A new Microsoft Teams client with an infrastructure rebuilt from scratch is reportedly launching in preview in late March. According to The Verge, work on this new “Teams 2.0” client started years ago, and we’ve already seen it in action already with the new Chat app for Windows 11 that’s powered by the “Teams for Consumers” experience.

Despite some efforts to improve the app’s performance over the years, Microsoft Teams remains a notorious resource hog on PCs and Macs. However, the preview version of Teams 2.0 coming next month has ditched the Electron framework in favor of Microsoft’s Edge-based Webview2 technology and the React JavaScript library.

“The app should use 50 percent less memory, tax the CPU less, and result in better battery life on laptops,” The Verge reports. The preview app launching next month is also said to include a toggle to switch between Teams 2.0 and the existing app, similar to what Microsoft previously used in the preview versions of its Outlook desktop apps.

Microsoft Teams will celebrate its sixth anniversary next month. The app had 270 million monthly active users as of January 2022, making it one of the fastest-growing apps in the Microsoft ecosystem.

Unfortunately, this fast growth also resulted in an app that probably tries to do too much. In addition to performance issues, the bloat is probably the other thing that makes Teams not so great to use for many people. According to The Verge, though, the move to the React Javascript library could lead to “further UI improvements” in the coming months, so there’s a reason to be hopeful.