ZetaOffice: LibreOffice in the Browser
zetaoffice.net
zetaoffice.net
Performance is execrable. Text rendering is awful. Input is simply broken (e.g. my Compose key just doesn’t work). Double clicking highlighted the entire canvas thing, as well as the word under the cursor. Right clicking did nothing. Scrolling isn’t captured. The first menu thing I happened to try in the full-UI https://zetaoffice.net/demos/simple-examples/rainbow_writer.... example (Format → Theme, maybe I just picked unfortunately) crashed the whole app (which means that it just stops working mysteriously, leaving the UI in the last state it was in).
And you can’t even get started until it’s downloaded 50MB. (Though I’m actually mildly impressed it’s only that size.)
Seriously, this is completely unusable. It’s “cool tech demo”, but I would hate to actually have to use it.
And I’m pretty sure, based on my rather accurate understanding of how all these things work (comprehensive on the web side, good on the native side, not so much specific about LibreOffice itself), that a lot of this is going to be completely unfixable—though a couple of the things I identified are fairly straightforward to fix, which is if anything a further indictment.
It’s going to be extremely hard to get even decent results without targeting real DOM instead of going pure-canvas, and you can’t get excellent results without doing so.
Sure you can. Google Docs switched to canvas three years ago: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-...
This wasm application renders to canvas and works fine for me: https://bandysc.github.io/AvaloniaVisualBasic6/
This one too: https://flutterweb-wasm.web.app/
Flutter and Google Docs gave up on the DOM because they couldn't get it working well enough, consistently enough across browsers. When you draw to canvas you get more consistent results because you control all the drawing.
And broke CJK and emoji input. They only fixed emoji input recently. CJK is still broken.
"The shorthand collective name for the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean writing systems."?
Flutter… ugh, Flutter on the web is awful awful awful awful awful AWFUL AWFUL and I will hate you if you decide with open eyes to use it when you’re deliberately targeting the web.⁴ I lack energy to express my vitriolic loathing. Just go through https://hn.algolia.com/?query=chrismorgan%20flutter&type=com..., there’s lots of detailed explanation of specifically what’s bad, if you need it.
Avalonia Visual Basic 6? It’s the kind of thing where the limitations will show least, because of how limited it is. And also because it’s imitating (not quite the right word, but close enough) ancient software which itself wouldn’t work fully properly if run on current machines. Its text handling is dodgy, doesn’t do composition properly, scrolling is non-native, context menus are non-native which stops some things from working properly… but honestly that’s kinda the vibe they’re going for, so it’s not particularly upsetting.
Pure-canvas is irredeemably bad. With difficulty you can make some things decent even with it, but excellence is impossible with pure canvas.
Flutter and Google Docs did not give up on DOM for the reasons you cite. Google Docs, I honestly don’t understand why they gave up on DOM, the reasons they cited publicly genuinely don’t make sense. Flutter, it was because they don’t actually care about the web, it’s a third-class target, and too much of the way they design their API doesn’t port to DOM directly, so that making DOM a first-class citizen would have required compromises in their APIs that they were unwilling to make. But it was emphatically not about cross-browser consistency.
—⁂—
¹ Seriously, Google Docs is slower than it used to be, especially with higher latency and jitter.
² The parts they replaced had no consistency problems in any realistic browsers. Seriously. Their layout requirements are, in practice, really basic. The area where consistency can actually be a problem is text shaping and rendering, but they haven’t replaced that since it would tank performance.
³ My favourite example is keyboard navigation. It doesn’t match platform conventions, and that’s really irritating. Since we’re in this thread, LibreOffice also flouts platform conventions in this area, and it’s really irritating.
⁴ If you’re focusing on mobile and make a mobile app with Flutter and also put it on the web with Flutter because why not, better than nothing, I won’t like you very much, but I’ll at least understand. But if you’re saying “we need a web thing, how about we use Flutter”… no.
If you're making an application, there's really nothing special about the DOM.
You might as well control your drawing. That way you don't need to figure out cross browser incompatibilities all day.
And here's what someone who used to work on Google Docs has to say about it:
Use DOM. Please use DOM.
Use canvas for an actual drawing canvas, but for the UI and anything else that’s largely text, use DOM.
I’m describing various specific ways in which it doesn’t work properly, in ways that stop users from doing things they may legitimately want to do, or which will frustrate some users, and you’re just disregarding them. I’m not being vague in most of my complaints, I’m being very specific.
