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Comment by smartmic | Hacker News Reader

I still cannot wrap my head around why so many folks want to use such applications in a web browser.

For me, web browser applications never reach the responsiveness and ease of use of well crafted desktop applications written in any decent systems programming language or even interpreted languages (not speaking of Javascript). Maybe I am getting old, but having the browser as a platform for programs is huge setback for many criteria that I personally value.

For example, as a free Excel alternative, I fall back to Gnumeric (http://www.gnumeric.org/) from time to time.

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Sharing and collaborative editing. Being able to coordinate some process via a shared spreadsheet in a browser is efficient and resolves all issues of conflicting versions. Think of an overview of who is going to the office on which days this week (useful in times of working from home due to Corona).

Responsiveness is not the primary concern here: good enough is fine for most purposes.

This is not a replacement for a proper spreadsheet editor (I prefer LibreOffice myself); it's a tool to collaborate on tabular data with a group of people and minimal overhead.

Interesting to note that cloud storage and realtime collaboration isn’t 100% tied to a browser-based interface though. Even though many existing apps work like that, there are desktop clients for a bunch of cloud-native SaaS (and even though some of those are Electron).

> resolves all issues of conflicting versions.

But isn't a problem in the browser, because you are always on the same version.

Regular desktop Excel supports multi user collaboration on workbooks saved in onedrive exactly the same as excel online/Google sheets etc do. You can see what other users are working on and their changes are synced instantly. The only annoyance is when one user changes a filter and it changes for everyone.

Using HTMl & CSS for your GUI is orthogonal with collaboration. It's just a hack that people accept

No installation

Multiple tabs/windows

Don't leave the browser

Works-at-all on multiple platforms incl mobile

Deep linking / sharing / bookmarking

App freezes are less common (on network access) and easier to manage when they happen - obviously this is anecdotal and not universal.

More importantly (for Google sheets):

Easy to share

No need to backup

Cross platform (works on Linux)

> No need to backup

You trust Google etc. to never ban your account for any reason, or to stay available 100% of the time without outages?

You trust your hard drive to never fail during crunch time, or Jane Doe in accounting to not lose the flash drive that gets shared around the office every quarter?

I'd take "generally highly available" vs "trusting my local copy" almost all the time. And as for using something like a Git'd Excel document: most people won't do that, and Github can go down, too.

Just because Google Drive isn't perfect, doesn't mean it's not better/easier/more user friendly than what has been the standard for years.

You need to back up your hard drive too.

The point is that you always need to back up. Sure, if you pay Google you can probably rely on them. But it is still best to backup anyways.

It's not an either-or. My argument was for making backups, not cloud vs. local storage.

And Google uses some badly tuned and not understandable by humans, and also constantly changing, machine learning algorithm to decide to serve you or not.

When something goes wrong with this, you have a a fairly small chance that you can reach a human to override, but it will be an overworked underpaid contractor somewhere and your chances will be poor.

If you talk long term (decades), it is quite possible that Google falls out of favor and becomes legacy, like Myspace, with not making that much money anymore. We all know what happened to the Myspace data, they just deleted most of it at some point.

Essentially it's a lottery with your data.

Now a badly maintained hard disk is a data lottery too, but it's not clear to me the chances to retain are that much worse than Google's.

I think it's foolish to shoot down advantages in practicality and fluency of use on the basis of a decades long event for the vast vast majority of use cases. My company hasn't been around for decades and we don't use any particular spreadsheet outside of a select few for more than a couple months at a time. You'd lose all credibility arguing against G-suite on the basis of losing your data/getting your enterprise google account banned, because it would cost the business so much time and confusion relative to the ease of cloud solution.

I've already had disks fail, never had an issue with Google Docs being down, and if it happens I think it will have been worth it.

Registration/Login required(I'll take the installation over that in many cases)

No properly working (or even implemented) keyboard shortcuts; I just tried, Google Sheets tells me to use Ctrl+C etc. but it doesn't do anything, and what's even worse is that the menu item for "insert" doesn't do anything either because Google wants to force me to use the dysfunctional keybinding...thanks I guess

Usually no right click + context menu

Input lag

No offline use possible(remember all the MS/Cloudflare/AWS etc. outages?)

Less control over data, privacy issues

It's an open source tool that you can self host, having none of the problems, or add to your application and when you're doing that, all of what you said already applies.

But yeah, I get why you prefer native programs - I do as well. But the web ones have their place too.

Btw context menu is in google sheets for a long time - I wanted to say a decade, but it might be a little less.

I understand the sentiment, but some of your points are simply not true. Ctrl+C works fine last time I tested GDocs (inc sheets). It also have offline support, and supports right clicking? Input lag is very dependant on the actual application and how it's made AFAIK, albeit it might be more difficult to do it right using web tech. That leaves two arguments (basically privacy arguments). That is not it related to web tech. For example, Adobe CC more or less requires the same login and authentication requirements as other web applications. Some web applications does not require login (pixlr for example). Many desktop applications phone home as well and gather even more information about you and your computer.

Web tech is not the problem in itself - it's how it's used and deployed that can be a problem (like the ads/data "freemium" business model some use BFF which a _few_ users dislike).

I thought we were better than arguing with false arguments and pointing fingers at the wrong problem - well, I guess "hoped" (in a naive sense) is actually more accurate...

