17 ms·

LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly

571 points by syrusakbary 5y ago

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
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?
- tempay 5y ago
  I think you're confusing it with OpenOffice. IIRC LibreOffice is mostly C/C++.
  - grandinj 5y ago
    LibreOffice is almost entirely C++, except that there are some extensions written in Java (and some written in python) I say almost, because we still have some QA code used for unit tests that is Java.
  - dtech 5y ago
    LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice, which has been dead for nearly a decade. I doubt they rewrote all of the core functionality.
  - _ea1k 5y ago
    OpenOffice wasn't written in Java either. They did have a few small Java components (for example, HSQL) but it it was predominantly C++.
- wahern 5y ago
  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 https://wiki.qt.io/Qt_for_WebAssembly
  - thorstenb 5y ago
    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 native browser gui.
    - jcelerier 5y ago
      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 :)
    - llornkcor 5y ago
      > Qt clearly deserves the credit for having a WASM runtime that gets us a working GUI toolkit. You're welcome. :) What version of Qt did you use for this demo? Also, for local system file access dialog on Qt wasm, you can use https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qfiledialog.html#getOpenFileContent https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qfiledialog.html#getOpenFileContent
      - llornkcor 5y ago
        Answered my own question by reading the README.wasm.md "We're using Qt 5.15.2 with Emscripten 2.0.31. "
- bzzzt 5y ago
  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.
  - pulse7 5y ago
    It's true, but it is a Java subset - not a complete Java SE.
    - bzzzt 5y ago
      True, but most of the time you don't need a full Java SE stack. Android still has only a Java subset and that hasn't stopped people from writing apps for it.
syrusakbary 5y ago
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/ https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/lotech_lowa/
- lokedhs 5y ago
  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.
  - Epa095 5y ago
    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.
    - hobo_mark 5y ago
      Webtorrent already exists, and does not require wasm. https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent
      - LtdJorge 5y ago
        Could WebRTC be used directly here?
    - RReverser 5y ago
      Or it could apply gzip/brotli + optionally wasm-opt and cut the size ~5-6x: https://twitter.com/RReverser/status/1494435774003093515 https://twitter.com/RReverser/status/1494435774003093515
  - vanviegen 5y ago
    It took about 20s for me, with the fans spinning up around halfway through. Once loaded it feels fairly usable, considering...
kingcharles 5y ago
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...
- Mandatum 5y ago
  You still got the source?
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    No. I wouldn't want to inflict that upon anyone. I'm more bummed that I let the domains expire, especially the short one which was o-w.com.
    - selcuka 5y ago
      > I'm more bummed that I let the domains expire, especially the short one which was o-w.com. It's ironic that you could've made more money than you would have gotten from VCs with that domain name. You probably didn't know that back then.
      - kingcharles 5y ago
        Ha, no. 3 letter dotcoms were still worthless in 1998, I don't think they were quite all used up. Especially ones with a hyphen in them. Going back to 1994 I owned a whole bunch of domains that later got sold for 7 digits. All dotcoms were free in 1994. It was later they started charging for them, so I let them all expire. I'd have been a millionaire many times over if I could have read the future. All those Bitcoins I mined in early 2010 and lost all the keys/wallet.
        selcuka 5y ago
        Sure thing. I meant you could have sold it later, in the 2000s. I remember finding many 3-letter .com domains in 1996/97 but didn't want to shell out ~$100/year or whatever netsol was asking for those days.
bobajeff 5y ago
This also runs in Brave for Android.
est 5y ago
- natively - in the browser Are there any non-native thing that runs in a browser?
- dec0dedab0de 5y ago
  Anything that uses a plugin. WebEx comes to mind, in the past I would have thought flash, Java applets, or ActiveX.
- FinalBriefing 5y ago
  "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.
  - qbasic_forever 5y ago
    Jupyter runs natively in the browser now with JupyterLite: https://github.com/jupyterlite/jupyterlite https://github.com/jupyterlite/jupyterlite It can use a native browser JS kernel, or some languages that have been converted to run in the browser with WASM (including a full python environment called pyodide). Nothing is run on a server. VS Code also runs natively in the browser now: https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2021/10/20/vscode-dev https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2021/10/20/vscode-dev This uses a Chrome only (for now) filesystem access API to give the browser access to your native files--you can edit them entirely in the browser with nothing happening on a server.
    - DustinBrett 5y ago
      I believe recently Safari added some support for the File System Access API. https://caniuse.com/native-filesystem-api https://caniuse.com/native-filesystem-api
  - est 5y ago
    So we call it "locally" then.
NicoJuicy 5y ago
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 has it, please share. It's pretty old news by now).
- pjmlp 5y ago
  They still do, the Excel engine is the native one. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/podcast/advancing-excel-as-a-programming-language-with-andy-gordon-and-simon-peyton-jones/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/podcast/advancing-e...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
guessbest 5y ago
I think openoffice did something like this before Microsoft did https://www.zdnet.com/article/browser-based-openoffice-org-released/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/browser-based-openoffice-org-r...
hendry 5y ago
A great reason not to have Web Assembly.
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  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.
  - vbezhenar 5y ago
    How do I run flatpak on iPhone?
    - encryptluks2 5y ago