It’s like you have a screw, and it’s worn enough that sometimes it makes the screwdriver slip, but you’re saying “just be careful, maybe apply a little more pressure, and it still works”.
Of course. You're living in a world of your own imagined requirements. The practical reality is that there are plenty of use cases for this stuff, whether you like it or not. This stuff is fit for purpose for many purposes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42252999
You can’t select text in neither of your provided samples on both PC and mobile in different browsers.
I don't know what you're doing.
Text selection and getting it to bring up a keyboard is iffy on the canvas-based things you linked to (I'm looking at them on Firefox for Android on a Pixel 6). Sure, the VB one is a desktop app. But the original (non canvas) version of that app likely worked with windows screen readers, and that is lost in this reincarnation onto the web. Good old fashioned DOM already has pretty good native accessibility support for mobile phone UI.
There's a lot of things that have been thought about when it comes to usability and accessibility, in both the web, and traditional desktop/mobile UI frameworks.
Reimplementing those UI frameworks in canvas in a browser environment requires mapping the a11y bits too, not just keyboard+mouse input and rendering to screen.
Not to mention Qt and Gtk and the older Android framework apps all use forms of markup and styling which are inspired by XHTML and CSS and document object models......
You just need to be one of the critical projects for BigTech. Easy peasy, compared to <editor_command> index.html.
> This wasm application renders to canvas and works fine for me: https://bandysc.github.io/AvaloniaVisualBasic6/
Trying to select text on mobile Safari just selects whole canvas. Same for your Flutter example.
What a regression for web. Just so that a couple of snowflakes can use their fad of the day or can stay in their comfort zone.
Or because the DOM is a piece of technology designed for rendering documents and not web apps and with limitations which has been severely gimping proper rendering of web apps for the past decade despite a slew of libraries trying to fill the cracks with various amount of success. Whichever you prefer.
In the case of Google Docs kt might be because it is really convenient to use canvas because then it gets much harder for clients to do things Google don't like, i.e. interoperability.
In other cases, like in IE^h^hChrome and large Google products like Calendar and YouTube there have been some interesting cases I think.
JS was made to animate monkey on a screen, and now it powers internet.
Technologies start with one goal and evolve.
That is like saying the existence of cargo trucks, pick-ups, minivans, campers, and rv's shows that the underlying 'internal combustion engine' technology is flawed.
I think it rather shows that the technology is so useful that it is able to spawn different implementations aimed at slightly different use cases.
-- Ellen Ullman
My brain concludes that Ellen thinks we are building our computer systems in the least bad way. :)
IDK, it seems to have been pretty successful at it to me, being of the most popular GUI frameworks currently, probably the most popular by a wide margin.
Being designed for documents it should exceed at rendering documents.
The problem isn’t on the DOM itself, it’s in mapping other frameworks to it. Of course it‘d be hard to port LibreOffice‘s rendering to the web, it‘d be a crazy amount of work to reach parity.
And it’s fine to argue that it doesn’t make sense at all to use the DOM for non-web document editing: OnlyOffice doesn’t do it either, as far as I’m aware.
It’s just a bummer to me since documents are exactly what the web was made for.
A div element is a node in a tree which will be rendered by a very opiniated rendering engine adhering to a fairly strict set of standards, and which can be manipulated using a limited subset of technologies which are themselves fairly opinionated.
A class Rectangle can be pretty much whatever you want.
> A class Rectangle can be pretty much whatever you want
- Both are rectilinear
- Both have width, height
- Both can have borders, backgrounds
- Both can be positioned in various grid/layout systems
- Both can contain child instances
- Both can contain a variety of child nodes like `Text`
- Both can be clipped and masked
- Both can be layered
A div element is a node in a tree which will be rendered by your browser in the way specified by the spec. You absolutely can’t freely do most of the actions you list to a div. There are severe limitations.
A div doesn’t at all emulate a class. Its semantically something completely different.
> A Rectangle component is a node in a component tree which will be rendered by your OS graphics library in the way specified by the spec. You absolutely can’t freely do most of the actions you list to a div. There are severe limitations.
It seems like you're just talking about a `Rectangle` in the abstract rather than the real limitation that even `class Rectangle` is subject to the rules of the runtime engine that renders said `Rectangle`...in a component tree...with the restrictions of the OS/GUI framework...
