Why?

I have written about Microsoft Teams before (in German), how horrible a user experience it is and so on. Let me tell you, it hasn’t gotten any better. Only “newer”.

Remember, Microsoft loves Linux now. Right? Or so people, including apparently MS itself, keep bullshitting around all the time all the while WSL is a horrendous trap — albeit a technically interesting one (especially v1) — to ensnare Linux-curious devs on Windows. They love Linux so much that less than 18 months (2022-11-07) ago they announced that they were going to throw out the — by that time already utterly outdated ¹ — Linux Teams app and pushed Linux users to the so-called PWA ². 🤮

And now we’re plagued with the “New Teams” (Microsoft’s PR-lingo) on Windows and literally no option left on Linux. Great, Microsoft loves Linux, right?! 🤦

What the flying F, Microsoft? Really? Why? 🖕

Microsoft makes it deliberately nigh-impossible to continue using the PWA which they — no 18 months ago — shoved down the throats of everyone who wasn’t using Windows.

Never mind that Teams has gotten progressively ³ crappier over the years. Microsoft hadn’t even managed to get it to work the same in the — non-Microsoft — browser as in the “old” app ⁴ the same way. Heck, they didn’t even manage that the desktop app and the PWA in Edge, Chrome and Firefox worked consistently compared to each other. A feature working or not was was good as the lottery, just felt like even fewer winning tickets.

And now that the “New Teams” is being shoved down the throats of millions of involuntary ⁵ users, based on the Edge WebView2 which — surprise surprise — is nothing other than yet another Chromium-based “foundation” ⁶, just like Electron was in “old” Teams.

Once you install the Teams desktop application, it appears, approximately 70% of your CPU resources and at least several GiB of RAM are being reserved for it. It’s an incredible resource hog indeed. It’s either running a build or attending that video call. Pick either one.

I sincerely hope that the anti-trust authorities step in as soon as possible to put an end to this. Although arguably it is probably too late by now. Alternative solutions ⁷ have been all but pushed out of the market by Teams. The fact that many companies struggled to accommodate the home office workers starting in 2022, helped Teams as the apparent “gratis” solution to become the de facto standard. Competitors have been hampered by the loss of of income from the potential customers that ended up using “gratis” Teams. But even the push for “Teams Premium” starting last years doesn’t seem to have hampered Teams’ conquest.

// Oliver

PS: use the following filters from the “My Filters” tab in uBlock₀ on a browser that allows uBlock₀ to work to its full potential:

teams.microsoft.com##div#ngdialog1
teams.microsoft.com##.app-switcher
teams.microsoft.com##.ngdialog-overlay
teams.microsoft.com##.app-switcher-install-by-policy-dialog.ts-modal-dialog.ngdialog
teams.microsoft.com##.app-switcher-warning.link-banner.dark-banner.warning-error-banner.banner-show.app-notification-banner

1. to the best of my knowledge it had never even left beta status … mind you, this was the same code base with Electron and the rest on the server side! [↩]
2. progressive web app, aka teams.microsoft.com [↩]
3. ah, there we go with the progressive in PWA! [↩]
4. which is just an embellished browser engine anyway … [↩]
5. because the crap is mandated by their respective employers [↩]
6. arguably in the spirit of what IE used to be with the IE web view being available to third-party applications [↩]
7. and in many aspects better ones [↩]