      You encourage Apple to implement a sandboxing API and a Linux compatibility layer. Even Windows has made progress with WSL.
      - noduerme 5y ago
        Fuggedabout it. That would undermine their whole business model. Knowing Apple, I wouldn't be surprised if they remove WASM support from mobile Safari on the grounds that it's "bad for battery life".
        nottorp 5y ago
  - csunbird 5y ago
    I am seriously thinking about creating a silly webpage running Firefox another browser (preferably Firefox). But, my experience with C++ is limited, anyone want to pair up?
noduerme 5y ago
Going to "Open..." a file seems to show a whole Android filesystem. Is this actually running some minimal version of Android in WASM?
- syrusakbary 5y ago
  I believe it's been compiled with Emscripten under the hood. So it's using the Virtual FS provided there.
  - thorstenb 5y ago
    Yep
cable2600 5y ago
I think LibreOffice on the desktop loads faster. I use LibreOffice under Ubuntu and Windows 10 for writing books and documentation.
- vasili111 5y ago
  Lately I checked Libre Writer on Windows 10 it had problem with kerning (not equal distance between letters) which made text looking quite bad. Did they fixed it?
function_seven 5y ago
Spell check doesn't seem to work. When I manually trigger one, the Dictionary dropdown doesn't have any options to choose from. Does LibreOffice expect the OS or Desktop to provide a dict?
- throw3838 5y ago
  Not from OS, it uses opensource library.
guardiangod 5y ago
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.
- anarcat 5y ago
  ... and it's as slow as on the Celeron! I guess it doesn't crash my entire machine, but that's an implementation detail which we'll surely workaround next.
  - mburee 5y ago
    Yeah, just because hardware got incredibly fast doesn't mean slow software is fast now, it just expands tothr available circumstances again
- qwertox 5y ago
  > 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.
  - claytongulick 5y ago
    I just downloaded and ran it on a galaxy note 10, took about 30 secs over LTE. Mind blown.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    You could already do that in 2011, just had to install Flash with CrossBridge, use Chrome with PNaCL, Silverlight,....
- squarefoot 5y ago
  It also had its own desktop/file manager back then. Good thing they removed it, although I often thought it could have been a nice optional feature to make small dedicated office machines that would load a very light OS image with the bare minimum necessary to run it without an underlying desktop manager.
Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
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?
- khan-saib 5y ago
- tmpfs 5y ago
  This doesn't sound right to me, are you running your WASM in a worker so it doesn't block the main UI thread?
  - Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
    I require a Go UI library(ebiten) so wasm cannot be initialized and run purely via a worker, But I've tried executing the timer inside a Goroutine with a handler as recommended by Go team but no dice[1]. There are others who have complained the same on SO. [1] https://github.com/golang/go/issues/41310 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/41310
- miohtama 5y ago
  WebAssembly is having/going to have threads https://github.com/WebAssembly/threads https://github.com/WebAssembly/threads
  - Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
    Go hasn't enabled it since it's still in proposal stages[1], Hence my question was regarding it's implementation using other languages and general experience of it. [1] https://github.com/golang/go/issues/28631 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/28631
tkgally 5y ago
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.)
- euroderf 5y ago
  Same here. Safari, Intel Mac Pro, Monterey 12.2 .
- noduerme 5y ago
  M1 Mac in Firefox, it was very sluggish when it ran (dragging a window around was about 1FPS), but it did run.
- xenonite 5y ago
  Safari sadly does not support the required WebAssembly module sizes.
khan-saib 5y ago
tempay 5y ago
This doesn't seem to be working for me in Firefox or Safari on an M1 mac. Has anyone else had any success or is it only working on Chrome?
- nemetroid 5y ago
  I'm having intermittent success in Firefox on Linux. It loaded successfully once, but most of the time fails with "Module.instantiateWasm callback failed with error: out of memory" in the console.
- YaBomm 5y ago
- tempay 5y ago
  I've just tried again in Firefox it it worked surprisingly well this time.
WelcomeShorty 5y ago
Qt for WebAssembly: soffice Application exit (TypeError: Cannot convert "undefined" to int) Safari (current) on MacOS (current) on a Apple M1
- xenonite 5y ago
  Safari sadly does not support the required WebAssembly module sizes.
- andix 5y ago
  Same on iPad. Maybe it has issues with ARM?
  - jonnycomputer 5y ago
    I had a similar crash on Intel Mac in Firefox, when clicking File>Save Remote
wg0 5y ago
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?
- searchableguy 5y ago
  > Figma would already be doing WebAssembly Yes, they have been for a while. This is their article from 2017 talking about it. I can't find any recent ones. https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-by-3x/ https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-...
- jillesvangurp 5y ago
  Yes, Figma is mostly C++ compiled to WASM with a bit of react on the side for things like the menu. Basically, all the bits that matter are C++.
- chrisjc 5y ago
  > 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?
IceWreck 5y ago
Crashes sometimes but works well
noduerme 5y ago
So... I still use Apache OpenOffice, but it takes about 30 seconds to Rosetta itself every time I launch it on an M1 Mac. For some reason it never caches. The load time on this was actually about the same. I'd try it again from my desktop, but it pains me to think of whoever's paying for the bandwidth on it today.
- unixhero 5y ago
  Why in the world don't you switch to Libre Office?
  - noduerme 5y ago
    I tried it awhile back, but it's also extremely slow on an M1 and I found the UI issues even more annoying than the ones I was used to in OpenOffice.
    - hutzlibu 5y ago
      As far as I understand, apache open office is not really in active developement, unlike libre office. So maybe try it again at some point. (the main developers left open office to fork it as libre office, after oracle aquired sun and open office with it, but destroyed it and after it was burned and pretty much without contributers, donated the name to the apache foundation, who for reasons unknown to me, do not want to merge again)