No.
Rendering outside of a web browser gives you a lot more freedom when it comes to how you layout and render. Rendering engines don’t necessarily use components tree by the way.
Even gui frameworks (which is what I think you are talking about with OS graphic library) have layout engines which are a lot more powerful than css. Flexbox is a step in the right direction but still inferior to what some frameworks could do 20 years ago.
Ah, so yet again Safari is the problem. The new Internet Explorer unfortunately.
And you can even control zoom/scale on desktop. Very accessible!
I must note (in the interest of factual accuracy, though as you see I loathe the approach) that this is not a fundamental limitation, just something that Flutter and probably ZetaOffice have chosen not to support. You can block such things in a DOM world too, and it’s stupidly common for app-like things to try to do so.
> Flutter and Google Docs gave up on the DOM because they couldn't get it working well enough, consistently enough across browsers. When you draw to canvas you get more consistent results because you control all the drawing.
And as a side effect, of course if you require the canvas, you will also be able to abuse the canvas, to fingerprint users. It is strange, how those things seemingly always coincide when it comes to Google products.
It's a toy that's making Google a lot of money.
This is the nasty catch-22. It is preferable to have a single tool that handles both simple and complex cases. But sometimes, you just can't make one tool that does both well. If you optimize for the hard cases, then most users will use only a tiny minority of the features.
Microsoft tried to work around that with the "ribbon", which tried to learn which features each individual uses. Users hated it.
So I keep around LibreOffice for the hard stuff, which I write perhaps once a year. And I use Google Docs every day.
I'd believe the vast majority of the user base has never noticed anything off with these applications. I have noticed one or two things missing in the in-browser PowerPoint and that's about it. If you want to do precise publication layout, Word (and Writer) are not the appropriate tools - you'll need something like InDesign.
Google Docs literally doesn't work in Firefox. (Garbled text.)
For Google not working consistently across browsers is a feature, not a bug.
i wonder if there is some parts that remain unaccelerated or hitting performance bottlenecks on linux/firefox?
* admittedly a bit low-res/ugly and hard to use on touchscreen
Do you test as much on FF as on Chromium based browsers, during development, as well as in quality assurance steps? I could imagine, that some devs are looking at it in Chromium (or even Chrome shudder) all day, while implementing things, and then just having to tick a checkbox for FF "Yep, seems to work.". Which would of course lead to a Chromium-centric code.
But for example, you unfortunately can't properly debug multi threaded WASM code in Firefox.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1589908
Have a look at the Firefox developer tools' debug tab with this page opened. And it will list the threads (web workers) named with some randomized UUID. Impossible as a daily development driver :-/
https://zetaoffice.net/demo2.html
Chromium's Sources tab properly shows each thread's name. So I can easily spot "em-pthread_1" which contains the LibreOffice main thread.
But have a look at this line and you'll spot some extra code I added for running in Firefox :-)
https://github.com/allotropia/zetajs/blob/8258649a7b98fd6af9...
If you have an idea for how to fix a Firefox specific problem, please file an issue and I promise to check if we can integrate the fix.
Canvas usually breaks text selections etc. and accessibility. But what they do seem to perform much better than trying to get the DOM to do something it wasn't designed for.
As for this case, I have never encountered a web app with performance (throughput and latency) problems like this. Not anywhere near it.
Oh, and abuse is the name of the game. Almost exclusively the only thing the browser deals with is abuse. Logical consequence when the users are the one paying for it.
Of course that has the problem is that you can make the "first impression" only once and when that said "first impression" is terrible it can be really hard to convince anyone to try the software again for the second time.
I guess releasing, almost like everything else, is a balancing game between two early or too late and both extremes have costs.
One of the ZetaOffice (and LibreOffice) hackers here - and I have to disagree.
For something like an office suite, the canvas is literally the only way to achieve the document layout fidelity that users expect. The DOM does not provide enough knobs & dials to get all of MSO (and OOo) bug-for-bug layout compatibility onto the screen (and it's not even close). Don't take my word for it, see e.g. here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42100660 (and that only deals with the text layout parts).
