Microsoft Teams 2.0 To Ease Performance Hell

Microsoft is poised to release a major update to Microsoft Teams, which promises to vastly improve the performance of the software.

Microsoft Teams shot to prominence during the pandemic, when many employees were suddenly forced to work from home. However, it has picked up an unwanted reputation for being a sluggish resource hog, particularly on older computers.

Microsoft Teams 2.0 will consume half the memory, put less strain on the CPU, and will consequently do less damage to laptop battery life, according to a report from Microsoft watcher Tom Warren on The Verge.

Moving Teams off Electron

The performance improvements will be the result of a complete rewrite of the Microsoft Teams client. Teams is moving away from the much derided Electron architecture to Microsoft’s own WebView 2 technology.

Electron has become widely used in app development circles over the past few years, largely because it makes it easier to reuse code across multiple platforms. However, that often comes at the expense of performance.

Electron apps are essentially a website without the address bar. They’re built on top of the Chromium engine that powers Google Chrome, but every Electron app requires its own Chromium back-end, meaning there’s lots of duplication of code on people’s computers. Electron also has a habit of building up huge multi-gigabyte caches of temporary files, adding to the bloat.

By switching to the WebView 2 technology, Microsoft is confident it can trim much of that fat.

Microsoft has already begun rolling out the updated software in the Microsoft Teams app that is bundled with Windows 11, but a full preview of the new app will emerge at the end of next month, according to The Verge.

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