5 ms·

Microsoft Word, Pages and Open Office don't seem to be bottlenecked by rendering performance like Google Docs. Perhaps the browser is the wrong platform for doc

by hctaw 5y ago

Microsoft Word, Pages and Open Office don't seem to be bottlenecked by rendering performance like Google Docs. Perhaps the browser is the wrong platform for document editing.

refulgentis 5y ago
Microsoft Word and Pages both also have web apps, for years, that are 'bottlenecked by rendering performance' (would put it as 'clearly would be improved by better rendering performance', as you're noting)
silicon2401 5y ago
I believe this 100%. After using google office for years (just because it's free and cloud-based), I recently tried MS Word and Excel recently at work. The different was mind-blowing. I forgot just how functional and straightforward MS Office is compared to the clunky, barebones google options. If I wanted a desktop-first, cloud-backed solution, what would be the most future-proof and durable? Can I use Open Office across OSes? What would be the best cloud backup service these days? (just a general question to readers)
- thayne 5y ago
  > Can I use Open Office across OSes? I would recommend Libreoffice over Openoffice, but yes (for both) And you can of course backup to your cloud service of choice. The main benefit of google docs, o365, etc. Is real-time collaboration. But there is no reason why a desktop app couldn't support realtime collaboration with a suitable backend service.
  - richardwhiuk 5y ago
    There are lots of reasons.
    - moshmosh 5y ago
      There must be exactly zero reasons—not lots—why they can't, since some native applications do, in fact, support realtime collaboration.
  - silicon2401 5y ago
    What do you prefer about Libreoffice? I've used both once or twice but not enough to really learn anything about them
    - teddyh 5y ago
      LibreOffice is an actual active project; OpenOffice is a political ghost entity.
      - silicon2401 5y ago
        Very good to know, thanks!
  - deckard1 5y ago
    The only time I've ever seen real-time Google Docs collaboration has been during meetings which should have been an email. Total waste of everyone's time. Not to mention the horrible UX of people constantly moving their cursor around and moving text around. I'd suggest that pass-the-baton style collaboration would be a much better UX if you absolutely must collaborate real-time on creating a document. Which I find the premise to be incredibly dubious to begin with.
    - thayne 5y ago
      Even if actual realtime collaboration is rare, there are other collaboration features that are missing in most desktop equivalents, like getting notified of changes, being able to mention people in comments, etc. that I do see used quite a bit. But my experience is that realtime collaboration is useful. In particular, immediately after emailing a doc to multiple people it is not at all unusual for more than one person to be actively looking at commenting on, and maybe changing the document at the same time.
- nvrspyx 5y ago
  I prefer LibreOffice over Open Office, but I believe both are cross-platform (Linux, Windows, macOS). Then, I'd just use Dropbox or similar to save the files to for cloud storage. The only downside is no real-time collaboration. You can also look into Collabora, but I don't have any experience with it. If you don't require Linux support or if the web is tolerable for Linux, I personally recommend the Microsoft Office suite. There's the obvious compatibility concern because nearly everyone uses those, they have real-time collaboration built in for both desktop and the web, comes with OneDrive storage, and will obviously be extremely future-proof. I cannot recall a single time any of the apps have crashed on me on both Windows and macOS, so I think it's pretty "durable".
  - ska 5y ago
    > The only downside is no real-time collaboration. This isn't a small thing for many users.
    - BlueTemplar 5y ago
      IMHO HTML documents backed by a versioning system (probably fossil or pijul rather than the overly complex git) are the way forward for documents where content is much more important than presentation.
      - Gaelan 5y ago
        While “text in a VCS” is a great option, it’s obviously far less usable than something like Google Docs, and you still don’t get real-time collaboration, which can be really nice.
        BlueTemplar 5y ago
        Yeah... I'm wondering though, Fossil is based on SQLite - a database - and databases are designed to solve the issues arising when multiple users try to change the same data. (Also, fossil by default works in "autosync" mode.) So it should be "easy(er)" to make a real-time collaboration tool based on Fossil ? P.S.: By researching this, I've stumbled on a (barebones) alternative to Google Docs : HackMD/CodiMD/HedgeDoc : https://demo.hedgedoc.org/ https://demo.hedgedoc.org/
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  I also prefer desktop-first, cloud-backed solutions, but I have quite the opposite experience. Working with MS Office has been a pain and I've been a happy Google Docs user for about 10 years. My wife who isn't an especially technical person also finds Google Docs quite a lot more intuitive and laments when she has to use MS Office products for work (she is a consultant for Microsoft including their 365 line of business and her whole firm makes pitch decks in Google Slides before converting them to MS Office to present at Microsoft meetings--IIRC for the Azure and other b2b lines of business they don't even bother with MS Office). Note that my wife and I (like most of our age group) grew up on MS office, so it's not a question of familiarity. Google Docs just built a better product and MS Office still hasn't caught up. I wonder if this is because or in spite of the browser target?
  - highwind 5y ago
    What makes Google Docs a better product than MS Office? Can you provide some examples of features that are better in Google Docs?
    - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
      Copy a few cells from a Google sheet and paste it in an email, then do the same with Excel. Collaborate on building out a document from scratch with 10 people in Google sheets vs Excel. Excel is a monster, and much more powerful than Google sheets in many ways, but in my experience, Google docs apps are a little better for collaboration, and they integrate a little tighter with each other.