> Ctrl+C works fine last time I tested GDocs

Well, it didn't work when I wrote my comment, sorry that it seems to be inconsistent on my setup. Regardless it is still very questionable of Google to make the "insert" menu item do absolutely nothing but show a popup dialogue telling you to use Ctrl-V. It is annoying and comes across as a bit condescending, like some engineer at Google wanted to teach the noobs how it's done properly.

> It also have offline support, and supports right clicking?

I was talking about web apps in general, not just Google. Many web apps don't have any context menu or shortcuts, you have to move the mouse back and forth all the time for the simplest steps.

And what's even worse is that many JS-loaded websites mess with the UI so much that you can't open links in new tabs anymore. I don't even want to know how that can be done unintentionally.

> Adobe CC more or less requires the same login and authentication requirements as other web applications.

You are right there, maybe I conflated the web app trend with the rising amount of user-unfriendly software design.

The insert menu tells you to use the shortcut because browser restrictions make accessing/modifying the clipboard without doing so difficult.

To be fair, Google apps are extreme outliers in SaaS, especially offline support.

> use Ctrl+C etc. but it doesn't do anything

Did you set clipboard events to false in about:config?

Probably. After all, if you don't set that, lots of sites will do stupid things like prevent you from copying, or pasting into certain fields.

But it will break things like Google Sheets.

> Don't leave the browser

For someone saying that they don't like browser-based apps, how is this an advantage? They're presumably not in a browser in the first place.

Just before I even start,I want to mention that I'm a fan of MS Office and don't really like Google Sheets ( it's like a toy to me). Having written this,I still do believe that there are millions of people out there for whom browser based spreadsheet application is all they really need. Those aren't people doing tens of thousands of rows manipulations from database extracts.Those are the people who'd have a simple file and do simple things with it. I see a lot of consultants working with it: they create UAT stories,share with multiple users on the client side and everybody knows what's going on.

Because you never use the same desktop, I myself can use up to 10 different devices, it is always easier to access stuff from a webbrowser.

I do agree that the snappiness of Gnumeric is wonderful, and it's easier to do on desktop, nevertheless many desktop apps are worse than web apps.

Available everywhere without installing anything, and I don't need to worry about file formats. With Google Drive I also appreciate that I can write custom functions using javascript which I already know, rather than learn some obscure language.

I tried gnumeric just now and the crappy looking toolbar and the poor autocomplete experience for formula functions was enough to put me off.

> For example, as a free Excel alternative, I fall back to Gnumeric (http://www.gnumeric.org/) from time to time.

Gnumeric is useful, but its GUI is very laggy (more laggy than LibreOffice Calc). Sadly, there NO fast & usable Qt-based alternative to Excell for Linux yet.

As lightweight spreadsheet app for Linux I use Qt-based mtCellEdit[0], which does not support .xls/.xlsx formats & could not fully replace Excell too.

[0] https://github.com/matyler/mtCellEdit

https://calligra.org/sheets/

Is there Qt-only (KDE-free) version of Calligra Sheets?

The browser is very accessible and understandable as an environment as compared to different kinds of desktop environments that exist. Sometimes having an imperfect thing which exists is better than a non-existent perfect thing. Sure, a web application will never be as snappier as a native application, but it can be built, deployed and maintained by a much smaller team than what would be required for supporting desktop applications for multiple environments. If it feels 'good enough' to the users, they won't care.

>Sure, a web application will never be as snappier as a native application, but it can be built, deployed and maintained by a much smaller team than what would be required for supporting desktop applications for multiple environments.

A webapp has a wide range of operational costs that a native app doesn't. I can't see why a modern webapp would be cheaper to develop as well with similar programming languages. Their advantage comes mainly from the lack of the need to install software, and for the data to be accessible by every device.

I am a big fan and user of keyboard shortcuts, and web apps make using those either weird and inconsistent with what you'd expect, or simply impossible. A user interface without support for keyboard shortcuts is not viable for productive use imho.

Web apps built with modern frameworks often can't even be used by Vim plugins in the browser, either because scrolling doesn't work, or the frameworks and scripts do so much black magic in the background that not a single button in the GUI is recognised as clickable element by the Vim plugin. Broken by design.

Not to mention all the performance issues and productivity blockers thanks to tracking, no support for right click(and its context menus) etc., instead we get animations which also add input lag to everything because it looks fancy.

I think it really depends on the scenario:

# Scenario 1 You are using one device where all your apps are installed or you have permission to install anything you want. You will find this in smaller companies with BYOD policy.

# Scenario 2 You are using a lot of different devices and/or regularly have to work with a new device that is only setup with the basic applications. It is not possible or allowed to just install any app. You will find this in enterprise businesses with a lot of policies about devices and workflows.

For #1 a solid desktop app is probably preferable but for #2 (prerequisite is a stable and fast internet connection) you can start working immediately when all necessary apps and data is available online.

Also there could be web apps that benefit from a spreadsheet which is more than just a basic grid view.

A tabular, instantly updating set of information is one I'm frequently discussing with groups of people online, it is ridiculously handy even with the overhead of a web browser slowing things down, if it's updating live. Of course a secure and easy to set up way to do it without the browser would be great as well.

> well crafted desktop applications written in any decent systems programming language or even interpreted languages (not speaking of Javascript).

These generally cost more money to develop/require ITs permission to be installed/get features slower.

Why would you use interpreted languages but not JavaScript?

Well, like it or not it helps a lot with web first exp. and also with collaboration.

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