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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

#141

Post by jcelerier »

thorstenb wrote: post #101
wahern wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's mostly written in C++, and the bulk of the effort which made this possible should probably be credited to Qt: https://wiki.qt.io/Qt_for_WebAssembly

Qt clearly deserves the credit for having a WASM runtime that gets us a working GUI toolkit. But this was still a gigaton of work to pull off inside LibreOffice (starting many years ago, actually natively using Qt as one of the GUI toolkits in the code, over to porting the build system, how the mainloop runs etc etc). Also note that using Qt here is mostly a shortcut to get a demo out, longer-term we'd want to use na…

Side note: is there a way to get that Qt version of libreoffice somewhere on the desktop ? It's one of the only non-Qt apps I sometimes use :)

Re: LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

#142

Post by martinald »

guardiangod wrote: post #30

I remember when LibreOffice was called Star Office and would run like molasses on a Celeron 300A OC to 450mhz machine. The office suite would take up most of the ram and eventually crash due to system resource exhaustion. Now we can run the whole thing in a browser like it's Minesweeper. Wow.

I can always remember thinking 10+ years ago that browsers would never be able to run 'proper' applications like Photoshop and Office, and would just be limited to CRUD style apps (around the times of IE6 when even basic CSS was buggy and hard to get right on multiple browsers).

Now I only use Figma - and never open Photoshop (for UI design). I rarely open MS Office, use google docs without thinking.

Re: LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

#143

Post by amelius »

jeroenhd wrote: post #115
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…

> This means you can't run this on iOS, due to Apple's WASM size restrictions, regardless of the browser you try.

What is this? I paid for x GB of RAM and now Apple prevents me from using it?

Edit: abstracted away actual memory size.

Re: LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

#144

Post by chrisjc »

wg0 wrote: post #52

Oh man.. Incredible. eBPF, WebAssembly are going to change the software landscape significantly. Question - if whole office suite can be loaded, I suppose Figma would already be doing WebAssembly?

> if whole office suite can be loaded, I suppose Figma would already be doing WebAssembly?

Sorry, but out of the loop here. What is the relationship between Figma and WebAssembly? Why would Figma already being doing it?

Re: LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

#146

Post by gpvos »

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.

I haven't tried much yet, but it seems to work fine for me in FF97 on W10 and a modern but not extremely fancy laptop.

Re: LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

#147

Post by latexr »

y4mi wrote: post #135
sgjohnson wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Runs shockingly smoothly once it starts, though. On what hardware? I've got a 2019 MacBook Pro with i9 and 32 GB of RAM, and there's a noticable delay (I'd guess 200~400-ish miliseconds) when clicking any elements with Firefox or Chrome.

Works fine on my current work windows laptop, 16gb ram with some budget low electricity use processor. Probably just apple not supporting anything web related as usual.

> Probably just apple not supporting anything web related as usual.

The comment you’re replying to specifically mentioned Firefox and Chrome, no mention of Safari.

Re: LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

#148

Post by diegoperini »

ZetaZero wrote: post #145

I typed in two words, then tried to copy/paste: Application exit (RuntimeError: Aborted(Assertion failed: pTrans, at: /home/libo/src/core/vcl/qt5/QtClipboard.cxx,104,getContents))

I had low expectations but that's actually a really nice error message! Well done WASM. No sarcasm.

Re: LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

#149

Post by vitiral »

mikewarot wrote: post #73

The fact that it runs at all is an amazing achievement. Kudos to the team that managed to shoehorn it in. What is likely to be seen as a bug by others, is actually the thing that gives me hope. There's no way for a WebAssembly program to access the host file system. I hope it stays that way. If the Wasm host can, in a foolproof and easy to verify way, offer the user dialog boxes to read/write single files... we'd hav…

It would work differently. Libre office would think it was accessing a local file, but really it would be whatever the JavaScript tells it exists. So you might be able to implement a rudimentary online doc and storage system using this if your users could suffer tab sizes of 300MiB for every open doc.

Re: LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

#150

Post by cyanydeez »

comboy wrote: post #78
deathanatos wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Progress bar would be nice, without these comments I would have no idea whether to wait or not thinking that maybe it got stuck in a loop downloading the same thing over and over again or something.

when i built my webapp with tons of packages, i tried to figure out if we could hook into the browser, but theres really no way that i found, my solutioj was to just make webpack split the bundles into chunks then have them announce themselves and a loading screen would tally
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