      - hctaw 5y ago
        Google docs is their document editor. Sheets is a part of GSuite. I've also never had trouble pasting a spreedsheet selection into a word document. Email is a nightmare in general though. I'm not sold on collaboration personally. I've had to do it a bunch since the pandemic began and I've found it to be an anti pattern. One of the big inconsistencies is that cells in sheets don't update while being edited while collaborating, which is not great if you have a spreadsheet heavy workflow. Docs is impossible to replace that though, because it's auto formatting is draconian and always seems to reset its preferences. When editing docs we spend more time formatting them then creating the content.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Maybe an heresy around here, Microsoft Office with SharePoint backed server.
  - marcodave 5y ago
    A free OneDrive account is enough, plus Office 2016+ autosave function, with the added bonus to have a cloud version of word to edit in collaboration your document on the go
- nightpool 5y ago
  I have had the exact opposite experience—I've used Google Docs for 10 years now, and in every way it manages to exceed Microsoft Office in usability. You're right that Google Docs can sometimes feel a little barebones, but it makes up for it by being very easy and straight-forward to use. In 10 years of using Google Docs, I can count on one hand—across probably tens of thousands of documents—the amount of times I've been missing something so critical to my work that I've needed to use an Office product. (That said, I'm really excited about the recent changes Microsoft is making for Excel, with LET and LAMBDA, and I look forward to trying it out again in the future. Maybe this is the thing that finally gets me to switch! I've also enjoyed doing some more ~fancy~ graphic design in Pages on Mac, but overall the clunkiness was just so frustrating that I can't in good faith recommend it to anyone)
- antaviana 5y ago
  The best approach for a desktop first cloud-backed solution is possibly to have a VDI with Windows (on AWS for example), and use Microsoft Remote Desktop from your preferred physical computer to access it. I have multiple desktop Macs in my various homes but I only use them for web browsing and RDP to the same Windows VDI.
larodi 5y ago
It was indeed a very strong marketing move for... decades to convince people, like smart people, that document editing can be a web-based thing. Actually, now that the browser is so ubiquitous that GUIs sit on top of it (think Electron), then is time to ask the very obvious question - since everyone seems to agree that universal GUI is needed (proof: the browser) then is the browser the right universal GUI? Not being heavily biased by any vendor, but really, is there anything better than XAML to describe user interfaces, that is also cross-platform and does not have the burden of DOM? Please - share examples.
- josephg 5y ago
  > then is the browser the right universal GUI? Absolutely not; but the web has became the behemoth it is through an absurd amount of money and engineering work. Chrome (well, Chromium) has 34 million lines of code now[1]. If we assume any competing universal GUI platform will need a similar amount of engineering effort, there's a very small list of companies in the world who have the resources to fund an effort like that. And Apple, Microsoft and Facebook have very little strategic incentive to care. (React Native notwithstanding). Google is trying with Flutter - but we'll see. I wonder if maybe the the right direction is up. WASM is already supported by all major browser engines. I'd love to see a lower level layout & rendering API for the browser, exposed to wasm. We could do to the DOM what Vulcan did to OpenGL. And like opengl, if it was designed right, you should be able to reimplement the DOM on top in (native wasm) library code. Then the universal GUI of the future could be the gutted out shell of a web browser (we'd just need wasm + the low level layout engine), running libraries for whatever UI framework you want to use, written in any language you like. A UI environment like that would be small, portable and fast. [1] https://www.openhub.net/p/chrome/analyses/latest/languages_summary https://www.openhub.net/p/chrome/analyses/latest/languages_s...
  - PoignardAzur 5y ago
    I really like that scenario, but I don't think market forces are moving towards it. Then again, we got wasm, and that feels like a miracle in itself.
tomjen3 5y ago
Google docs is worth it for the coorporation, but if you are writting for yourself, or anything seriously it is simply not good enough, but I don't think the performance is the issue.
BlueTemplar 5y ago
The browser is the wrong platform for anything that isn't an HTML document, and not only for performance reasons, but perhaps much more importantly : for interface reasons. For instance : in your typical windowed program, when you press "Alt", it's supposed to show the Menu, which you can then quickly navigate using keyboard shortcuts. You can't do that properly inside the browser because it's going to conflict with the browser's own Alt-Menu.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  Based on inspecting the DOM of the read-only preview document they link to, my guess is that they will be using traditional DOM elements for much of the editing UI. There appear to be many empty DOM elements that are there to hold various toolbars and other UI elements. And for what it's worth, there seem to be empty DOM elements intended to be read by screen readers.
tshaddox 5y ago
This mode of argument seems odd to me. Google is announcing a solution to the problems they were having with the platform. Wouldn't the criticism "Perhaps the browser is the wrong platform for document editing" only be appropriate if Google was complaining that they have been unable to fix the problems? The fact that, while developing for a given platform, you can encounter problems and fix them, doesn't seem to imply that there's something wrong with your choice of platform.