When I say “targeting real DOM”, that doesn’t mean you have to be subject to the browser’s layout implementations, though preferably you would still use its text shaping. You can still do all the layout yourself, if you want, and position everything absolutely. In practice you’ll tend to want to do at least a little of that, if you want to be able to support editing large documents; and much more if you’re aiming for consistent-across-devices layout. (… which my sister, who actually uses Word for work, reports Microsoft has been hugely slipping on—and Word never was intended as a desktop publishing platform.)
View DOM as more a rendering target; I don’t mind at all. So long as you’re using real DOM for input and output, most of the problems I’m complaining about will go away. Selection, editing, context menus, text rendering, all these things will be done properly.
If you take this approach, it is possible for you to run into some incompatibilities in advanced shaping, if your layout/text shaping engine and the browser’s behave differently, but in practice that will practically never happen any more in shaping, and in other areas you can control it.
I would also clarify what I thought was clear enough from my initial comment’s context: when I speak of “decent results”, I refer to the editing experience, not document layout fidelity.
Why is a desktop application being developed and provided if this is compatible with LibreOffice (since the latter already has desktop applications)? Is it just to have the same name and recognition?
Is the desktop application kept on par with the latest LibreOffice release or does it only guarantee document format compatibility up to a specific version?
[1] https://apps.nextcloud.com/
Do you mean the applications of the suit are buggy, or are they somehow hackable / leaking private information?
For example, what I remember, there was a module to move photos from Google Photos, but it always stopped at 10% photos without any errors. Then there was also some document suite module and it would hang my entire machine regularly, for some reason (had to restart it).
I would say it is the core component of my self-(vps)-hosted setup and easily the most valuable.
I'll be the first one celebrating if I can add a WASM LibreOffice to my private, low end (Raspberry Pi alike) Nextcloud home server.
What next? Blender in the browser? OS inside the browser? (Oh yeah, we already have that!)
Just because some people use the browser all the time, it does not mean that it should be the "OS". It is silly.
The only reason people build “apps” in the browser to begin with is because it simplifies the development for the engineering team. Easier to ship, easier to update, write once, etc. Sometimes the user benefits, but rarely.
The other problem I have is it blurs the lines between data on your machine (private) and data that is in the cloud. not everybody wants all their data in the cloud. When you’re working with a “app” in the web browser it’s not always clear.
And for what? A slower alternative to native apps because I am too lazy to click on "Open"? Sounds silly to me.
Interesting take. Usually web apps lower friction for users.
- no installations - no large binaries - collaborative - easy to adopt
I can't think of any (desktop) app that came out in recent years that specifically pitched "because native, we are better" and won. Sketch is a glaring example of a web app (figma) killing native (sketch)
Gen Z might think so but that’s because we’ve conditioned them to expect everything in a browser IMO, not because it’s actually complicated.
“no large binaries”, i agree browsers have an advantage here - somewhat. Most apps have large binaries because software development today is lazy. Companies typically use huge libraries for EVERYTHING and then their final binary gets bloated. For example 90% of apps (excluding games) could be 30mb or less. Stuff like analytics and user tracking, advertising libs, the list goes on.
Who says a native app can’t be collaborative? You can use http or websockets in a native app to push/pull data. That’s like saying social media apps aren’t collaborative.
I do agree some web apps are well executed. Figma is pretty good. Google docs and google maps are excellent. I have a few more that i genuinely enjoy using. That’s the _exception_ though.
Surely, my beloved Debian would be the much more perfect OS for everyone ;-)
It's also useful to be able to quickly send someone a link to collaborate on the document without needing them to install anything. Installing a separate app may not be possible for aging parents, people using shared computers (e.g., library or school computer), or organizations with restricted IT systems.
> Installing a separate app may not be possible for aging parents, people using shared computers (e.g., library or school computer), or organizations with restricted IT systems
This seems like a non-issue, too. If my grandma were to use the PC, I would be the one installing programs (or the OS) on it, and if I knew she wanted to open and edit documents, I would install LibreOffice. It is one of the programs I install on my parent's computer. You (or the IT staff) ensure tools are available; you install LibreOffice, similarly to how you would install a browser to begin with. For example IT staff are already responsible for installing and maintaining browsers. Adding productivity software to their responsibilities is a standard practice in professional environments.
Browser-based tools are a complement, not a replacement, and the push toward browser dependence should consider the trade-offs in performance, user experience and so forth. Using browsers for productivity tools may feel more convenient in very specific edge cases, but for most users and workplaces, the effort involved in installing and using native applications is negligible in comparison.
