Ask HN: Why is MS Teams so slow, do devs test Teams on less powerful machines?
I have a laptop with an i5 processor and 8G of RAM. Hard drive is an SSD. It sometimes takes me a full minute and a half to get Teams open and ready to join a meeting. It is driving me crazy.
256 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 278 ms ] threadNo issues with any other meeting platform (Slack, Zoom, Discord etc... all work a treat), but the Teams client, on multiple machines? I've lost track of the number of times it's just not worked for me, or been an absolute dog.
Hope that Microsoft give it some love, because it's definitely got room for improvement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wunderlist
Vscode is great yet with each update it gets more buggy than its fixed. Let's see how many years will take Microsoft to turn Vscode into crapware too.
We have a decades-long history of IM platforms, and I've never seen one where messages were randomly deleted from DM history or tell me "we lost your picture; please attach it again" when editing a message (extra fun when it was a temporary snippet from the clipboard[0]).
0: Extra extra fun considering Windows doesn't have clipboard history like Linux DEs have for years.
Windows + V allows you to enable it.
Source: Click the voice/video chat button in teams on FF and get the popup: "This feature isn't available yet for your browser. Try the web app with Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome, or switch to the desktop app."
Since Jitsi suggests it's engine related, Opera/Edge/Chrome/Chromium/Brave probably all work fine for Teams (unless they user agent sniff)
[0]: https://community.jitsi.org/t/software-unusable-on-firefox-w...
For the developers, Teams works... as good as Teams can. So not great, but it works most of the time (for me, anyway). For everyone else though, I hear nothing but issues. Constantly having to restart to make Teams work. And again, this is on Surface devices, so Microsoft is making the app, the OS, and the hardware!
Even aside from the performance, I just think Teams is laid out horribly and it stifles communication. The redundancy between chats, group chats, and Teams channels (which are like a message board?) is just bizarre and constantly causes confusion. It's so much worse than Slack (which we used to use, and I used at a previous job) where all communication channels are listed along the left side, and you didn't have to dig through menus and trees of categorization to get to certain places to talk to your coworkers. And since Teams channels are sectioned off behind another screen from your chats (where you'll probably be most of the time), the only way to be aware of when someone posts in one of the channels is to turn on notifications for it. Which is very annoying!
edit: oh also a recent update made it so when you paste a code snippet into the plaintext editor thing (whatever it's called, you activate it by typing 3 backticks), it strips all the whitespace from the left, meaning you lose all the code indentation. Just great
Oh yeah, I'm with you! I'll admit that Slack's UX and UI is not my favorite either, but at least any challenges are in a single dimension (not like Teams in multiple, challenging dimensions)...Meanwhile Teams' is just awful. I mean, the Teams "rooms" (I guess i call them "rooms" because its annoying to call them "Teams Sites"?) almost exist like channels/rooms in good ol' IRC...but then Teams has channels underneath Teams Sites/rooms...?...Plus, if i want to chat with an indiviodual, those live in the separate "Chat" area...Ugh! To the valid point about slack, at least its all there on the left. I guess i could sort of see if there was drastically different functionality between Chats and Rooms/Sites...but i dont think so. So, why then separate them? As much as i dislike Microsoft as an organization overall (for their historic corporate behavior), they often don't jhave the worse UX ideas...But for Teams, ugh!
I'm gpoing to pivot a little to matrix, and specifically the Element client...which is the most popular matrix web client. I'm an admitted matrix fanboy, so clearly i'm biased...but even Element has areas that are simpler for me to comprehend and utilize...Also, Element in my mind is still waaaaay early in its evolution, and still very much far from their UX being topnotch. But even in Element's infancy is leaps abovew what Teams is now after several years. I acknowledge that Teams "does more" (like embedding Office software, etc.)...and of course the underlying matrix protocol is NOT limited to chat...But, wow, is Teams sucky.
Discord should just sell a white label version or start a subsidiary to sell to enterprise. Slack will probably get smushed by Salesforce, and short of Satya Nadella's personal laptop bursting into flames because of Teams, I doubt they'll slim down the client.
I don't say that lightly, I'm pretty hard to please in general. Element is one of the few pieces of software that I don't have a complaint about.
https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/2320
Other than that it works great though.
That sure is odd...and not my experience at all.
> ...short of Satya Nadella's personal laptop bursting into flames because of Teams, I doubt they'll slim down the client.
