This is great especially because there is still no M1 version of teams and running the Intel version of teams on M1 makes the whole computer slow to a crawl.

But, at this point, I have to wonder if teams is just abandonware. Stuff like this thread and the lack of M1 support 2.5 years after the M1 transition was announced and over a year after you could walk into an apple store and buy an M1 computer? I don't understand what could prevent them from releasing an M1 version besides a complete lack of will to do so.

Almost all Microsoft software feels like abandonware, which is wild when you consider how heavily they're promoting and profiting from it and how many and how heavily people use it.

I remember that microsoft had essentially sunsetted Microsoft Teams while they worked on a complete rewrite to be built into Windows. They were partially through it...

And then Covid happened.

Then, they had to go back and work on the old app, fixing as many issues as fast as they could because now a lot of people suddenly depended on the app.

To their credit, they did eventually fix the most pressing issues (more than two video streams showing at once, push-to-talk mode, etc...), but I do think they'll need to go back to a rewrite that can be used cross platform.

I agree, I know it isn’t new with Microsoft, but they sure do consistently release slow buggy software. It would seem that a company as large of Microsoft could get ahead of the issue, but perhaps it their size and beurocracy actually make it harder to quality control.

I've had nothing but negative experiences with Microsoft and their products on macOS. Unsurprisingly, dealing with their "support engineers" is maybe even more frustrating than using a macOS device that is infected with their software.

Speaking as an experienced person when dealing with M365 products in our fleet, I absolutely, 100%, cannot, in good conscience recommend for any company that supports macOS devices to purchase or use any Microsoft products. There is simply no amount of money you can pay (I'm fairly certain we have one of the highest license tiers) in order to get any assurance that you will get any meaningful functionality or support from them.

Yeah I was in the same position. Support is useful when the issue is documented in the kbase. Which 95% of our issues aren't because it's they were I would have found the answer myself already.

The support people are outsourced and seem to be penalized for escalating so they really know no more than we do. Getting them to escalate something is really a fight. They tend to stall us requesting the same extensive logs over and over.

I think a lot of their products are only held together by the hopes and dreams of their sales department.

Well It isn't new with any similar company either, Apple consistently releases slow buggy software for years too, just remember XCode, ha-ha

My Win10 laptop has started shutting off the WLAN device at the worst times, and it seems to happen when a Bluetooth mouse is connected and a battery charger is plugged in at the same time.

The troubleshooter and report forms both crash on opening.

I guess that's one way to hit a "zero negative feedback" KPI!

The symptoms (aside from the feedback reporter issue) likely point at a hardware issue with the underlying machine, and probably not a software bug.

I've had WLAN shutoffs related to drivers, would you consider that hardware or software? Are you thinking power droops or what's the hardware history of WLAN shutoffs look like?

I'm suspecting a power issue and that the internal WLAN and Bluetooth device are likely on the same USB root hub. Have you checked the manufacturer for newer USB drivers?

I use excel/word daily and they work great on my M1 mac and feel modern.

Do you mean a mac version?

Honestly just having microsoft software adhere to apple human interface guidelines and the menu system improves it infinity percent (∞%)

Using office360 is a confusing jumbled mess.

I can't help but think it's on purpose.

I remember talking to an ex-microsoft guy decades ago about some incompatibility with some third party thing. I said sometimes new engineers didn't know how their software would be used or interact with other stuff. He told me not to be naive. Microsoft had meetings trying to figure out "how can we own this?"

Isn't it precisely when they can do that that you know it's a good business?

Good for whom?

If you're running an Apple Silicon Mac you can get an early build of Teams osx-arm64 from the exploration build link listed here.[0]

I've been running a daily build for a few weeks and it's noticeably better than the Intel build on an M1 Pro. It launches in half the time and feels far more responsive (probably due to not needing to use the Rosetta JIT for Electron). That said it's still a daily "exploration" build so YMMV.

[0] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ItzLevvie/MicrosoftTeams-m...

How do you prevent it from automatically updating to the Intel version? I keep downloading the preview builds and they keep getting updated.

Maybe try to delete the launch agent (`com.microsoft.update.agent.plist` in `/Library/LaunchAgents`)

and launch daemon (`com.microsoft.autoupdate.helper.plist` in `/Library/LaunchDaemons`)

Can confirm it is snappier on a M1 Macbook Pro and using *less* RAM, maybe about 10% less.

I love you.

It's not abandoned, they are working on it a lot. Every month sees major updates. The problem is that they are only working on adding glossy new features and ignoring performance. So it's becoming ever glossier and ever slower.

When it first came out it was pretty snappy. Now I can't switch to another chat tab without a loading spinner, statuses are not updating anymore unless I click on them etc..

Looks at Teams on Linux... yeah... abandonware

Abandon suggests it might have been half-way decent to start with.

This was a pile of steaming shit from the get-go.

Given how hard MS has been pushing RTO, and how unlikely they are to be Mac users, I wouldn’t be surprised if they just don’t feel the pain like everyone else and therefore don’t care.