      - hutzlibu 5y ago
        About the reaons of the not happening merger between open office and libre office, it might be because of license issues. LibreOffice is with copyleft and OpenOffice switched to dual licence https://mobile.twitter.com/ApacheOO/status/1316422829202604032 https://mobile.twitter.com/ApacheOO/status/13164228292026040... Frustrating.
    - einpoklum 5y ago
      Please file bugs about these issues at: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/ 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.
apexalpha 5y ago
What the hell. This feels basically native?! I had no idea WebAssembly was this far developed. This feels like electron in reverse, and GOOD.
- yamadapc 5y ago
  It's completely frozen for me (after downloading), but it's very cool for sure
- tbodt 5y ago
  What's your environment? It feels like incredibly poor performance for me (Firefox on macOS)
  - apexalpha 5y ago
    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.
  - capitainenemo 5y ago
    Smooth for me in Firefox on linux too. Maybe check about:support to see if there's any graphics driver issue?
- nottorp 5y ago
  Is Electron the baseline to compare to these days, instead of an actual native app?
  - apexalpha 5y ago
    I meant Electron brought webapps to the Desktop. Now Web Assembly seems to bring native apps to the browser.
    - jslaby 5y ago
      Next step is bring native apps to the desktop. Then we'll be cookin'
squarefoot 5y ago
Impressive, although much slower compared to the native one, at least on this (admittedly not stellar) 4300GE machine: the about window takes like 5 seconds to display, and page scrolling is a lot slower. Also caching doesn't seem to work: if I close it and load it again it seems to start the download/compilation process again, which is both a network and resources hog. Didn't wait for it to complete though, so I can't be 100% sure. Nonetheless an impressive result; I believe we still have to find a killer application for the technology; simply porting native apps to the web, to me beyond the technical accomplishment is the least interesting one, and also dangerous if misused because it encourages the transition to remote applications, which would take away from the users any control on which software they run.
- thorstenb 5y ago
  Caching is a prob, due to the current size - what works here is: * FF: set browser.cache.disk.capacity to something >300MB, then set browser.cache.disk.max_entry_size to at least 150MB * Chrom{e|ium}: start browser from cmdline, via `chromium --disk-cache-dir=/var/tmp/foo --disk-cache-size=2147483647` (I'd not recommend this for production setups, obvsly .. ;))
mikewarot 5y ago
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.
- master-lincoln 5y ago
  Sounds like the upcoming File Access API is exactly what you have in mind https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System_Access_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System...
- stavros 5y ago
  That's not a bug, that's a very deliberate design decision. WASM programs run entirely sandboxed.
- iggldiggl 5y ago
  > Preventing a process from deciding itself which files to access disables so many attack vectors. It also disables a lot of existing use cases and file types (basically any multi-file file format): Multi-part archives, multi-part video files, playlists, videos with separate subtitle files, HTML documents containing links to other local HTML documents or referencing various sub-resources (images/videos/audio/style sheets/scripts/...), Audacity projects, images with metadata in external sidecar files, ditto for georeferenced images, QGIS projects, AutoCAD's lock file implementation, DWG files as such, … Edit: And since we're talking about Office software: Spreadsheets referencing data from other spreadsheets stored in separate files…
  - thorstenb 5y ago
    With LibreOffice, the nice thing is you can chose. if you want all of the above - install the native version.
albertzeyer 5y ago
Application exit (Runtime error: The application has corrupted its heap memory area (address zero)!) After I opened the file open dialog and then clicked cancel.
glandium 5y ago
ISTR there used to be an emscripten asm.js version. It'd be lovely to see a comparison how setting them up differs, what kind of glue each required, and how they compare in performance. But I'd only really expect that if the same people were behind both, which ia probably not the case.
rcarmo 5y ago
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.
- thorstenb 5y ago
  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.
  - vasvir 5y ago
    What that means though? A VCL backend that targets HMTL5 instead of Qt? Can you elaborate?
    - thorstenb 5y ago
      We already use cairo/freetype/skia to do essentially all the document rendering in software (not for the Qt prototype though), so that's not a big leap to get that blitted out. Incrementally then using more of html canvas to speed things up might be next. Most of the work is going to be having the GUI (toolbar/notebook bar, menues, sidebar, dialogs) browser-native of course.
      - anonymouse008 5y ago
        I’ve been seriously impressed with Tokamak for Swift. Is this what you mean for browser native GUI? https://github.com/TokamakUI/Tokamak https://github.com/TokamakUI/Tokamak
einpoklum 5y ago
I don't like the trend of SAAS apps via webassembly, nor that my browser runs something like an office suite.
xenonite 5y ago
FYI: Safari does not work because of Safari's binary size limitations.
- quux 5y ago
  So much for write once run anywhere
  - patrec 5y ago
    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.
amelius 5y ago
I'm hoping someone will port Firefox or Safari to WebAssembly. For fun, but also it could be useful as a double or triple (etc) sandbox.
- danuker 5y ago
  Would also be useful for easier compatibility testing.
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  I don't think Safari and its heavy dependency on macOS will show up on any other platform any time soon. Firefox and the various WebKit browsers though, those should work. Theoretically they already work, as you can run them in JSLinux (the RISCV version or the Windows 2000 compatible versions), but that's a terribly slow method of running the software.
amelius 5y ago
I wonder how Fabrice Bellard's JSLinux demo would perform if he wrote it on top of WebAssembly.
fouc 5y ago
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.
- canbus 5y ago