Sadly, i think you're right.
https://office365itpros.com/2021/06/25/teams20-webview2-repl...
Which... was bizarre, coming from Slack.
As parent phrased it, "the redundancy between chats, group chats, and Teams channels" is mind-bogglingly stupid.
I can't actually imagine a user who would desire that. Maybe someone from HR worried about secrets being shared in a chat?
> ...Maybe someone from HR worried about secrets being shared in a chat?
Your phrase there immediately made me think of that Catbert evil HR director character from Dilbert...which is exactly the kind of thing he would want to have setup! :-)
This is very true, and hugely problematic. As a consultant I have to use Teams with 3 separate clients right now, which means signing in to 3 different Teams tenants - Microsoft SSO does not like that at all.
I have a personal hatred for MS because of their long history of building shit like this, but I hoped that working for a different cloud provider would keep me away from that ecosystem - it was legitimately a positive benefit I perceived about this job when thinking about the move. Alas, the cancer of MS software gets everywhere by virtue of being effectively free for anyone using Office.
The fact that this happens on a piece of software which natively supports dark mode tells a lot of the amount of testing that teams is getting before being pushed to users.
It really is, why do I get notifications in chat sometimes and not the Teams room that everyone is a part of?
Why are people referencing others in these chat channels when that's what we discuss in the Teams channels?
And I'm a senior software engineer!
While we’re bashing Teams—why are their notifications some awful custom window that doesn’t respect your OS notification settings?!??!
It almost never works for me.
Then MS introduced that weird semi-forced threaded discussion feature that make following conversations a nightmare and nobody, not a single person in the whole company, sent a message over Teams ever again. We kept running it to appear online, but literally nobody actually used it.
We did spend a fair amount of downtime talking about how much we hated Teams, though. And Azure DevOps. More than one person there considered it some of the worst software they've ever used, and they're right. It was a horrendous mess or awful UX (but tons and tons of charts for the managers to value far too highly).
That was a year and a half ago or so, maybe it's better now. But at the time, having switched to that from Gitlab, it was atrocious and we avoided it as much as we could.
Whatever cost savings Teams affords, the difference is more than lost in confusion, miscommunication, and frustration across the workplace.
May I never have to use it again.
Interestingly, my team now uses Discord for communication and we really love it.
Now I'm on Windows, and it doesn't seem to be a problem anymore (or at least it doesn't crash my system anymore, its still always top of the list for memory usage), but it is very irritating to use
- Lists: A few months ago you can simply use markdown style lists in any chat and hitting enter would create a new list item instead of sending the whole message off. A few updates since Nov slowly stripped off this option for Chats, and then Channels. The only option to send lists is to use the format button.
- As you said, code snippets, now they stripped off all indentations if you are not using the format button (and have to go through a tedious process to insert code)
I work for an institution that has gone balls deep with MS products and it's driving me crazy considering they are always worrying about budgets and saving money.
When I started everyone was communicating with email. Drove me nuts. I convinced the team I was assigned to, to drop emails and switched to hipchat ( loved it) then slack ( meh ) When covid hit, everyone needed to be on chat. Top brass told us we were not allowed to use anything but MS Teams. The devs hate it. It's run by the main IT dep so we have no control over how it works.
I want to stage a revolt and install mattermost on one of our servers lol
The SSO is so bad as well - the popup telling you to login doesn't have a window title either, or lock to the teams window, so it comes across as a completely anonymous prompt. Phishing attack anyone?
Closing the login prompt only opens it again. I hope youre not offline and on mobile - prompt will open, close, open, close, tens of times per second.
And lets not forget the dark pattern of soft forcing me to login on Windows with a Microsoft account after I successfully logged in. Need to click that text link - the CTA and primary button logs your machine in!
Start writing a message and then choose a message to reply to. Voíla, reply quote comes after the message.
Wysiwyg constantly gets formatting wrong, sometimes without possibility to restore it by deleting text. Its like it gets stuck in a table or wonky css or something.
Deletes newlines of pasted text.
Click a chat that you havent opened in a while and quickly start typing while its loading. Your text will come out garbled as the input gets selected and the text position marker reset to 0 after finished loading the history.
Wanna send an image from slack, to teams? Well you will need to either take a a screenshot or download it - Teams doesnt understand the clipboard if you right click and copy the file.