Teams on Windows is just as bad.

RTO = Return to Office ?

Yes

There absolutely are native M1 builds of Teams. They just aren't widely known about.

See https://github.com/ItzLevvie/MicrosoftTeams-msinternal/blob/...

See the "osx-x64 + osx-arm64" builds.

"They just aren't widely known about"

That's seriously the understatement of the past 8 months. which is about as long as I've been trying to find this (unsuccessfully).

Anyway, thank you!

I wish it was abandonware as it was quite performant at first. Now it seems every feature they add adds a memory print of several gb main memory.

Thanks for the tip. I'll give this a try!

For work, I have to run Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Discord. Of those 3, Slack surprisingly uses the least amount of memory (~700 MB), and Teams uses the most (~1.5 GB). I dusted off an old Intel Mac (literally) and interact with it using Universal Control. It only runs those 3 chat apps + mail. It's turned out to be a great way to offload resource hogs and as an added benefit, it minimizes distractions. I'll occasionally glance at the dock to see if there are any notification badges, whereas on my main Mac, I'd feel compelled to deal with notifications immediately.

When I have to share my screen or focus on a conversation, I'll fire up one of those 3 apps on my main (M1) Mac and quit it when I'm done.

Universal Control still feels rough around the edges, but it has saved me from ditching my Macbook Air and shelling out for an M1 Macbook Pro. Sometimes there are issues with reconnecting to the Intel Mac, but it seems to resolve itself if I wait a bit or turn off/on wifi.

The Teams webapp is hot garbage though. On video you can't even see all the participants. It's years behind Google Meet and Zoom.

It's the same for the desktop version. Not being able to see everyone is egregious.

I think it's meant to save on bandwidth/resources by only showing the "speaking" video feeds.

It's somehow still using more bandwidth than Google Meet with the same number of video streams.

It's most likely still receiving all feeds in the background though.

You may be right. I don’t know how it works. I’ve noticed that when a new video-enabled user shows up on the screen, there is a delay between the user profile showing and the video overlay presenting itself, so I was assuming that was where a stream was being started for that video feed.

Yes, although I'm not sure if the hidden streams use bandwidth. Also, to the best of my knowledge, Teams handles individual streams usually, while meet usually muxes them to save bandwidth. Zoom is easily the most efficient of the big four and I think uses a whole bunch of compression tricks.

I'm pretty sure the video limit for teams is 25 simultaneous video feeds (in a 5x5 grid) and anything more than that gets switched in and out as people talk.

Is there a real use case for seeing more than 25 users' video feeds at a time?

Nice. Fight cancer with cancer.

Yea, or just use a Firefox add-on[0] to change the user-agent to Edge for the Teams web app

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/teams-phone-f...

(or even better, don't use Teams at all, obviously)

Tried that before, doesn't work. It'll f up, when you try to actually talk in a call or share screen and so on.

I mean they're already using a Mac...

edgy!

No edgier than calling microsoft edge "cancer", surely..

Sure, but tbf he said "edgy" and not "edgiest".

It «works», but still takes up a lot of resources (gigabytes of RAM and a whole CPU core while in video meetings),and depending on sso policies might require you to sign in several times a day. It’s also limited to four video streams.

This tip is gold. I had no idea Edge had this feature on Mac. I have used a variety of other tools in the past to create website "apps". Thanks!

Also possible with Chrome.

How?

Hot dog menu -> More tools -> Create Shortcut -> check the "Open as Window" checkbox

For PWAs (web apps that do additional things to make them work more like apps) there may also be a simpler install button in the url bar itself

Just check out the little button in the address bar on the right.

I quietly use Teams every day. I'm not a particular fan of it but it doesn't get in my way more than an Electron splash at boot and an ugly purple icon at bottom right. This is on a rather elderly HPE laptop - dmidecode says: "HP 250 G6 Notebook PC"

I used to have audio snags with it but those went away and I migrated to pipewire about 12 months ago and the audio quality has improved.

I do lack some "features" like background blurring etc but I note that BBB manages to do it fine.

It does look like there is a lack of love for Team on Linux but it sounds like the third class citizen is Mac.

Forgive my ignorance, but what makes these apps practically different from say, a bookmark?

I find it hard to conceptualize these apps as little more than your browser, but ever so slightly more pointed

They are just a bookmark, but on Windows, they become a first class citizen on your task bar.

If you are the type to have a ton of tabs open across many windows, this also makes the "app" easier to spot.

You can also pin the app to the taskbar and have it launch with Windows.

Ah I see, thank you!

Continuing on with what the other poster said, when run as an "app" it then also eliminates the regular address bar and other buttons that are common on a full web browser so it "feels" more like a native app. There's also metadata that the app can use to add to the "jump list" feature of the Windows taskbar. You can then also get added as a target to "share" on Windows. There's a number of features that you get access to as an installed PWA at least on Windows compared to just being a webpage in the browser.

