Microsoft Word, Pages and Open Office don't seem to be bottlenecked by rendering performance like Google Docs. Perhaps the browser is the wrong platform for document editing.
I believe this 100%. After using google office for years (just because it's free and cloud-based), I recently tried MS Word and Excel recently at work. The different was mind-blowing. I forgot just how functional and straightforward MS Office is compared to the clunky, barebones google options.
If I wanted a desktop-first, cloud-backed solution, what would be the most future-proof and durable? Can I use Open Office across OSes? What would be the best cloud backup service these days? (just a general question to readers)
I also prefer desktop-first, cloud-backed solutions, but I have quite the opposite experience. Working with MS Office has been a pain and I've been a happy Google Docs user for about 10 years. My wife who isn't an especially technical person also finds Google Docs quite a lot more intuitive and laments when she has to use MS Office products for work (she is a consultant for Microsoft including their 365 line of business and her whole firm makes pitch decks in Google Slides before converting them to MS Office to present at Microsoft meetings--IIRC for the Azure and other b2b lines of business they don't even bother with MS Office). Note that my wife and I (like most of our age group) grew up on MS office, so it's not a question of familiarity.
Google Docs just built a better product and MS Office still hasn't caught up. I wonder if this is because or in spite of the browser target?
Google Docs seems so bare-bones. I recently couldn't find a way to format a series of chunks of text within a Google Doc as code, and I'm pretty sure that it simply doesn't support styles for anything but headings and body text. It just doesn't seem to be the same kind of tool as Word.
Copy a few cells from a Google sheet and paste it in an email, then do the same with Excel. Collaborate on building out a document from scratch with 10 people in Google sheets vs Excel.
Excel is a monster, and much more powerful than Google sheets in many ways, but in my experience, Google docs apps are a little better for collaboration, and they integrate a little tighter with each other.
Google docs is their document editor. Sheets is a part of GSuite.
I've also never had trouble pasting a spreedsheet selection into a word document. Email is a nightmare in general though.
I'm not sold on collaboration personally. I've had to do it a bunch since the pandemic began and I've found it to be an anti pattern. One of the big inconsistencies is that cells in sheets don't update while being edited while collaborating, which is not great if you have a spreadsheet heavy workflow. Docs is impossible to replace that though, because it's auto formatting is draconian and always seems to reset its preferences. When editing docs we spend more time formatting them then creating the content.
> I'm not sold on collaboration personally. I've had to do it a bunch since the pandemic began and I've found it to be an anti pattern.
How much of this is really related to technology? I do a lot of writing in both Word and Google Docs and see different sets of problems for both products. Having a group of people jump into either and expecting a good product (and experience getting there) is unrealistic.
With the pandemic, I think people have been trying lots of things without understanding what will be most effective. At least early on, there was a feeling that people had to be seen to be productive. It's nothing like real remote work.
For important docs, I still come back to having individuals write their content and only then does one person attempt to assemble it. The individuals often need their own independent reviews and consultation anyway before they have a decent draft. In some ways it improves visibility and helps with keeping folks on schedule too.
Google sheets is the specific example that I hate. In my experience, it's often laggy and clunky. You can't even scroll smoothly: the window MUST snap to row/column lines. When I realized that google sheets has such a laughable shortcoming, I knew I needed to get out of google office eventually.
i think copying some cells from excel into outlook, which i guess is the comparable transaction, works pretty well - what doesn't work for you? Maybe I am just missing out on some amazing functionality by not using google docs.
Personally, I like it better sometimes for having less features. MS Word has such a massive number of formatting features that interact in complex ways that there's plenty of ways for your document to end up formatted in a weird way and to be very difficult to figure out exactly where the switch is to make it not do something. I think one time I had a document where the entire doc was highlighted in yellow, and it took me over an hour of fiddling with various formatting boxes to figure out how to turn it off. Any word processor that doesn't have the capability to do that has some appeal to me.
I haven't seen a word processing document in a professional setting for many years now (didn't realize it until just now). Who uses a word processor these days? Writers certainly don't use that garbage.
I use text editors so I can think about the content and if it is going to get prettied up with fonts it goes into a target system that supports markdown (confluence, git, email, etc..). If you are flummoxing around in a word processor or sending around formatted docs that aren't PDF I fully expect people to be looking at you sideways.
I hate to inform you that, yes, writers do indeed use “that garbage”. I’m married to an author who regularly uses Scrivener to write. But anytime she has to send anything to anyone she has to convert to a Word document and send that out. Everyone uses Word that she interacts with. (Though author friends of hers might also use Scrivener for their writing)
Writers who understand git, let alone Markdown, are going to be extremely rare. You’re in a bubble if you haven’t encountered how dependent the writing field is on Word documents.
