Visual Studio and Teams Get More Native ⇥ mjtsai.com
The senior vice president of Microsoft Teams announced that Teams would be moving to their own Edge Webview2 Rendering Engine ditching Electron for seeking performance gains. It is marketed that Teams would consume 2x less memory as a result of the transition. It would be called Teams 2.0 and might ship with Windows 11 in late 2022.
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Webview2 cannot be thought of as a replacement to Electron; It is not a wrapper like Electron to rapidly ship web apps on the desktop platform. The original Webview (Webview1 for namesake) used Microsoft’s Edge rendering engine while the Webview2 uses the Chrome rendering engine. Webview2 is already used by Outlook as a part of Microsoft’s “One Outlook” project.
Via Michael Tsai:
I’m not sure this makes much difference for Mac users, since it’s still built on Web technologies with a bundled browser engine.
If this is anything like the browser engine used in OneDrive, it might be worse. OneDrive regularly consumes nearly a gigabyte of RAM on my Mac while idling — several times more than the already bloated Electron-powered Dropbox client. When OneDrive syncs files, it helps itself to an entire Intel i7 CPU core and causes the fans to come on.
These issues are well documented, but Microsoft has no incentive to make improvements because anyone who has to rely on OneDrive or Teams for work has no alternative.
I am sure much of that behaviour is not attributable to the choice of browser engine. But I am worried I will soon have two apps I must keep running in the background that monopolize computer resources for trivial tasks.