Max Glenister

… Google Hangouts for Chrome needs some work.

Problems

It keeps randomly uninstalling itself

Is this a feature? Perhaps its a productivity enhancement? Either way it’s annoying, and reason enough to drop Hangouts from my Mac and go back to Messages.app

It reinstalls itself after you’ve actively uninstalled it

I mean seriously. I could understand if this was an issue with my Google profile getting out of sync between my various computers, but as of this morning none of my installations of Chrome had Hangouts installed, I updated to Chrome 29 and then Hangouts was magically back in my toolbar.

It uses a lot of resources over time

I’ve experienced Chrome slow-downs due to Hangouts, running out of RAM (though Mountain Lion is probably to blame in this case), and generally the Hangout windows being slow/unresponsive until they’re reloaded.

It has some major interaction/integration issues

This is how Google promote the desktop windows of Google Hangouts for Chrome:

This is how it is in reality:

The biggest problems:

• New windows are invasive, they popup in front of whatever you’re doing
• Existing windows practically shout at you for attention, no way to control the notification sound or turn off message flashing
• The windows popup in front of everything, even the dock on OS X
• In their minimised state they’re still on top of everything, so the bottom/right side of the screen is unusable
• They don’t have a presence in the dock, except as windows of Chrome.app
• As it’s a Chrome window, if you cmd+tab between another program and “Chrome” (read: Hangouts) you can find yourself being focussed on the wrong window

Don’t get me wrong, I love Hangouts

I still stand by my post back when Hangouts was announced, but they’ve got to fix the Google Chrome version of Hangouts.

For now, I’m going back to Messages.app, as bad as it is, it works.