Microsoft claims that the Teams for Windows 11 performance appears to have improved in the core usage cases of messaging, calls, and meetings due to code modifications.
Microsoft Teams was originally designed as a group-chat software, but it has evolved into an all-encompassing collaboration platform since 2016. During the COVID-19 epidemic, Microsoft Teams’ popularity skyrocketed, with 145 million daily active users in April 2021, up from 44 million in early 2020. It altered its measurement from daily to monthly in January and claimed to have 270 million monthly active users.
Microsoft’s “Teams 2.0” initiative, which began last year and is still ongoing, has included migrating from the Angular to React HTML/Java JavaScript frameworks and switching from Electron to WebView2, a component of Chromium Edge for integrating web code in a native app.
The most notable changes were to customer experience for users using Teams desktop for messaging, conferencing, and meetings.
Teams for Windows 11 is now much faster
Today, teams’ desktop performance in August 2021 is comparable to that reported in earlier studies. Following are some of the test results showing improved latency and load times for messaging and meeting lags.
Latency
Teams’ latency when scrolling down the chat list has dropped by 11.4%, and channel listing latency has improved by 12.1% in comparison to Messenger, according to Microsoft’s research. Furthermore, the compose message box loads 63 percent faster.
Page load times
Switching to a channel and creating a chat window were 25% faster, as was switching threads in the activity feed (up 17.4%). And changing conversation topics has improved by 3.1%.
Switching faster
The drop in latency when switching between muted and unmuted audio is 16%. Additionally, going to the pre-meeting join screen is considerably faster, as well as moving between meetings to communicate.
How did it get faster?
Mark Langton, a group program manager on Office 365 Microsoft Teams, said, “Investments have included transitioning from Angular framework to React, upgrading Electron (a framework for building desktop applications), reducing re-rendering, and making incremental improvements to the code,” about the update.
He added: “Our desktop, framework, and performance teams made several foundational improvements and our messaging and calling/meeting teams partnered to optimize the code for targeted user experiences we identified as important to the overall experience.”
“Opening a calling/meeting window loaded 4.5% faster. Then once a user is in a meeting switching into a chat improved by 13%, switching to the activity feed improved by 18.7%, and switching to a channel improved by 20%,” says Langton.
Langton said Microsoft tests for Teams used “anonymized data from the 95th percentile of all desktop users in the world (meaning that 95 percent of the time the experience is better than this metric).” It focuses on the 95th percentile to capture “users on low-end devices, users on low bandwidth networks, and incorporate other edge cases that can impact the user experience.”