  It's working OK in Firefox for me on 97.0 (64-bit) in Win10
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  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.
  - sharikous 5y ago
    > Apple's WASM size restrictions What are those? I searched for that and I got no relevant results
  - amelius 5y ago
    > 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.
    - wtetzner 5y ago
      128GB of RAM on iOS?
    - jackson1442 5y ago
      The most expensive iPhone 13 models ship with 6GB of RAM.
jeroenhd 5y ago
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.
- jcelerier 5y ago
  > Had to try Bromite to get it working well, but I'm seriously impressed by how fast this is on mobile (Snapdragon 855). This is so interesting. I tried on my phone, oneplus 8 pro, snapdragon 865 so a little bit above and on a scale that does 1-10 where 1 is "not even in dreams" and 10 is "more-or-less tolerable" I'd rate it a 2 or 3. There's an ostensible slowness when just selecting text for instance. If for you this is fast I don't think you have any idea of how fast an actually fast computer can be and that makes me super sad for you !
phkahler 5y ago
Why? LibreOffice is Free Software and can be run natively on everything. Cloud software is part of a rental model.
FpUser 5y ago
It works, amazing and congrats. On the other hand it lags so much when doing any real editing. It is the best proof that for these type of apps browser as an application platform is that bridge in Brooklyn someone wants to sell me.
blable2 5y ago
My copy/paste stopped working after trying this out.
Asmod4n 5y ago
Sadly saving doesn’t work.
danShumway 5y ago
I don't have time to do a more complete check, but am I wrong in assuming that all of these demos still have basically non-existant accessibility? Last time I looked Qt was still trying to pretend that was the browser's fault. As far as I can tell this seems to still be pushing out blobs of pixels to the canvas. Seems really laggy for me on a 2015 Mac, to the point where I got a few unresponsive page warnings, but resizing at least works, so that's starting to get better. WASM continues to be very impressive/promising, and there's a lot of potential here. I just wish more of these frameworks would leverage the rest of the browser properly.
Kibranoz 5y ago
For me it gives me this Application exit (TypeError: Cannot convert "undefined" to int)
ZetaZero 5y ago
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))
- diegoperini 5y ago
  I had low expectations but that's actually a really nice error message! Well done WASM. No sarcasm.
- gibspaulding 5y ago
  I got a similar error when I clicked "Print": Application exit (RuntimeError: Aborted(native code called abort()))
fnord77 5y ago
isn't libreoffice/star office written in java? so now we have come full circle with a jvm (via wasm) in browsers again
- dt123 5y ago
  No, it's written in C++
mlvljr 5y ago
amelius 5y ago
Firefox "about:performance" tab shows only 714 KB used by the soffice tab. How is this possible?
matt321 5y ago
Now make firefox run inside my edge browser using wasm
- supertrope 5y ago
  You joke but imagine every website bundling its preferred browser. Web developers can just bundle Chrome 123 with their website in lieu of testing in other browsers. Every website will be a 50 MB download. Poly fill on steroids.
Demcox 5y ago
Extremely cool project and execution but it (hardly) runs on my MBP M1 Pro, 16 GB with FF and a 350mbit/s up-down connection and no other tabs open. Actions (clicking, dragging scrolling) takes a full two seconds to happen... Would have loved to play around with it!
- leodriesch 5y ago
  I have the same hardware and was also using Firefox, and I got decent performance (only briefly tried it out though). Maybe it is a settings/extension thing?
ksec 5y ago
A hundred plus comments and not a single mention of GIMP? I think we are close. After COVID, we should be releasing a lot of the emotional attachment to the C programming tools. And by 2025, we should be able to have the Windows version of GIMP running inside Mac versions of Chrome, on top of Wine, X Windows, CC and WASM in Chrome. And since Chrome can be compiled to WASM, we could have GIMP running on Chrome and Chrome running inside Firefox....... And the story ( or history ) continues in the link below. https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
mgerdts 5y ago
Something like this was tried before. The year was ~1995 and the trough of disillusionment for Java applets was far in the future. WordPerfect decided that the future was the web and they wanted in. They ported WordPerfect to Java and and published an applet. The applet was huge (at least 10's of MB), particularly so when fast internet access for most meant a 28.8k modem. After the excruciating wait for it to load, it crashed. I would have been happier if it would have at least flashed a message "don't forget to drink your Ovaltine." A quarter of a century later, this attempt works much better.
- gigel82 5y ago
  Not really the same. WASM is part of the browser and an open web standard. It can be emulated entirely in JavaScript which comes with serious security guarantees. Java applets are in the same category as ActiveX controls, which is basically hosting native code (with all the security issues that entails) in a DOM element.
anonymouse008 5y ago
I'd hate to be receiving the bandwidth bill for this... appears to be on Google Cloud, too; ouch.
jfmc 5y ago
UI is really slow. I wish that anyone takes QT or GTK backends for DOM+wasm seriously. More work should be delegated to the UI components. X-Windows was ugly... but there was a clean separation that was useful.
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
One small detail I can see which already seems like something that some of us would consider signposts to the insanity of this sort of thing: the version in the browser has no access to your system installed fonts.
ivanjermakov 5y ago
I pressed the "print" button to see what happens and it crashed :(
5ESS 5y ago
It doesn’t work on iPhones…
- sohrob 5y ago
  Didn't work on my Mac using the latest Safari either.
  - 5ESS 5y ago
    This should be redone in WebGL1 and WASM to be system independent and working on all devices including iOS and Mac.
mark-r 5y ago
This is a really good technology demonstration. I must admit I still think JSLinux is more impressive.
bacan 5y ago
WASM is not going to happen. Stop pushing it. Also Google Docs, Microsoft and several others have been doing this via JS, since ages.
kag0 5y ago
Wow, it even has a window manager

