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The most heard complaint about Microsoft Teams is that it’s sluggish, bloated, slow and uses too much resources. Microsoft didn’t miss out on these critics and placed in on the roadmap. The developers came back with some nice imrpovements.

While the app allows employees to collaborate remotely, Microsoft’s reliance on cross-platform web technologies like Electron means performance isn’t always as good as it would be on Windows if it were a “pure” native app. (Slack, Microsoft’s rival, suffers from the same issue.)

However, it appears that the corporation is making substantial progress in boosting the effectiveness of its Teams app (specifically the business version of Microsoft Teams integrated into Windows 11).

A look at the changes made

In a recent blog post by Mark Longton, he explains how the app’s developers make things a little faster. Longton said the corporation has been working hard for the past year to enhance overall interaction reaction time to provide users with a smoother experience.

In more technical words, the Teams app has switched from Angular to React, improved the Electron build, decreased re-rendering, and made incremental code improvements.

Here is a recap of the highlights. 

  • Latency has decreased by 11.4% when users navigate through the chat list.
  • The ability to scroll through the channel list has been improved by 12.1%.
  • When users transition into a chat or channel, the compose message box loads 63% quicker, allowing them to type a message right away.
  • The time to switch to a channel and launch a chat window was reduced by 25%.
  • The activity feed’s thread switching has been enhanced by 17.4%.
  • The time it takes to switch between chat threads has improved by 3.1%.
  • The mute and unmute audio responsiveness increased by 16% during a call.
  • It takes 9% less time to get to the ‘Pre-meeting join’ screen.
  • Opening a call/meeting window now takes 4.5% less time to load.
  • Switching from a meeting to a chat increased the user’s experience by 13%. Moving to the activity feed increased performance by 18.7%, whereas switching to a channel increased performance by 20%.

While some of those percentages are low, such as only 9% for going to the ‘Pre-meeting join’ page, the overall experience is what matters, and it is evident that Teams is in a better place now than it was a year ago.

Also read: Zoom vs Google Meet vs Microsoft Teams vs Webex Meetings vs BlueJeans