Hello Shaun,
Well, well. You're really a bit too harsh, but OK, let's be harsh
then.
Skype 8 sucks indeed. Not as a piece of software, but as a
*messenger*. See the difference: a messenger should be fast, light on
CPU and memory usage, and not only accessible, but usable. I'm a huge
fan of Web technologies myself, but here they are in the wrong place.
So let's list what's missing in Skype 8 comparing to Skype 7:
1. Separate chat windows. Yes, this is important when you have a
separate chat with your boss, another one with a project manager,
another one with a group of developers, and a couple personal ones. If
your company uses Skype for work, it is a daily scenario. Can you
manage to cope with it in Skype electron? Yes, you can, but not that
fast. Far not. Commpare pressing Alt+Tab with those cumbersome
gestures in a single window.
2. Performance. My PC is quite old, it has a Core I5 CPU and 4 gigs of
RAM. Skype 7 works like a charm, though with Skype 8 I often have my
fans rotating at high speeds, and the app crashes quite often during
calls. "buy a new machine," could you say. For a messenger? I mean,
really?
3. Sounds are not customizable. I still use classic sounds in Skype 7,
and I'll give you a reason for that: when I'm away from my PC and I
hear that loud old-fashioned phone ringing from my headphones, I know someone wants my
attention in Skype. Was it too hard to implement in a newer version?
I'm 100% sure it was not.
4. Alt+numbers in chats. If you ever talked in a rather crowded group chat
with sighted people, you understand my point:
Tab-Shift-Tab-arrow-up-arrow-down just don't work, you miss messages.
5. Skype 7 has a plethora of settings, like: show or hide animated
emoticons, link previews, user avatars, how to quote messages, what to do on
pressing Enter, and so on, and so forth. Skype 8 left us with a tiny
piece of that settings tree which prevents it from being a
professional messenger.
6. Global hotkeys: someone calls me while I'm working in an IDE, a
word processor, an e-mail client or a sound editor. Do I have to go and
desperately search for a Skype window to pick up the call? Are you
serious?
7. the main interface itself. Again, I don't say it is inaccessible,
but it is far from being *comfortable* to use. Skype was the only and
the last messenger with native-like windows, and now Skype 8 came.
Everyone uses Slack these days. Well, Microsoft said, let's do it like
Slack, maybe they will come back to Skype? It is the same error when
everyone imitates Apple's phone design by removing home buttons and
headphone jacks in a desperate hope that "if we
are like Apple, we will have billions of users". When Skype was
special and particular, everyone used it just because it was
comfortable both for large businesses and for aged people. It was
peer-to-peer, it allowed sending large files, its interface was simple
and its sound quality was decent. Nowadays however amount of Skype
users decreases, and sighted users also complain about Skype 8
interface that is sluggish and drains batteries on laptops and cell
phones.
If they fixed those issues I described, at least partially, it would be
great. I don't blame them for doing it bad, I blame them for choosing
a wrong technology. Electron is not suitable for a messenger, it's a
virtual machine upon another virtual machine, so to say. I wouldn't
blame them even if they provided an API, but they don't,
unfortunately.