571 points by syrusakbary 5y ago

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?

tempay 5y ago
I think you're confusing it with OpenOffice. IIRC LibreOffice is mostly C/C++.
- grandinj 5y ago
  LibreOffice is almost entirely C++, except that there are some extensions written in Java (and some written in python) I say almost, because we still have some QA code used for unit tests that is Java.
- dtech 5y ago
  LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice, which has been dead for nearly a decade. I doubt they rewrote all of the core functionality.
- _ea1k 5y ago
  OpenOffice wasn't written in Java either. They did have a few small Java components (for example, HSQL) but it it was predominantly C++.
wahern 5y ago
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 https://wiki.qt.io/Qt_for_WebAssembly
- thorstenb 5y ago
  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 native browser gui.
  - jcelerier 5y ago
    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 :)
  - llornkcor 5y ago
    > Qt clearly deserves the credit for having a WASM runtime that gets us a working GUI toolkit. You're welcome. :) What version of Qt did you use for this demo? Also, for local system file access dialog on Qt wasm, you can use https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qfiledialog.html#getOpenFileContent https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qfiledialog.html#getOpenFileContent
    - llornkcor 5y ago
      Answered my own question by reading the README.wasm.md "We're using Qt 5.15.2 with Emscripten 2.0.31. "
bzzzt 5y ago
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.
- pulse7 5y ago
  It's true, but it is a Java subset - not a complete Java SE.
  - bzzzt 5y ago
    True, but most of the time you don't need a full Java SE stack. Android still has only a Java subset and that hasn't stopped people from writing apps for it.

syrusakbary 5y ago

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/ https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/lotech_lowa/

lokedhs 5y ago
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.
- Epa095 5y ago
  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.
  - hobo_mark 5y ago
    Webtorrent already exists, and does not require wasm. https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent
    - LtdJorge 5y ago
      Could WebRTC be used directly here?
  - RReverser 5y ago
    Or it could apply gzip/brotli + optionally wasm-opt and cut the size ~5-6x: https://twitter.com/RReverser/status/1494435774003093515 https://twitter.com/RReverser/status/1494435774003093515
- vanviegen 5y ago
  It took about 20s for me, with the fans spinning up around halfway through. Once loaded it feels fairly usable, considering...

kingcharles 5y ago

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...

Mandatum 5y ago
You still got the source?
- kingcharles 5y ago
  No. I wouldn't want to inflict that upon anyone. I'm more bummed that I let the domains expire, especially the short one which was o-w.com.
  - selcuka 5y ago
    > I'm more bummed that I let the domains expire, especially the short one which was o-w.com. It's ironic that you could've made more money than you would have gotten from VCs with that domain name. You probably didn't know that back then.
    - kingcharles 5y ago
      Ha, no. 3 letter dotcoms were still worthless in 1998, I don't think they were quite all used up. Especially ones with a hyphen in them. Going back to 1994 I owned a whole bunch of domains that later got sold for 7 digits. All dotcoms were free in 1994. It was later they started charging for them, so I let them all expire. I'd have been a millionaire many times over if I could have read the future. All those Bitcoins I mined in early 2010 and lost all the keys/wallet.
      - selcuka 5y ago
        Sure thing. I meant you could have sold it later, in the 2000s. I remember finding many 3-letter .com domains in 1996/97 but didn't want to shell out ~$100/year or whatever netsol was asking for those days.

bobajeff 5y ago

This also runs in Brave for Android.

est 5y ago

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

dec0dedab0de 5y ago
Anything that uses a plugin. WebEx comes to mind, in the past I would have thought flash, Java applets, or ActiveX.
FinalBriefing 5y ago
"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.
- qbasic_forever 5y ago
  Jupyter runs natively in the browser now with JupyterLite: https://github.com/jupyterlite/jupyterlite https://github.com/jupyterlite/jupyterlite It can use a native browser JS kernel, or some languages that have been converted to run in the browser with WASM (including a full python environment called pyodide). Nothing is run on a server. VS Code also runs natively in the browser now: https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2021/10/20/vscode-dev https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2021/10/20/vscode-dev This uses a Chrome only (for now) filesystem access API to give the browser access to your native files--you can edit them entirely in the browser with nothing happening on a server.
  - DustinBrett 5y ago
    I believe recently Safari added some support for the File System Access API. https://caniuse.com/native-filesystem-api https://caniuse.com/native-filesystem-api
- est 5y ago
  So we call it "locally" then.

NicoJuicy 5y ago

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 has it, please share. It's pretty old news by now).

pjmlp 5y ago
They still do, the Excel engine is the native one. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/podcast/advancing-excel-as-a-programming-language-with-andy-gordon-and-simon-peyton-jones/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/podcast/advancing-e...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

guessbest 5y ago

I think openoffice did something like this before Microsoft did https://www.zdnet.com/article/browser-based-openoffice-org-released/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/browser-based-openoffice-org-r...

hendry 5y ago

A great reason not to have Web Assembly.