by hctaw 5y ago

Microsoft Word, Pages and Open Office don't seem to be bottlenecked by rendering performance like Google Docs. Perhaps the browser is the wrong platform for document editing.

refulgentis 5y ago

Microsoft Word and Pages both also have web apps, for years, that are 'bottlenecked by rendering performance' (would put it as 'clearly would be improved by better rendering performance', as you're noting)

silicon2401 5y ago

I believe this 100%. After using google office for years (just because it's free and cloud-based), I recently tried MS Word and Excel recently at work. The different was mind-blowing. I forgot just how functional and straightforward MS Office is compared to the clunky, barebones google options. If I wanted a desktop-first, cloud-backed solution, what would be the most future-proof and durable? Can I use Open Office across OSes? What would be the best cloud backup service these days? (just a general question to readers)

thayne 5y ago
> Can I use Open Office across OSes? I would recommend Libreoffice over Openoffice, but yes (for both) And you can of course backup to your cloud service of choice. The main benefit of google docs, o365, etc. Is real-time collaboration. But there is no reason why a desktop app couldn't support realtime collaboration with a suitable backend service.
- richardwhiuk 5y ago
  There are lots of reasons.
  - moshmosh 5y ago
    There must be exactly zero reasons—not lots—why they can't, since some native applications do, in fact, support realtime collaboration.
- silicon2401 5y ago
  What do you prefer about Libreoffice? I've used both once or twice but not enough to really learn anything about them
  - teddyh 5y ago
    LibreOffice is an actual active project; OpenOffice is a political ghost entity.
    - silicon2401 5y ago
      Very good to know, thanks!
- deckard1 5y ago
  The only time I've ever seen real-time Google Docs collaboration has been during meetings which should have been an email. Total waste of everyone's time. Not to mention the horrible UX of people constantly moving their cursor around and moving text around. I'd suggest that pass-the-baton style collaboration would be a much better UX if you absolutely must collaborate real-time on creating a document. Which I find the premise to be incredibly dubious to begin with.
  - thayne 5y ago
    Even if actual realtime collaboration is rare, there are other collaboration features that are missing in most desktop equivalents, like getting notified of changes, being able to mention people in comments, etc. that I do see used quite a bit. But my experience is that realtime collaboration is useful. In particular, immediately after emailing a doc to multiple people it is not at all unusual for more than one person to be actively looking at commenting on, and maybe changing the document at the same time.
nvrspyx 5y ago
I prefer LibreOffice over Open Office, but I believe both are cross-platform (Linux, Windows, macOS). Then, I'd just use Dropbox or similar to save the files to for cloud storage. The only downside is no real-time collaboration. You can also look into Collabora, but I don't have any experience with it. If you don't require Linux support or if the web is tolerable for Linux, I personally recommend the Microsoft Office suite. There's the obvious compatibility concern because nearly everyone uses those, they have real-time collaboration built in for both desktop and the web, comes with OneDrive storage, and will obviously be extremely future-proof. I cannot recall a single time any of the apps have crashed on me on both Windows and macOS, so I think it's pretty "durable".
- ska 5y ago
  > The only downside is no real-time collaboration. This isn't a small thing for many users.
  - BlueTemplar 5y ago
    IMHO HTML documents backed by a versioning system (probably fossil or pijul rather than the overly complex git) are the way forward for documents where content is much more important than presentation.
    - Gaelan 5y ago
      While “text in a VCS” is a great option, it’s obviously far less usable than something like Google Docs, and you still don’t get real-time collaboration, which can be really nice.
      - BlueTemplar 5y ago
