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LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

lab.allotropia.de

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Re: LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

#113

Post by jeroenhd »

Had to try Bromite to get it working well, but I'm seriously impressed by how fast this is on mobile (Snapdragon 855). Everything just seems to work, except the mobile keyboard because the browser doesn't know what to do with it or when to show it. If it works on my phone, this should run great on most modern flagships to the point of it almost being usable!

Quite an impressive feat to compile a complex program like this into WASM, this could be very useful for things like automatically scanning documents with macros for suspicious behaviour inside companies that run LibreOffice because of the near-perfect sandbox WASM provides.

The 300MB download can seriously use a progress indicator, though.

Re: LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

#114

Post by einpoklum »

noduerme wrote: post #103
einpoklum wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please file bugs about these issues at: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/ (but first search for pre-existing reports about them.) Also consider donating to the project, and writing relevant people (e.g. Engineering Steering Council?), petitioning them to work on the quality of M1 support.

I'll give it another go and file what I see. I can't recall exactly what problems I ran into, but I remember having trouble with choppy scrolling and some UI elements appearing blurred. But I'll need to play with it again. It was awhile ago. I'm always happy to support a project if I end up using it ;)

I've filed something like... well, probably over 60 bugs related to RTL, Hebrew, and Arabic support (in addition to many others). In my experience, something like... maybe half or so have gotten some traction on them within a year of filing, and many have been completely resolved. Sometimes even quickly.

Re: LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

#115

Post by jeroenhd »

fouc wrote: post #111

I wonder if title should say "in Chromium-based browsers" rather than "in the browser". Especially when it doesn't run in Firefox or Safari.

It runs relatively well in Firefox on Android, though the UI latency is a bit higher than using the Chromium engine. If Firefox fails, you should check your privacy/scripting settings, because it's working fine for me even with privacy-preserving addons installed.

Of note is that if you're on iOS, all browsers must use Safari as a rendering engine by Apple's decree, so any browser you try is actually just Safari with a skin (no Gecko/Blink). This means you can't run this on iOS, due to Apple's WASM size restrictions, regardless of the browser you try.

Re: LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

#116

Post by vasvir »

fouc wrote: post #111

I wonder if title should say "in Chromium-based browsers" rather than "in the browser". Especially when it doesn't run in Firefox or Safari.

It also works for me in firefox 96 Debian, Linux but it needs some time for downloading...

You can't open local files or save to local files. Open/Save remote crashes...

Pretty impressive though.

Re: LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

#117

Post by patrec »

quux wrote: post #104
xenonite wrote: post #92

FYI: Safari does not work because of Safari's binary size limitations.

So much for write once run anywhere

I'm not too sad if my browser vendor decides they don't want to support someone foisting multi gig executables on me via their webpage. Doesn't even need to be my browser vendor, anyone with enough market share will do. I'm pretty sure you could write a much better office suite¹ than LibreOffice is with a footprint that's closer to 10MiB than 300MiB, and I suspect we're more likely to see such software if browser vendors impose some artificial limits on bloat.

¹Not with full blown internationalization support for languages with very complex text rendering requirements etc., but most people don't need that.

Re: LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

#118

Post by jabiko »

deathanatos wrote: post #41
syrusakbary wrote: post #2

Note that it will download around ~300Mb of data directly to your browser, so it might take a bit to load from slow connections. Here's the related video from FOSDEM: https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/lotech_lowa/

300 MiB. & … "a bit" — it takes nearly 20 seconds on "Gigabit" fiber. (312 MiB in 19.22s, or 136 Mbps.) Runs shockingly smoothly once it starts, though.

It runs smoothly for me when zoomed out but when you zoom in on a page it starts to lag. Nevertheless its quite amazing to see LibreOffice running in the browser.

Re: LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

#119

Post by vasvir »

thorstenb wrote: post #96
rcarmo wrote: post #84

Interesting, since it makes me wonder if it could actually be usable if you stripped out Qt and flattened things "down" to a simpler widget set and rendering engine, but completely unusable on all my machines.

Longer-term, we need to move to browser-native GUI, yep. The nice bits though - the entire document loading, rendering & editing works in the browser now.

What that means though? A VCL backend that targets HMTL5 instead of Qt?

Can you elaborate?

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