encryptluks2 5y ago
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.
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  How do I run flatpak on iPhone?
  - encryptluks2 5y ago
    You encourage Apple to implement a sandboxing API and a Linux compatibility layer. Even Windows has made progress with WSL.
    - noduerme 5y ago
      Fuggedabout it. That would undermine their whole business model. Knowing Apple, I wouldn't be surprised if they remove WASM support from mobile Safari on the grounds that it's "bad for battery life".
      - nottorp 5y ago
- csunbird 5y ago
  I am seriously thinking about creating a silly webpage running Firefox another browser (preferably Firefox). But, my experience with C++ is limited, anyone want to pair up?

noduerme 5y ago

Going to "Open..." a file seems to show a whole Android filesystem. Is this actually running some minimal version of Android in WASM?

syrusakbary 5y ago
I believe it's been compiled with Emscripten under the hood. So it's using the Virtual FS provided there.
- thorstenb 5y ago
  Yep

cable2600 5y ago

I think LibreOffice on the desktop loads faster. I use LibreOffice under Ubuntu and Windows 10 for writing books and documentation.

vasili111 5y ago
Lately I checked Libre Writer on Windows 10 it had problem with kerning (not equal distance between letters) which made text looking quite bad. Did they fixed it?

function_seven 5y ago

Spell check doesn't seem to work. When I manually trigger one, the Dictionary dropdown doesn't have any options to choose from. Does LibreOffice expect the OS or Desktop to provide a dict?

throw3838 5y ago
Not from OS, it uses opensource library.

guardiangod 5y ago

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.

anarcat 5y ago
... and it's as slow as on the Celeron! I guess it doesn't crash my entire machine, but that's an implementation detail which we'll surely workaround next.
- mburee 5y ago
  Yeah, just because hardware got incredibly fast doesn't mean slow software is fast now, it just expands tothr available circumstances again
qwertox 5y ago
> 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.
- claytongulick 5y ago
  I just downloaded and ran it on a galaxy note 10, took about 30 secs over LTE. Mind blown.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  You could already do that in 2011, just had to install Flash with CrossBridge, use Chrome with PNaCL, Silverlight,....
squarefoot 5y ago
It also had its own desktop/file manager back then. Good thing they removed it, although I often thought it could have been a nice optional feature to make small dedicated office machines that would load a very light OS image with the bare minimum necessary to run it without an underlying desktop manager.

Abishek_Muthian 5y ago

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?

khan-saib 5y ago
tmpfs 5y ago
This doesn't sound right to me, are you running your WASM in a worker so it doesn't block the main UI thread?
- Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
  I require a Go UI library(ebiten) so wasm cannot be initialized and run purely via a worker, But I've tried executing the timer inside a Goroutine with a handler as recommended by Go team but no dice[1]. There are others who have complained the same on SO. [1] https://github.com/golang/go/issues/41310 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/41310
miohtama 5y ago
WebAssembly is having/going to have threads https://github.com/WebAssembly/threads https://github.com/WebAssembly/threads
- Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
  Go hasn't enabled it since it's still in proposal stages[1], Hence my question was regarding it's implementation using other languages and general experience of it. [1] https://github.com/golang/go/issues/28631 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/28631

tkgally 5y ago

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.)

euroderf 5y ago
Same here. Safari, Intel Mac Pro, Monterey 12.2 .
noduerme 5y ago
M1 Mac in Firefox, it was very sluggish when it ran (dragging a window around was about 1FPS), but it did run.
xenonite 5y ago
Safari sadly does not support the required WebAssembly module sizes.

khan-saib 5y ago

tempay 5y ago

This doesn't seem to be working for me in Firefox or Safari on an M1 mac. Has anyone else had any success or is it only working on Chrome?

nemetroid 5y ago
I'm having intermittent success in Firefox on Linux. It loaded successfully once, but most of the time fails with "Module.instantiateWasm callback failed with error: out of memory" in the console.
YaBomm 5y ago
tempay 5y ago
I've just tried again in Firefox it it worked surprisingly well this time.

WelcomeShorty 5y ago

Qt for WebAssembly: soffice Application exit (TypeError: Cannot convert "undefined" to int) Safari (current) on MacOS (current) on a Apple M1

xenonite 5y ago
Safari sadly does not support the required WebAssembly module sizes.
andix 5y ago
Same on iPad. Maybe it has issues with ARM?
- jonnycomputer 5y ago
  I had a similar crash on Intel Mac in Firefox, when clicking File>Save Remote

wg0 5y ago

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?

searchableguy 5y ago
> Figma would already be doing WebAssembly Yes, they have been for a while. This is their article from 2017 talking about it. I can't find any recent ones. https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-by-3x/ https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-...
jillesvangurp 5y ago
Yes, Figma is mostly C++ compiled to WASM with a bit of react on the side for things like the menu. Basically, all the bits that matter are C++.
chrisjc 5y ago
> 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?

IceWreck 5y ago

Crashes sometimes but works well

noduerme 5y ago

So... I still use Apache OpenOffice, but it takes about 30 seconds to Rosetta itself every time I launch it on an M1 Mac. For some reason it never caches. The load time on this was actually about the same. I'd try it again from my desktop, but it pains me to think of whoever's paying for the bandwidth on it today.

unixhero 5y ago
Why in the world don't you switch to Libre Office?
- noduerme 5y ago
  I tried it awhile back, but it's also extremely slow on an M1 and I found the UI issues even more annoying than the ones I was used to in OpenOffice.
  - hutzlibu 5y ago
    As far as I understand, apache open office is not really in active developement, unlike libre office. So maybe try it again at some point. (the main developers left open office to fork it as libre office, after oracle aquired sun and open office with it, but destroyed it and after it was burned and pretty much without contributers, donated the name to the apache foundation, who for reasons unknown to me, do not want to merge again)
    - hutzlibu 5y ago
      About the reaons of the not happening merger between open office and libre office, it might be because of license issues. LibreOffice is with copyleft and OpenOffice switched to dual licence https://mobile.twitter.com/ApacheOO/status/1316422829202604032 https://mobile.twitter.com/ApacheOO/status/13164228292026040... Frustrating.
  - einpoklum 5y ago
    Please file bugs about these issues at: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/ 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.