Cool! I hadn't considered OS/Windows integration :)

The more minified window sounds useful on my Linux installation, things like Slack randomly fall behind on Electron and stop working

What features does this allow that aren't available if you just use the website via FF/Brave?

Teams doesn't work with Firefox on Linux or macos. You need chrome or chromium. Brave probably works.

On macOS Teams audio does work in calls, but video does not.

When I tried to do the same, it complained about lack of features on browsers other than edge, without specifying anything.

Since we're on this topic: Up until a few weeks ago I swear when I got an invitation link and opened it in Firefox I could just join with the browser. Then two weeks ago it forced me to download the app for linux, no way to join with the browser.

Is there any workaround for that? Faking the user agent? I didn't have the time then to grab an extension and start fiddling around, so I just spun up a VM and installed the app...

This also works with Chrome. I would recommend using that to at least have slight vendor diversity (did you know that Microsoft likes to EEE?).

If you are actually worried about diversity then Edge and Chrome are no different. Both contribute to the Blink monoculture.

If we want to split hairs then Edge is slightly better purely because it doesn't have the same 65% market share as Chrome.

> 1. Install the Microsoft Edge Web browser on your Mac

You had me up until here. It is pretty amazing how slow "modern" chat apps run.

It's depressing to see that chat (both textual and video) was a solved problem over a decade ago with single-core CPUs measured in hundreds of megahertz and low-hundreds of megabytes of RAM but nowadays despite orders of magnitude more resources it's apparently became an impossible problem.

I did this, but the problem was that I never got any notifications. I did not block notifications at all, but I got little to no notifications especially for when meetings started. I had to revert to full app because of this.

I just tried this as well, didn't work at first but I enabled notifications when it prompted me & now appears to have worked (once at least).

Any idea how to get notification badges to work (if possible)?

Messing around the edge://flags to toggle native notification on or off, I remembered that the default notification mode has bug currently. Also ensure you grant it permission of notification in system setting. That isn't done by default.

Thank you! I checked windows system notifications & it looks like edge notifications were already enabled but I did need to turn on the teams.microsoft.com notifications in edge.

Does that really help? I’ve tried teams web app in chrome and the performance is equally depressing as the Linux desktop app. Memory usage is ok but I really don’t enjoy waiting 2 seconds for every click.

A more extreme tip is to not use it on your desktop at all. Just use the iOS app, it hurts me to praise Teams but that app is not just decent, it’s actually very good. Fast, stable, good ux, all the features you need. Just missing a way to connect a proper keyboard and share my main desktop screen.

IMO the iOS app is better, but there are some bugs if one uses many instances.

I was using both desktop and iPad versions and somehow I was getting incoming calls on the iPad from people who were not calling me, but who did maybe 30 min before. Not just the notification but "so and so is calling you right now". It was very confusing.

That's because MS hasn't found a way to run electron on iOS yet ;-)

Thanks! I made the HN submit link because I was looking for solutions to the performance, greatly appreciated, downloading.

Does desktop Safari not run Teams, or is the installing edge suggestion just so you can install it?

Apple has always had piss-poor PWA (progressive web apps, aka websites that can be installed and used offline as apps) support.

It's done by design to try and force more people to use their app store, where apple can take a cut of everything it can.

Yeah I knew it doesn't have the install button.

Just wondering if teams flat out refuses to work on Safari.

(Only time I use teams is when someone sends me a meeting link. I just run it on the browser. I use Void Linux btw)

> Just wondering if teams flat out refuses to work on Safari.

Yes. Every other office app works, just not teams.

It completely refuses to launch. Now I wouldn't be surprised if audio/video features may legitimately not be supported, but at least text messaging should work.

I have two small issues with this

1. That when I close outlook (this doesn't happen on teams), and open it again, I need to put my password, it doesn't stay logged in.

2. That whenever I open teams or outlook, an empty Edge stays on as a different window.

Any solutions?

Very nice tip. I've filed this away in my brain for later. Many thanks!

Notion is also better as an Edge App than its own standalone app.

You can allow cross-site tracking and third party cookie in safari, then use teams from safari. I have been using it this way without any issues for all my Teams meetings.

Hmm for me this is a lot slower than the M1 app, and it also used way more RAM.

One note on that: last time I tried installing edge it asked me to enter my password, which I find unnecessary.

it’s optional to sync your settings across devices, not mandatory

See step 8 on the installation instructions [0], the installer prompts the password, I don't recall firefox or chromium requiring that.

[0]: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftedge/forum/all/...

I do this on a Pixelbook (Linux version of Edge). Works quite well for all of Office 365, for me.

And you can have multiple windows.

There's literally 3 "..."s to click on.

Can you still share your screen with this version?

Took me a minute to set up a test meeting, but it looks like you can!

Screen sharing works. Screen control (as in, controlling a screen someone else has shared) does not.

Yes

I can’t find this option anywhere.

You are my hero!

ok, gonna have to try this out.