Microsoft Teams gets a massive changeover with rapid speed and new UI
Microsoft is remodelling its Teams app to make it faster and easier to use. The Team app received a prime update with umpteen performance improvements and UI changes.
In a recent blog post, the company announced that the app has been redesigned.
As per reports, the new app is two times faster than the previous version.
“The new Teams is faster, simpler, and more flexible than ever before,” says Sumi Singh, CVP of engineering for Microsoft Teams, in an interview with The Verge. “We’ve made tremendous strides in performance and usability. The new Teams is 2x faster while using 50 percent fewer resources.”
The usage and importance of video calls during pandemic arose at an alarming rate. To stabilize and meet the user demands, company scale out what they had.
Ever since then feedbacks of slow and problematic team app started arising. However, the company started looking into the matter and this raised the bar of faster and easy app.
Microsoft Team: What’s new?
The existing Microsoft Teams client moved to the React framework but not fully, as it was still using parts of Angular JS. That meant the app has been loading two JavaScript frameworks, which made it a little heavier than it needed to be.
Microsoft has now ditched the Electron foundations of Teams and moved toward Microsoft’s Edge WebView2 technology alongside a full move to the React JavaScript library and a larger focus on the Fluent design language for UI improvements.
“The key benefits observed from the transition from Electron to WebView2 include reduced memory usage and a lowered disk footprint as resources are shared with Edge,” explains Microsoft Teams engineers in a blog post today.
“The decision to transition from AngularJS to React was primarily based on performance characteristics and benchmarking results specific to our use cases. We observed that React has been a better fit for our scenarios and it has been a beneficial move for the application’s overall performance.”
Installing the new Microsoft Teams app should be three times faster and launching or joining meetings two times faster. Microsoft says the new Microsoft Teams should also consume 50 percent less memory and 70 percent less disk space.
Significantly, the new version brings performance improvements, especially if you’re experiencing slowdowns in the current Teams app.
Moreover, in a blog post, company claims to achieve this by making a ground-up investment to overhaul the platform to optimize the data, network, chat, and video architecture for speed and performance.
User Interface
Microsoft has also given Teams a visual refresh to better match Windows 11. The new Teams app now uses native materials like Windows 11’s Mica translucency to feel more like a native Windows app. Microsoft has also changed the canvas color from gray to white and uses less of the purple Teams color throughout.
Microsoft Teams will automatically switch to dark mode now, and the app has group profile pictures and theming.
Availability
Microsoft is targeting the general availability of new app later this year in 2023. In the meantime, the company is encouraging commercial customers to use public preview.
Microsoft claims that it intends to extend the preview release to a broader set of customers, including those using Macs later this year.
