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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

#71

Post by mynameismon »

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.

Funny, it took me approximately triple the time on a 60 Mbps connection. Makes me wonder if its throttled from source due to a network overload.

Re: LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

#72

Post by the_biot »

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 remember it as well -- found it astonishing that it took up half the CPU just idling. Star Office was just a truly awful product. Literally the only interesting thing about it was that it was free.

Re: LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

#73

Post by mikewarot »

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 have the "PowerBox" that is required to make a modern capability based operating system.

Preventing a process from deciding itself which files to access disables so many attack vectors.

Re: LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

#74

Post by apexalpha »

tbodt wrote: post #67
apexalpha wrote: post #64

What the hell. This feels basically native?! I had no idea WebAssembly was this far developed. This feels like electron in reverse, and GOOD.

What's your environment? It feels like incredibly poor performance for me (Firefox on macOS)

Firefox 97 on Ubuntu 20.04.

It took a while to load, but the site is probably seeing heavy loads. But afterwards it feels like a native application.

Re: LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

#75

Post by Epa095 »

lokedhs wrote: post #12
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/

Even with a fast connection, it takes a very long time. I'm guessing the site is overloaded as the peak was a few tens of Mb/s, and generally much slower.

Makes me wonder if it is possible/usefull to make the download a two step process, first download a small wasm bittorrent client, then use it to download (and share) the 300mb file.

Re: LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

#77

Post by dtech »

tempay wrote: post #46
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #44

Wait... Isn't LO a Java application? Have we created a new way to shove Java into a browser, but this time with the JVM itself inside the browser ?

I think you're confusing it with OpenOffice. IIRC LibreOffice is mostly C/C++.

LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice, which has been dead for nearly a decade. I doubt they rewrote all of the core functionality.

Re: LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

#78

Post by comboy »

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.

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.

Re: LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

#80

Post by bzzzt »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #44

Wait... Isn't LO a Java application? Have we created a new way to shove Java into a browser, but this time with the JVM itself inside the browser ?

You don't need a JVM to run Java code in the browser since there's a VM already. There's TeaVM which compiles Java bytecode to WASM.
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