auto-sizing, auto-layout boxes (think: floating tiles) that fit the space you give them, and you can pick top/bottom/left/right when someone is sharing a screen.

Then things that hold GTM back: they still push their native client, and it takes two clicks every time to join with browser (it's not buried like zoom, but it's nowhere near the instant-on, zero-effort of Jitsi). The other thing driving me absolutely mad right now is they introduced a bug a few weeks ago that causes it not to remember my audio settings or name. When I host a meeting, despite telling it to "remember me" it never does -maybe this is part of the federated login my company uses, but the end result is when I click to start my meeting it tells me it's waiting for me to arrive, add takes like 4 more clicks and bouncing around login sites to get in.

My ideal:

Run in a browser, use extensions to get extra functionality if needed.

With lots of people, switch to multiplexing and/or automatically downscale video.

Support seamless pstn dial-in, and pop up a suggestion about this to users if their audio starts breaking up.

Don't stop my webcam when I start screen-sharing.

Support active speaker view, gallery (zoom-style), or GTM-style.

Remember all my preferences and make it so I rarely have to think about any settings. Or login.

Make it easy to give people permission to control/share/etc, and for recurring meetings, remember those changes for next time.

> Support active speaker view, gallery (zoom-style), or GTM-style

I prefer Jitsi’s gallery style — that lets you scroll through the participants with your actual scroll wheel — to Zoom’s — forcing you to drag your cursor back and forth across the screen’s longest axis every time you want go back a screen of participants after advancing one, or vice-versa.

I don't think so, Google Meet has gallery view and that's browser only.

I’d guess as much as they love us installing their software, it’s also just really hard to solve these types of problems when you’re restricted to the browser.

Discord also has a gallery view for web, so it’s definitely technically possible

Browsers do generally have a limit on simultaneous outgoing connections per domain[1] - it could be related to that. (This is also why e.g. TFS breaks down when you open too many tabs).

[1] https://docs.pushtechnology.com/cloud/latest/manual/html/des...

I doubt that has anything to do with it. Zoom almost certainly handles composing the image for gallery view server-side; you're not maintaining a separate connection for each participant.

I thought i read somewhere that they don’t, which is what makes them more performant.

It's possible that the server just forwards a selection of packets from each participant (hopefully dropping some from those who aren't speaking or moving) and the client stitches them into the view.

Sure, that would be the SFU doing it's job, but my point is that you aren't maintaining a connection per participant, but one connection with Zoom itself where you get all the video data. It's true that could be in the form of a single video stream of the entire gallery, or separate streams of only the participants visible to you.

Google Meet does send each video participants video stream seperately. You can tell this by disconnecting internet and then clicking a (now frozen) participant - they become fullscreen but low-res.

That means the client must have had that data locally rather than needing to wait for the server to send it.

Do you happen to know why TFS causes this? Does it leave connections open in each tab? Otherwise it should not matter how many tabs we have open I think.