(I remember the old days when I used https://gobby.github.io with my friend to edit code together. It is a native program for editing documents (incl. code) together. Today you would probably use an extension to VS Code unless it supports it natively (no clue).)
I am pretty sure there are people on here who would be able to explain it better than I do.
Stll for some corporate use cases it has advantages
better security automatically updated
I'm also blown away that there is a gulp file in the repository. That's a blast from the past.
I've used LibreOffice/OpenOffice/StarOffice for two decades now. It's OK, not great. At least it interoperates with Microsoft desktop formats now. Mostly.
I use LO exclusively and it's a joy to use. On the rare instances I'm forced to use MSO it feels only marginally better than google docs. YMMV
And, strictly speaking, the reason things break sometimes when switching from LO to MSO is because MSO is broken: LO follows the spec (both .odt and .docx) faithfully, which then breaks when MSO relies on undocumented features or outright bugs for the end-result (i.e. the "works best on Internet Explorer" legacy).
Same here and at several other people who asked me for alternatives over the years. I installed LO (formerly also OO) both on Linux and Windows and they became productive almost immediately. However when I install it on other people PCs I always set the default save formats as Word/Excel/Powerpoint 97-2003 so that nobody will complain when they send files to other people who presumably will be running mostly MS Office.
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/LibreOffice_...
Note: "LibreOffice Online is not intended as a standalone software. His goal is, instead, to be integrated with other tools to edit their documents." ... while Zeta and Collabora are standalone.
The idea of LOOL (LibreOffice OnLine) is to be an embeddable component; we have used it before on a Moodle site. And this is the same for COOL (Collabora Office OnLine), which is used by Nextcloud Office (as components called COOLWSD, and LOKit).
Collabora works on mobile devices and integrates with Nextcloud
note: they use WASM, so the load is on the client. Collabora relies on a server part, though easy to host.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42251940
I use COOL every day. But I haven't set it up on my low end home server yet, because of the extra resources needed.
Couple of observations:
- https://zetaoffice.net/demos/simple-examples/rainbow_writer.... hangs with an `unreachable` in the console if I try Tools -> Options.
- Things don't seem to be hiDPI aware, so everything looks a bit unfortunate on e.g. my MacBook's retina screen.
Joke aside, the source code isn't featured on the web page, despite LibreOffice (unlike Apache OpenOffice) being copylefted. They mention self hosting, but it says to contact them. It seems it runs on WebAssembly either directly or through a VM on top of WebAssembly like https://copy.sh/v86/ . The screen seems to be simulated with a canvas. I think perhaps they didn't change the code of LibreOffice much, but have a custom setup of something like https://copy.sh/v86/ or even are running it on actual WebAssembly with a virtual screen. So they have a virtual computer that it's running on, and they consider that separate when it comes to copyleft obligations. Plus it's possible to make something open source but inconvenient, and charge to make it convenient.
I'm not quite interested enough to spend the CPU cycles it'd take to build and see whether that is really the whole story.
[1](https://github.com/allotropia/zetajs?tab=readme-ov-file)
Here's their page about WASM: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/WASM
It says it uses Qt/VCL. Maybe those can talk to canvas in a fairly straightforward way, or maybe ZetaOffice chose a different backend to get a proof of concept out faster.
(but it says, between the lines, mostly stale I guess)
As an aside: one of the very first demos of LibreOffice in a browser (from the Collabora people) was using the broadway backend. But they've moved on, using their own tiled rendering server backend, plus custom, javascript gui on the client.
For an even more obvious demo of that, c.f. the hidden gem https://zetaoffice.net/demos/simple-examples/rainbow_writer.... ;)
Current source version powering the demos is https://git.libreoffice.org/core/+/0d9eb8245e1a1345ed9526ad8... - we should make that more prominent, indeed.
Regarding sandboxing - everything WebAssembly is heavily sandboxed already, and requires cross-origin isolation in the browser, so we can use SharedArrayBuffers.
So that's likely no worse than running LibreOffice containerized on a server.
Humanity really does need an online self-hosted office suite that natively uses OpenDocument format, but I'm afraid that to achieve that it'll be easier to start from scratch with browser version as a first platform in mind.
I did not know that it is possible to wasm build lo!
(but I haven't been able to actually run it)
> demo is disabled on mobile