“Native” Microsoft Teams performance on M1 Macs
Disclaimer: Near-native on top of Chromium engine
I started to use the M1 Macbook Air as my main work machine in early 2021. Apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint that belong to the Microsoft Office suite are able to support Apple Silicon not very long after the M1 machine's debut, which I’m happy about.
But, one interestingly annoying problem is that Microsoft Teams is the only app that somehow left behind still requires Rosetta 2 to run on M1 Macs until today (23 Sept 2021).
Performance Issues
Running Microsoft Teams with Rosetta 2 translation suffers. Performance issues like slow app startup time, slow button click feedback, chat history search lag or hang, and even sometimes freeze.
Basically, everything is slow.
Workaround
The web version of Microsoft Teams actually is also a Progressive Web App (PWA). In order to get a better experience on M1 Macs:
- First, you need to install Microsoft Edge that can runs natively on your Mac.
- Visit teams.microsoft.com and log in to your Microsoft account.
- Click the
...button and go to theAppssection, you will seeInstall This Site as an App, click that to finish the PWA installation on your device.
After you complete the installation, you can use it like all other apps on your Mac devices. Here is the comparison between the PWA version and the Intel build version of Microsoft Teams.
There are only a few minor differences in the top navigation section UI, other than that, most of the UI and UX are the same.
Performance Boost
I’ve done a few ‘quick and unscientific’ tests, the startup time is around 3 to 16 seconds faster. The response time for any UI element click is 1 to 3 seconds faster.
Speaking of memory consumption, here is a simple comparison:
PWA version very likely consumes 22% less memory.
Hope this article helps, and hopefully, the native build of Microsoft Teams can roll out as soon as possible, even though these latest community discussions show something weird about Microsoft not upgrading Electron.
But, from my own speculation, Microsoft is actually working on Teams 2.0 which they already publicly announce that they are moving away from Electron and embrace Edge WebView 2.
Let’s wait and see.