        Yeah... I'm wondering though, Fossil is based on SQLite - a database - and databases are designed to solve the issues arising when multiple users try to change the same data. (Also, fossil by default works in "autosync" mode.) So it should be "easy(er)" to make a real-time collaboration tool based on Fossil ? P.S.: By researching this, I've stumbled on a (barebones) alternative to Google Docs : HackMD/CodiMD/HedgeDoc : https://demo.hedgedoc.org/ https://demo.hedgedoc.org/
throwaway894345 5y ago
I also prefer desktop-first, cloud-backed solutions, but I have quite the opposite experience. Working with MS Office has been a pain and I've been a happy Google Docs user for about 10 years. My wife who isn't an especially technical person also finds Google Docs quite a lot more intuitive and laments when she has to use MS Office products for work (she is a consultant for Microsoft including their 365 line of business and her whole firm makes pitch decks in Google Slides before converting them to MS Office to present at Microsoft meetings--IIRC for the Azure and other b2b lines of business they don't even bother with MS Office). Note that my wife and I (like most of our age group) grew up on MS office, so it's not a question of familiarity. Google Docs just built a better product and MS Office still hasn't caught up. I wonder if this is because or in spite of the browser target?
- highwind 5y ago
  What makes Google Docs a better product than MS Office? Can you provide some examples of features that are better in Google Docs?
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
    Copy a few cells from a Google sheet and paste it in an email, then do the same with Excel. Collaborate on building out a document from scratch with 10 people in Google sheets vs Excel. Excel is a monster, and much more powerful than Google sheets in many ways, but in my experience, Google docs apps are a little better for collaboration, and they integrate a little tighter with each other.
    - hctaw 5y ago
      Google docs is their document editor. Sheets is a part of GSuite. I've also never had trouble pasting a spreedsheet selection into a word document. Email is a nightmare in general though. I'm not sold on collaboration personally. I've had to do it a bunch since the pandemic began and I've found it to be an anti pattern. One of the big inconsistencies is that cells in sheets don't update while being edited while collaborating, which is not great if you have a spreadsheet heavy workflow. Docs is impossible to replace that though, because it's auto formatting is draconian and always seems to reset its preferences. When editing docs we spend more time formatting them then creating the content.
pjmlp 5y ago
Maybe an heresy around here, Microsoft Office with SharePoint backed server.
- marcodave 5y ago
  A free OneDrive account is enough, plus Office 2016+ autosave function, with the added bonus to have a cloud version of word to edit in collaboration your document on the go
nightpool 5y ago
I have had the exact opposite experience—I've used Google Docs for 10 years now, and in every way it manages to exceed Microsoft Office in usability. You're right that Google Docs can sometimes feel a little barebones, but it makes up for it by being very easy and straight-forward to use. In 10 years of using Google Docs, I can count on one hand—across probably tens of thousands of documents—the amount of times I've been missing something so critical to my work that I've needed to use an Office product. (That said, I'm really excited about the recent changes Microsoft is making for Excel, with LET and LAMBDA, and I look forward to trying it out again in the future. Maybe this is the thing that finally gets me to switch! I've also enjoyed doing some more ~fancy~ graphic design in Pages on Mac, but overall the clunkiness was just so frustrating that I can't in good faith recommend it to anyone)
antaviana 5y ago
The best approach for a desktop first cloud-backed solution is possibly to have a VDI with Windows (on AWS for example), and use Microsoft Remote Desktop from your preferred physical computer to access it. I have multiple desktop Macs in my various homes but I only use them for web browsing and RDP to the same Windows VDI.