Neither does copying an image from Teams paste into either Slack or Paint. (99% sure on that last one)
Dont try calling someone when youre already being called on mobile. The app wont let you call, but it fails to tell you that someone is in fact calling you.
If you try sending a voice message when on a call, even when muted, the app bugs out.
I guess theres more to report if only someone would seem to care about the application.
Now i get why in a company environment one wouldn't use free services from matrix/discord or telegram, but at the same time there are self-hosted options or cloud ones that are relatively cheap and still way better than MS/Zoom.A company choosing a service because of promotional plans from big corporations is not a good deal, it's a red flag.
Telegram's UX blows Element out of the water for me. IME, Element is slow, buggy, and most of the time just refuses to launch telling me I'm "offline" (a quick peek at Developer Tools shows it is connecting to the home-server fine). I always groan when I have to open Element to do something. Telegram's UX is amazing.
Originally we only had a few folks using Teams, and the client was pretty snappy and just seemed to work. Then over time more features were added, and things started breaking.
For example:
On my desktop client, images will not load when clicked unless you back out of a conversation then come back in and click the image. This is not something I experience on the web client. Also on the desktop client, I cannot for the life of me do formatting any more. Bullet or numbered lists are out!
The web client seems to work better for me, but will start to chug near the end of the day, which requires a quick reload of the app.
Other "how did this shit ship?" bugs:
Cant seem to handle simple `blocktext` half the time
Pasting tables ends up with black on black most of the time
Changing chats takes multiple seconds
Scrolling through chat history lazy loads for each screen worth with a few seconds delay each time.
It's dogshit.
The chat experience is by far the worst I've ever had to deal with:
- My sidebar is riddled with old meetings chats nobody cares about anymore. Makes it hard to find actual important direct conversations with people.
- The text editor is absolute jank, I've yet to figure out how to get out of a quote after starting one, lists constantly glitch out, it keeps "bold/italic" state like office but with no easy way to remove it.
- Because it connects to sharepoint you get to enjoy all the lovely permission bullshit when trying to share a simple freaking file. Half the time I post a picture it glitches out for me and I can no longer see it. Or I can see it but not if I make it fullscreen.
Honestly the abysmal performance is just the cherry on top...
How do you screw up a chat program this badly?
By having the highest-level-goal be: make it look like the competition and give it away for free.
Whether it actually works like the competition was deferred until some later date.
If the competition perishes in the meantime, well, then there's no need to fix.
I've had to put up with it before and I won't do it again. I can almost feel my cortisol levels rising just thinking about it.
There are seemingly countless different ways to start a chat. You could start a thread in a channel (or is it team?), or just start a new channel/team, or invite people to a group chat. There ends up being a forever growing list of chats/rooms/whatever because people can't find the previous one so just make a new one.
People are forever accidentally starting a new thread instead of replying to the current thread. Most stupid UI ever. I find 99% of the time people just want flat chat and find whatever the easiest way to get that is.
And why the hell do you need to give me a top level notification that won't go away when someone "reacts" to the thing I've just said in the chat I'm still viewing?!
Oh, and the random breakages. It seems every other week they break code pasting. Currently viewing images is broken for me. I just have to keep retrying until on the tenth time it finally works.
If I share a window on one screen, the teams call carefully placed on the other monitor helpfully minimizes to a floating window in front of what I'm trying to share. So then I have to re-maximize because I sometimes like to see the reactions when I'm sharing stuff.
One person I call, I can't. He has to call me back. Every Time.
It's not the worst video chat I've used. That's either skype or any of the pre-facetime real-video things that never really worked. But it's not good either.
Worst of all, it will open all links in edge, unless you configure Edge to Not do it. WTF? Why is this even possible?
Legitimately irritating as it happens several times a day
Root cause? Their notification is generated but we can't see it unless we do alt tab
To me it looks like another failed attempt to solve communication without really giving it a good thought - resulting in an incomprehensible mess.
It’s included and integrated with Office.
One colleague who’s on a modern desktop with an i7 and 32GB of ram waits the upwards of 20 seconds to load a conversation.
In the past couple of years Teams has sores in popularity and perhaps the dev work has been focused on scaling. It’s clear to me MS need to allocate some developer for getting the fundamentals right.
