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Comment by guardiangod | Hacker News Reader

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.

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... 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.

Yeah, just because hardware got incredibly fast doesn't mean slow software is fast now, it just expands tothr available circumstances again

I can always remember thinking 10+ years ago that browsers would never be able to run 'proper' applications like Photoshop and Office, and would just be limited to CRUD style apps (around the times of IE6 when even basic CSS was buggy and hard to get right on multiple browsers).

Now I only use Figma - and never open Photoshop (for UI design). I rarely open MS Office, use google docs without thinking.

Data is still a problem for audio and video apps, because there can be so much of it.

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

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

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

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

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

Mind blown.

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

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.

I wonder if I can run Office 2000 on my current machine. Would require so much less RAM and CPU.

If minesweeper was a 300mb binary. Yes.

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