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Comment by euniceee3 | Hacker News Reader

Only Office can run in a cloud-based capacity. Think Office 365 that is able to be self-hosted.

You can also self-host Office: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/officeonlineserver/office-...

The protocol that connects the office suite to the file sharing platform is called WOPI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Application_Open_Platform_...). OneDrive/Dropbox/Nextcloud all seem to support it.

Seems like Collabora and OnlyOffice are the two big players right now.

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/LibreOffice_...

There have been various efforts to bring LibreOffice to the web, but I haven’t tested anything in a long time, so I can’t say if it works well.

They work quite well, I've been using it (Collabora + "richdocuments" in Nextcloud) for a number of years now.

Why would you want to?

One reason is that it’s more convenient to use on computers you don’t own and can’t install software on, and other is you can share things with people without them needing to install it to view or edit your documents

OK, the first one I can understand. The second one... installing an open-source package that runs on almost everything doesn't seem like that big a deal.

But those are reasonable answers. I would rather see engineering effort go into fixing bugs in the suite, but I realize that the people volunteering to "Web-enable" the software aren't necessarily the ones who'd be fixing unrelated bugs.

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