All the complaints people have here are about experiences I've seen myself: images not loading, resource-hungry to the point where anyone who needs to run Teams with another app (eg to screenshare) needs a non-Microsoft laptop, sidebar full of ancient chats, pants notifications, pants reauth flow.
It's brutal, coming to Teams from Slack. It makes you sad.
One interesting thing about being based on Electron is that they've made the bugs cross-platform as well - the image loading bug happens just as often on the Mac version as on the Windows version.
Other than that, I sometimes need to reboot to pick up my Logitech webcam correctly, when working at home.
Otherwise, it really seems pretty decent. This is on a 2019 Razer Blade 15" with 40 GB dram.
In short, Teams is crap. My daughter uses Google Meet at school and its so fast/fun/easy on an old 8GB laptop.
But at least the performance should get better some day. Microsoft has now made the "personal" edition of Teams that is shipping with Windows 11 into one that instead of shipping a browser, uses Edge as a renderer (WebView2). Since that's probably already cached in RAM anyway, it launches near instantly and consumes much less RAM than the clunky edition that doesn't share resources with anything else.
However, MS Teams for Business still does not exist in such an edition although I assume they are working on it.
[EDIT AGAIN] I'd guesstimate its person-hour-of-use crash rate at at least 20x that of Slack, from what I've seen. Maybe quite a bit higher.
Once you run more than one chat in Discord even on recent PCs you see the suck.
VSCode isn't that snappy either but it's decent enough. If every Electron app was like that "It's slow because it's Electron" wouldn't be such a meme.
VSCode really needs better competition than clunky Java IDEs from the likes of JetBrains or Eclipse or platform-specific native IDEs like Xcode.
But yeah there's clearly room for a snappier LSP-based editor, preferably one with a toolbar.
It has integrated docs, simulators, unit/UI test functionality inc coverage reports, live UI debugging, tons of profiling tools, and I can use it to upload my apps straight to App Store Connect. Starting with XCode 13 I also have built in CI/CD. I can build, profile, test and deploy a whole app on multiple platforms from scratch with it. And its free.
Certainly reflects my experience as well. When the text editor of a development environment doesn't work right, I mean, shouldn't that be job number 1? Search google for "Xcode bugs", you'll see thread after thread of complaints.
I can find major complaints of bugs and crashes going all the way from 9 years ago to the latest Xcode release, no other development environment has this many complaints. It is by far the most buggy and crash prone development environment available today. People _happily_ pay for AppCode for a reason.
Ideally it would be here OR there, ie much less of them!
The average user does not have a gaming or workstation CPU.
And you can blame all the fuckers who ran to Slack and VSCode, for it. Once electron became "acceptable in polite society", it was all over.
Personally I have to quit Discord to keep myself from getting distracted, so it’s way worse when you have to wait so long just to reply to a notification.
That said the bar for different people varied a lot. I am latency sensitive.
Why does this keep being said about VSCode? Electron has it’s benefits and so does VSCode but it’s in no way fast or “fast as shit” as far as editors and even IDEs go, sorry but it’s slow.
It takes 10-15 seconds to start up on my work machine. That's not "fast as shit" by any stretch of the imagination.
That's not shipping an entire browser. That's shipping an entire bloody OS! (edge is still stupidly deeply integrated, and I'd bet there's still old ie MSHTML gubbins in there for the enterprise crowd to cling to.)
ZeroTier uses it for its control panel, and installs it on first launch which caused me some confusing as to why i always had to launch it twice to make it appear after a new install.
... While I mention Roblox, let me just let it be known that the win32 Roblox app, the one that Roblox pushes, uses an incredibly insecure IE webview. Roblox simply doesn't listen to feedback.
And if they ship Webview 2 cross platform to Mac and linux I assume it is not that much different to shipping electron ?
The only thing that works well is calls, voice and video. I am sure they have plans to destroy that too :-)
I often use _phrase_ to italisise. This seems to trigger the left/right arrow key bug semi-regularly. This fix is to find the Teams icon in the Taskbar, right click and Quit.
Then restart Teams.
> find the Teams icon in the Taskbar, right click and Quit.
...and never open Teams again!
1) Echo cancellation. This is a solved problem and pretty much every other conferencing app does it right. Microsoft probably rolled their own which is why it does not work right.
2) I have Teams installed on my desktop, Android phone, and iPad. (Unfortunately, my company wants us to use it.) Regardless of the notification settings in the apps, if I was on the desktop but switched my KVM away, my phone and iPad will not notify me of incoming Teams calls, messages, etc.
