If you use web conferencing services to view other peoples’ desktops, you know how clunky they often feel. Long load times, heavy demands on your CPU, browser incompatibilities at launch – no fun. That’s why it’s exciting to see web office company Zoho launch a new lightweight HTML5 web conference viewer that runs in the browser. It seems to run really well, too.
Zoho said this morning that the new viewing option is faster than the company’s Java, ActiveX and Flash options, it’s secure and can play nicely with corporate firewalls. Presenters can set up meetings to display in HTML5 by default, but this new option is only for viewers. Participants seeking to present their own desktops will need to switch to the Java or ActiveX options.
There’s a demo available at this link. It’s not clear to me whether this viewer can be embedded in other web pages like Zoho’s Flash version can be. The demo page asks you if you’d like to install the Java app but you don’t need to just to view it. That prompt really ought to be fixed, if possible.
We wrote about Zipcast from SlideShare in February. That service works quite well, too. It has a more public, broadcasting, feel to it whereas this new Zoho product feels like Webex – just better. Simpler, no doubt, but I know I rarely need advanced features and would trade them for joy of use.
When standard, non-proprietary, lightweight web-based technologies become available for online communication, that’s good for users. It certainly makes me feel like a problem has been solved and I’m ready to see what vendors like this move on to enabling next. Now we’ll see if anyone doing any of the many remote demos I view each week moves off of the big platforms and switches to one of these.
