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LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

lab.allotropia.de

31–40 of 216 posts

Re: LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

#31
post #15

A great reason not to have Web Assembly.

I agree. Before you know it they'll be creating browsers to run in the browser to run browsers to run browsers in the browsers in the browsers. On a more serious note, Flatpak and other sandboxing solutions make 100% more sense than using something that already leaks way too much in order to sandbox apps.

How do I run flatpak on iPhone?

Re: LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

#32

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.

> Now we can run the whole thing in a browser like it's Minesweeper. Wow.

I don't know what you're trying to say with this. I'm currently asking myself if it is really slow to compile/load, of if uBlock Origin broke something. I'm patiently waiting.

Update: It's kind of amazing to see what can run inside a browser.

Re: LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Before you know it they'll be creating browsers to run in the browser to run browsers to run browsers in the browsers in the browsers. On a more serious note, Flatpak and other sandboxing solutions make 100% more sense than using something that already leaks way too much in order to sandbox apps.

How do I run flatpak on iPhone?

You encourage Apple to implement a sandboxing API and a Linux compatibility layer. Even Windows has made progress with WSL.

Re: LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

#34
post #32

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.

> Now we can run the whole thing in a browser like it's Minesweeper. Wow. I don't know what you're trying to say with this. I'm currently asking myself if it is really slow to compile/load, of if uBlock Origin broke something. I'm patiently waiting. Update: It's kind of amazing to see what can run inside a browser.

I just downloaded and ran it on a galaxy note 10, took about 30 secs over LTE.

Mind blown.

Re: LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

#35

Wow, things have come full circle. I built and launched a browser-based office suite in about 1998 called Office Wherever that used a Java Applet. VCs laughed us out of every meeting.. "No-one will put their private documents on the Internet! You're mad!" WHO'S MAD NOW, HUH? Huh? Huh...

> "No-one will put their private documents on the Internet! You're mad!" I miss the days when people had this much common sense.

Indeed, people have got used to running their stuff on other people's machines.

Re: LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

#36
post #8

- natively - in the browser Are there any non-native thing that runs in a browser?

"Notebooks" like Jupyter, or Github Spaces and VS Code for the web, where a lot of the processing runs on a remote server, and the result is displayed in the browser.

So we call it "locally" then.

Re: LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

#37
I started experimenting with Go-WASM recently and learnt that writing non-blocking code is very crucial, Timer even inside a Goroutine blocks & crashes WASM. Leading me to use unreliable JS timers(albeit mitigating it with a worker) and performing only non-blocking compute on WASM.

Is this just a consequence of using Go for WASM(i.e. lack of WASM threads), What are people who built LibreOffice in WASM or Doom3 using? Can Go-level concurrency be achieved with WASM threads when programmed with other languages?

Re: LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

#38
In Safari on iPadOS and MacOS, after a minute or two of downloading, I got the following message:

Application exit (TypeError: Cannot convert "undefined" to int)

The page did finish loading and compiling in Chrome on my Mac. Menus, text input, etc. seemed to work but were sluggish, just as the standalone LibreOffice was for me on my ten-year-old MacBook Pro. (It works fine on my M1 Mac mini.)

Re: LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

#39
post #32

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.

> Now we can run the whole thing in a browser like it's Minesweeper. Wow. I don't know what you're trying to say with this. I'm currently asking myself if it is really slow to compile/load, of if uBlock Origin broke something. I'm patiently waiting. Update: It's kind of amazing to see what can run inside a browser.

You could already do that in 2011, just had to install Flash with CrossBridge, use Chrome with PNaCL, Silverlight,....

Re: LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

#40

I can't find it anymore, but related and interesting is office 365. To have a quick online version of office, they ran the eve/dll's in the cloud and send it back to the end user. While it most definitely worked, it was definitely expensive as a first version. But it was too stop Google with their online office suite, as they didn't had an online response yet. ( Searched for the source, but can't find it. If anyone h…

They still do, the Excel engine is the native one.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/podcast/advancing-e...

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