apexalpha 5y ago

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

yamadapc 5y ago
It's completely frozen for me (after downloading), but it's very cool for sure
tbodt 5y ago
What's your environment? It feels like incredibly poor performance for me (Firefox on macOS)
- apexalpha 5y ago
  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.
- capitainenemo 5y ago
  Smooth for me in Firefox on linux too. Maybe check about:support to see if there's any graphics driver issue?
nottorp 5y ago
Is Electron the baseline to compare to these days, instead of an actual native app?
- apexalpha 5y ago
  I meant Electron brought webapps to the Desktop. Now Web Assembly seems to bring native apps to the browser.
  - jslaby 5y ago
    Next step is bring native apps to the desktop. Then we'll be cookin'

squarefoot 5y ago

Impressive, although much slower compared to the native one, at least on this (admittedly not stellar) 4300GE machine: the about window takes like 5 seconds to display, and page scrolling is a lot slower. Also caching doesn't seem to work: if I close it and load it again it seems to start the download/compilation process again, which is both a network and resources hog. Didn't wait for it to complete though, so I can't be 100% sure. Nonetheless an impressive result; I believe we still have to find a killer application for the technology; simply porting native apps to the web, to me beyond the technical accomplishment is the least interesting one, and also dangerous if misused because it encourages the transition to remote applications, which would take away from the users any control on which software they run.

thorstenb 5y ago
Caching is a prob, due to the current size - what works here is: * FF: set browser.cache.disk.capacity to something >300MB, then set browser.cache.disk.max_entry_size to at least 150MB * Chrom{e|ium}: start browser from cmdline, via `chromium --disk-cache-dir=/var/tmp/foo --disk-cache-size=2147483647` (I'd not recommend this for production setups, obvsly .. ;))

mikewarot 5y ago

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.

master-lincoln 5y ago
Sounds like the upcoming File Access API is exactly what you have in mind https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System_Access_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System...
stavros 5y ago
That's not a bug, that's a very deliberate design decision. WASM programs run entirely sandboxed.
iggldiggl 5y ago
> Preventing a process from deciding itself which files to access disables so many attack vectors. It also disables a lot of existing use cases and file types (basically any multi-file file format): Multi-part archives, multi-part video files, playlists, videos with separate subtitle files, HTML documents containing links to other local HTML documents or referencing various sub-resources (images/videos/audio/style sheets/scripts/...), Audacity projects, images with metadata in external sidecar files, ditto for georeferenced images, QGIS projects, AutoCAD's lock file implementation, DWG files as such, … Edit: And since we're talking about Office software: Spreadsheets referencing data from other spreadsheets stored in separate files…
- thorstenb 5y ago
  With LibreOffice, the nice thing is you can chose. if you want all of the above - install the native version.

albertzeyer 5y ago

Application exit (Runtime error: The application has corrupted its heap memory area (address zero)!) After I opened the file open dialog and then clicked cancel.

glandium 5y ago

ISTR there used to be an emscripten asm.js version. It'd be lovely to see a comparison how setting them up differs, what kind of glue each required, and how they compare in performance. But I'd only really expect that if the same people were behind both, which ia probably not the case.

rcarmo 5y ago

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.

thorstenb 5y ago
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.
- vasvir 5y ago
  What that means though? A VCL backend that targets HMTL5 instead of Qt? Can you elaborate?
  - thorstenb 5y ago
    We already use cairo/freetype/skia to do essentially all the document rendering in software (not for the Qt prototype though), so that's not a big leap to get that blitted out. Incrementally then using more of html canvas to speed things up might be next. Most of the work is going to be having the GUI (toolbar/notebook bar, menues, sidebar, dialogs) browser-native of course.
    - anonymouse008 5y ago
      I’ve been seriously impressed with Tokamak for Swift. Is this what you mean for browser native GUI? https://github.com/TokamakUI/Tokamak https://github.com/TokamakUI/Tokamak

einpoklum 5y ago

I don't like the trend of SAAS apps via webassembly, nor that my browser runs something like an office suite.

xenonite 5y ago

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

quux 5y ago
So much for write once run anywhere
- patrec 5y ago
  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.

amelius 5y ago

I'm hoping someone will port Firefox or Safari to WebAssembly. For fun, but also it could be useful as a double or triple (etc) sandbox.

danuker 5y ago
Would also be useful for easier compatibility testing.
jeroenhd 5y ago
I don't think Safari and its heavy dependency on macOS will show up on any other platform any time soon. Firefox and the various WebKit browsers though, those should work. Theoretically they already work, as you can run them in JSLinux (the RISCV version or the Windows 2000 compatible versions), but that's a terribly slow method of running the software.

amelius 5y ago

I wonder how Fabrice Bellard's JSLinux demo would perform if he wrote it on top of WebAssembly.

fouc 5y ago

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.

canbus 5y ago
It's working OK in Firefox for me on 97.0 (64-bit) in Win10
jeroenhd 5y ago
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.
- sharikous 5y ago
  > Apple's WASM size restrictions What are those? I searched for that and I got no relevant results
- amelius 5y ago
  > 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.
  - wtetzner 5y ago
    128GB of RAM on iOS?
  - jackson1442 5y ago
    The most expensive iPhone 13 models ship with 6GB of RAM.

