The web client is a horrible experience on the Mac. The design decisions of the group that put it together are horrible. Why in the world did they think that sticking the app to the corner of my screen is okay? Why does it follow me across every workspace? Why do they insist on interacting with the application in a different way than every other application on my machine?

If you want to make a webapp, fine, make a webapp and leave it in my browser like every other webapp. If you want to make a native client, make a native client. Don't do this half-assed crap that does nothing well.

Are you using the Hangouts extension? Yea, I hate that. Don't use it. I just use Hangouts in Gmail.

this in itself illustrates one of the problems with hangouts... why are there these two different ways of running it? where am I told which to use? how do I explain to my grandma that she shouldn't be using an "extension" but if she wants to video chat with me, she has to ... go to her email?? it's all very, very confusing

Huh? You can video chat with the extension. All versions of Hangouts are basically the same, your Grandma wouldn't be able to tell the difference nor would she care.

You can move it from the corner and it'll act like any other chrome window.

Yep, that was one of the first things I did to make it somewhat usable, but besides that: - it sometimes spontaneously re-aranges windows in a completely useless way - windows go blank, sometimes requiring to disable/enable the extension multiple times - it sometimes closes your chat windows with your unsubmitted messages if the internet is down - it sometimes keeps looking like you've got unread messages somewhere when you don't

But still the fact that I can use it on the desktop and the android client is pretty ok, makes me use it.

For me the killer feature of hangout is that it's a "better Skype". With the exact same contact with whom I'd typically Skype back in the days, Google Hangout gives a better quality video/audio (which I take it is due to better/faster compression/decompression algorithms but I may be mistaken on that).

Not my experience at all. Video quality as far as I can tell is equivalent, and the Skype UX is miles better. Full screen with the little self-view monitoring window at the bottom -- great experience.

My parents-in-law still can't figure out how to get on their G+ account to use Hangouts, but for them Skype is second-nature. Open it, click on the contact, phone rings, presto, we're chatting.

Agreed. Mightytext (sms on desktop) has been my go-to since I found it a month ago. Surprised it isn't more widely used.