Re:Slack outage: Degraded performance and connectivity issues
by Nextgrid on Friday October 16, 2020 @03:39PM
(#24804251)
I've tried Teams. I dislike the UI however that is mostly personal preference and indeed it's not bad enough to make it unusable. If the UI was the only thing wrong with it I could still live with it.
The problem is that it's just so damn slow and unstable. It is an order of magnitude worse than Slack which is also an Electron app, so Electron alone isn't to blame here.
The notification system is a mess. They use their own notification system instead of integrating with the system one which is terrible because those notifications take up way more space than the default system ones and established UX behaviors (like dismissing them by swiping right on the trackpad) don't apply. There's also a bug where the notification is its own window which remains (in an invisible state) even when no notification is displayed (which means you can Cmd+Tab into it).
The tiny video window while you're on a call will bring up the main Teams UI when you try to minimize it. So if you're in a call with the participants in the main window and switch away from it, the little window will pop up in the bottom right corner of the screen. If you minimize that one, the main Teams window will come back into foreground and you now need to minimize it too.
The text editing experience is awful. It's wysiwyg-based with some minor Markdown-like formatting supported, but the problem is that copy/pasting most content from other apps will paste as "rich text" so not only is the formatting of that pasted text screwed up, but the screwed up formatting continues as you type beyond it. The button to copy a meeting invite link will copy HTML which means it'll work if pasted into a rich-text field (although the formatting will still be screwed up and differ from whatever was there before), but it will just spew out several long lines of HTML if you paste it into a plain text field like a code editor or another messenger. When you make a button called "copy meeting link", it should copy a plain-text link and that's it.
The slowness of it all is just the icing on the cake and makes dealing with those (relatively minor if in isolation) issues painful.
Teams is a pile of shit and its only objective is to win marketshare by appealing to bean-counters who will never seriously use it or people who've spent their entire life in a bullshit Microsoft environment and never tried real tools. I guess if your only experience of enterprise chat is Skype for Business (ex-Lync) then maybe it's better, but that's a pretty low bar and is definitely a trip back to the dark ages once you've used a real messenger like Slack or even the consumer-grade ones such as Discord, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, etc.
My experience using it for the past 3 months was so bad that it's now on my "stuff I don't work with" list and any potential client that insists on it gets an instant decline on my part.
The problem is that it's just so damn slow and unstable. It is an order of magnitude worse than Slack which is also an Electron app, so Electron alone isn't to blame here.
The notification system is a mess. They use their own notification system instead of integrating with the system one which is terrible because those notifications take up way more space than the default system ones and established UX behaviors (like dismissing them by swiping right on the trackpad) don't apply. There's also a bug where the notification is its own window which remains (in an invisible state) even when no notification is displayed (which means you can Cmd+Tab into it).
The tiny video window while you're on a call will bring up the main Teams UI when you try to minimize it. So if you're in a call with the participants in the main window and switch away from it, the little window will pop up in the bottom right corner of the screen. If you minimize that one, the main Teams window will come back into foreground and you now need to minimize it too.
The text editing experience is awful. It's wysiwyg-based with some minor Markdown-like formatting supported, but the problem is that copy/pasting most content from other apps will paste as "rich text" so not only is the formatting of that pasted text screwed up, but the screwed up formatting continues as you type beyond it. The button to copy a meeting invite link will copy HTML which means it'll work if pasted into a rich-text field (although the formatting will still be screwed up and differ from whatever was there before), but it will just spew out several long lines of HTML if you paste it into a plain text field like a code editor or another messenger. When you make a button called "copy meeting link", it should copy a plain-text link and that's it.
The slowness of it all is just the icing on the cake and makes dealing with those (relatively minor if in isolation) issues painful.
Teams is a pile of shit and its only objective is to win marketshare by appealing to bean-counters who will never seriously use it or people who've spent their entire life in a bullshit Microsoft environment and never tried real tools. I guess if your only experience of enterprise chat is Skype for Business (ex-Lync) then maybe it's better, but that's a pretty low bar and is definitely a trip back to the dark ages once you've used a real messenger like Slack or even the consumer-grade ones such as Discord, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, etc.
My experience using it for the past 3 months was so bad that it's now on my "stuff I don't work with" list and any potential client that insists on it gets an instant decline on my part.