jeroenhd 5y ago

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.

jcelerier 5y ago
> Had to try Bromite to get it working well, but I'm seriously impressed by how fast this is on mobile (Snapdragon 855). This is so interesting. I tried on my phone, oneplus 8 pro, snapdragon 865 so a little bit above and on a scale that does 1-10 where 1 is "not even in dreams" and 10 is "more-or-less tolerable" I'd rate it a 2 or 3. There's an ostensible slowness when just selecting text for instance. If for you this is fast I don't think you have any idea of how fast an actually fast computer can be and that makes me super sad for you !

phkahler 5y ago

Why? LibreOffice is Free Software and can be run natively on everything. Cloud software is part of a rental model.

FpUser 5y ago

It works, amazing and congrats. On the other hand it lags so much when doing any real editing. It is the best proof that for these type of apps browser as an application platform is that bridge in Brooklyn someone wants to sell me.

blable2 5y ago

My copy/paste stopped working after trying this out.

Asmod4n 5y ago

Sadly saving doesn’t work.

danShumway 5y ago

I don't have time to do a more complete check, but am I wrong in assuming that all of these demos still have basically non-existant accessibility? Last time I looked Qt was still trying to pretend that was the browser's fault. As far as I can tell this seems to still be pushing out blobs of pixels to the canvas. Seems really laggy for me on a 2015 Mac, to the point where I got a few unresponsive page warnings, but resizing at least works, so that's starting to get better. WASM continues to be very impressive/promising, and there's a lot of potential here. I just wish more of these frameworks would leverage the rest of the browser properly.

Kibranoz 5y ago

For me it gives me this Application exit (TypeError: Cannot convert "undefined" to int)

ZetaZero 5y ago

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))

diegoperini 5y ago
I had low expectations but that's actually a really nice error message! Well done WASM. No sarcasm.
gibspaulding 5y ago
I got a similar error when I clicked "Print": Application exit (RuntimeError: Aborted(native code called abort()))

fnord77 5y ago

isn't libreoffice/star office written in java? so now we have come full circle with a jvm (via wasm) in browsers again

dt123 5y ago
No, it's written in C++

mlvljr 5y ago

amelius 5y ago

Firefox "about:performance" tab shows only 714 KB used by the soffice tab. How is this possible?

matt321 5y ago

Now make firefox run inside my edge browser using wasm

supertrope 5y ago
You joke but imagine every website bundling its preferred browser. Web developers can just bundle Chrome 123 with their website in lieu of testing in other browsers. Every website will be a 50 MB download. Poly fill on steroids.

Demcox 5y ago

Extremely cool project and execution but it (hardly) runs on my MBP M1 Pro, 16 GB with FF and a 350mbit/s up-down connection and no other tabs open. Actions (clicking, dragging scrolling) takes a full two seconds to happen... Would have loved to play around with it!

leodriesch 5y ago
I have the same hardware and was also using Firefox, and I got decent performance (only briefly tried it out though). Maybe it is a settings/extension thing?

ksec 5y ago

A hundred plus comments and not a single mention of GIMP? I think we are close. After COVID, we should be releasing a lot of the emotional attachment to the C programming tools. And by 2025, we should be able to have the Windows version of GIMP running inside Mac versions of Chrome, on top of Wine, X Windows, CC and WASM in Chrome. And since Chrome can be compiled to WASM, we could have GIMP running on Chrome and Chrome running inside Firefox....... And the story ( or history ) continues in the link below. https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

mgerdts 5y ago

Something like this was tried before. The year was ~1995 and the trough of disillusionment for Java applets was far in the future. WordPerfect decided that the future was the web and they wanted in. They ported WordPerfect to Java and and published an applet. The applet was huge (at least 10's of MB), particularly so when fast internet access for most meant a 28.8k modem. After the excruciating wait for it to load, it crashed. I would have been happier if it would have at least flashed a message "don't forget to drink your Ovaltine." A quarter of a century later, this attempt works much better.

gigel82 5y ago
Not really the same. WASM is part of the browser and an open web standard. It can be emulated entirely in JavaScript which comes with serious security guarantees. Java applets are in the same category as ActiveX controls, which is basically hosting native code (with all the security issues that entails) in a DOM element.

anonymouse008 5y ago

I'd hate to be receiving the bandwidth bill for this... appears to be on Google Cloud, too; ouch.

jfmc 5y ago

UI is really slow. I wish that anyone takes QT or GTK backends for DOM+wasm seriously. More work should be delegated to the UI components. X-Windows was ugly... but there was a clean separation that was useful.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

One small detail I can see which already seems like something that some of us would consider signposts to the insanity of this sort of thing: the version in the browser has no access to your system installed fonts.

ivanjermakov 5y ago

I pressed the "print" button to see what happens and it crashed :(

5ESS 5y ago

It doesn’t work on iPhones…

sohrob 5y ago
Didn't work on my Mac using the latest Safari either.
- 5ESS 5y ago
  This should be redone in WebGL1 and WASM to be system independent and working on all devices including iOS and Mac.

mark-r 5y ago

This is a really good technology demonstration. I must admit I still think JSLinux is more impressive.

bacan 5y ago

WASM is not going to happen. Stop pushing it. Also Google Docs, Microsoft and several others have been doing this via JS, since ages.

kag0 5y ago

Wow, it even has a window manager