3) Editing a document using the collaborative environment is painfully broken. Sometimes it will take many seconds to register a keystroke (on a gigabit-class CONUS connection). Sometimes edits will disappear completely, or sometimes just temporarily. Change tracking doesn't work right. Google Docs had collaborative editing perfected over 10 years ago.
4) Moving files in/out of Teams "Folders" can be painfully slow.
5) Interoperability between the desktop Teams app and govcloud/non-govcloud users is hosed, but it seems to work fine on phones and tablets. Desktop users must access meetings via browser if their "home" Teams account govcloud flavor does not match that of the meeting originator, but no such restrictions exist on phones & tablets. WTF?
6) The Linux desktop version of Teams does not operate with govcloud at all.
7) Depending on the platform, users cannot share their desktop when using the browser-based version. Chrome actually supports this better than Edge.
I don't know if Teams is worse or not, but my take is that it is impossible to do right for conversations since it introduces too much lag. I sincerely prefer echoes. Old time phones worked just fine and it felt like you stood next to the person you were speaking too instead of speaking through some filter group delay.
They also had a whole heck of a lot less latency. Sure, routes were probably less direct, but if you had an honest to goodness analog line, the only added latency was from amplifiers and multiplexing equipment, neither of which added significant latency. More likely your call would be digitized and sent as part of a T1 or similar circuit; but that doesn't add a lot of delay, because a T1 is multiplexed as one sample per line, 8000 samples per second per line. Where your is connected at digital telphone switches, there would need to be a buffer to match up timing, but it only needs to be one sample long. There's not likely to be that many switches on a call, so total added latency is going to be a few sample lengths, and maybe around 1ms. (This is in addition to the transmission delay, of course)
In contrast, modern computers have meaningful audio sampling delays, and transmitting each sample would kill your network, so you batch a few samples (usually 10-40ms worth), there's delay from the encode/decode, and packet switched networking also adds delay in waiting for a send slot.
Echo cancelling with all that latency is even more important, cause the echos are hard to tune out when they come back so late.
I didn't know there were echo cancellation in old time phones: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_suppression_and_cancell...
Is it maybe the background noise filters that mess up sound latency in Teams?
I used to play with friends over a privately hosted Ventrilo server back in the days, and the conversations were always crystal clear and felt like instant.
Maybe the VOIP providers just timeshare calls too much in their servers or have bad routing of packages.
I'm using the Teams Electron app on a Ryzen 5 with 16G RAM and nvme disk, I can't complain about load times at least.
I just wish it had better bluetooth audio support and wayland screen sharing on Linux. Some day maybe.
The most positive thing about Teams is that we finally have an app that EVERYONE uses. From my co-workers, to vendors, to clients. Monopoly is great when it allows me to connect with people easily.
Windows design issues?
Coding standards incentivize slow code?
Something I'm missing completely?
They want to sell their stuff to enterprises, no matter how inefficient their systems are in every way.
The classic Mac vs. Windows PC at its finest. Apple cares about design and thinks from actual user perspective to make life easier and enjoyable and sell beautifully designed products to make money (as a company they have a lot to be criticized of course, but that's not the topic of this thread).
Microsoft is a boring company that ONLY cares about money and enterprises.
I've used it daily for years and it's never been a good experience - desktop, mobile, web (FF, Chrome, Brave)... they are all trash. Although as others have pointed out, it has gotten noticeably worse over the last year.
My teams client is CONSTANTLY confused about this "work account home account" garbage. Holy crap Batman it's a disaster.
Clicking on teams links causes my teams client to freeze up with a blank screen sometimes for minutes. So I've been late to many meetings because the Teams client just doesn't connect.
I'm yet to hear a SINGLE instance of someone using teams other than "we already bought it" or "we have some strategic partnership with MS, so we have to use it" – some BS that's shoved down people's throats.
The multi-account stuff is something slack and discord got right from day one. And years into it, MS still hasn't figured this out. It's appalling how bad Teams is, years later.
Anytime I see a teams link in a calendar event, I groan loudly.
This thread is much needed therapy. Teams is truly awful on so many levels.
For the actual talks, of course, most of these conferences use Teams to send out Zoom links. Using Teams for those would be a disaster.