larodi 5y ago

It was indeed a very strong marketing move for... decades to convince people, like smart people, that document editing can be a web-based thing. Actually, now that the browser is so ubiquitous that GUIs sit on top of it (think Electron), then is time to ask the very obvious question - since everyone seems to agree that universal GUI is needed (proof: the browser) then is the browser the right universal GUI? Not being heavily biased by any vendor, but really, is there anything better than XAML to describe user interfaces, that is also cross-platform and does not have the burden of DOM? Please - share examples.

josephg 5y ago
> then is the browser the right universal GUI? Absolutely not; but the web has became the behemoth it is through an absurd amount of money and engineering work. Chrome (well, Chromium) has 34 million lines of code now[1]. If we assume any competing universal GUI platform will need a similar amount of engineering effort, there's a very small list of companies in the world who have the resources to fund an effort like that. And Apple, Microsoft and Facebook have very little strategic incentive to care. (React Native notwithstanding). Google is trying with Flutter - but we'll see. I wonder if maybe the the right direction is up. WASM is already supported by all major browser engines. I'd love to see a lower level layout & rendering API for the browser, exposed to wasm. We could do to the DOM what Vulcan did to OpenGL. And like opengl, if it was designed right, you should be able to reimplement the DOM on top in (native wasm) library code. Then the universal GUI of the future could be the gutted out shell of a web browser (we'd just need wasm + the low level layout engine), running libraries for whatever UI framework you want to use, written in any language you like. A UI environment like that would be small, portable and fast. [1] https://www.openhub.net/p/chrome/analyses/latest/languages_summary https://www.openhub.net/p/chrome/analyses/latest/languages_s...
- PoignardAzur 5y ago
  I really like that scenario, but I don't think market forces are moving towards it. Then again, we got wasm, and that feels like a miracle in itself.

tomjen3 5y ago

Google docs is worth it for the coorporation, but if you are writting for yourself, or anything seriously it is simply not good enough, but I don't think the performance is the issue.

BlueTemplar 5y ago

The browser is the wrong platform for anything that isn't an HTML document, and not only for performance reasons, but perhaps much more importantly : for interface reasons. For instance : in your typical windowed program, when you press "Alt", it's supposed to show the Menu, which you can then quickly navigate using keyboard shortcuts. You can't do that properly inside the browser because it's going to conflict with the browser's own Alt-Menu.

tshaddox 5y ago
Based on inspecting the DOM of the read-only preview document they link to, my guess is that they will be using traditional DOM elements for much of the editing UI. There appear to be many empty DOM elements that are there to hold various toolbars and other UI elements. And for what it's worth, there seem to be empty DOM elements intended to be read by screen readers.

tshaddox 5y ago

This mode of argument seems odd to me. Google is announcing a solution to the problems they were having with the platform. Wouldn't the criticism "Perhaps the browser is the wrong platform for document editing" only be appropriate if Google was complaining that they have been unable to fix the problems? The fact that, while developing for a given platform, you can encounter problems and fix them, doesn't seem to imply that there's something wrong with your choice of platform.