Unfortunately I do agree with this. I think a lot of tech isn't a matter of "what's the best?" but instead "what's the least bad?". I don't think Office is perfect but I think it's a lot less bad than google. I don't think MacOS is great but it's a lot better than windows for certain things, and vice versa. IMO unless software puts the user first in allowing customization and control, the best we can ever get is good instead of great.
I would recommend Libreoffice over Openoffice, but yes (for both)
And you can of course backup to your cloud service of choice. The main benefit of google docs, o365, etc. Is real-time collaboration. But there is no reason why a desktop app couldn't support realtime collaboration with a suitable backend service.
The only time I've ever seen real-time Google Docs collaboration has been during meetings which should have been an email. Total waste of everyone's time. Not to mention the horrible UX of people constantly moving their cursor around and moving text around. I'd suggest that pass-the-baton style collaboration would be a much better UX if you absolutely must collaborate real-time on creating a document. Which I find the premise to be incredibly dubious to begin with.
Even if actual realtime collaboration is rare, there are other collaboration features that are missing in most desktop equivalents, like getting notified of changes, being able to mention people in comments, etc. that I do see used quite a bit.
But my experience is that realtime collaboration is useful. In particular, immediately after emailing a doc to multiple people it is not at all unusual for more than one person to be actively looking at commenting on, and maybe changing the document at the same time.
I have had the exact opposite experience—I've used Google Docs for 10 years now, and in every way it manages to exceed Microsoft Office in usability. You're right that Google Docs can sometimes feel a little barebones, but it makes up for it by being very easy and straight-forward to use. In 10 years of using Google Docs, I can count on one hand—across probably tens of thousands of documents—the amount of times I've been missing something so critical to my work that I've needed to use an Office product.
(That said, I'm really excited about the recent changes Microsoft is making for Excel, with LET and LAMBDA, and I look forward to trying it out again in the future. Maybe this is the thing that finally gets me to switch! I've also enjoyed doing some more ~fancy~ graphic design in Pages on Mac, but overall the clunkiness was just so frustrating that I can't in good faith recommend it to anyone)
I prefer LibreOffice over Open Office, but I believe both are cross-platform (Linux, Windows, macOS). Then, I'd just use Dropbox or similar to save the files to for cloud storage. The only downside is no real-time collaboration. You can also look into Collabora, but I don't have any experience with it.
If you don't require Linux support or if the web is tolerable for Linux, I personally recommend the Microsoft Office suite. There's the obvious compatibility concern because nearly everyone uses those, they have real-time collaboration built in for both desktop and the web, comes with OneDrive storage, and will obviously be extremely future-proof. I cannot recall a single time any of the apps have crashed on me on both Windows and macOS, so I think it's pretty "durable".
IMHO HTML documents backed by a versioning system (probably fossil or pijul rather than the overly complex git) are the way forward for documents where content is much more important than presentation.
While “text in a VCS” is a great option, it’s obviously far less usable than something like Google Docs, and you still don’t get real-time collaboration, which can be really nice.
Yeah... I'm wondering though, Fossil is based on SQLite - a database - and databases are designed to solve the issues arising when multiple users try to change the same data. (Also, fossil by default works in "autosync" mode.) So it should be "easy(er)" to make a real-time collaboration tool based on Fossil ?
P.S.: By researching this, I've stumbled on a (barebones) alternative to Google Docs : HackMD/CodiMD/HedgeDoc :
https://demo.hedgedoc.org/
The best approach for a desktop first cloud-backed solution is possibly to have a VDI with Windows (on AWS for example), and use Microsoft Remote Desktop from your preferred physical computer to access it.
I have multiple desktop Macs in my various homes but I only use them for web browsing and RDP to the same Windows VDI.
A free OneDrive account is enough, plus Office 2016+
autosave function, with the added bonus to have a cloud version of word to edit in collaboration your document on the go
It was indeed a very strong marketing move for... decades to convince people, like smart people, that document editing can be a web-based thing. Actually, now that the browser is so ubiquitous that GUIs sit on top of it (think Electron), then is time to ask the very obvious question - since everyone seems to agree that universal GUI is needed (proof: the browser) then is the browser the right universal GUI?
Not being heavily biased by any vendor, but really, is there anything better than XAML to describe user interfaces, that is also cross-platform and does not have the burden of DOM? Please - share examples.
Absolutely not; but the web has became the behemoth it is through an absurd amount of money and engineering work. Chrome (well, Chromium) has 34 million lines of code now[1].
If we assume any competing universal GUI platform will need a similar amount of engineering effort, there's a very small list of companies in the world who have the resources to fund an effort like that. And Apple, Microsoft and Facebook have very little strategic incentive to care. (React Native notwithstanding). Google is trying with Flutter - but we'll see.
I wonder if maybe the the right direction is up. WASM is already supported by all major browser engines. I'd love to see a lower level layout & rendering API for the browser, exposed to wasm. We could do to the DOM what Vulcan did to OpenGL. And like opengl, if it was designed right, you should be able to reimplement the DOM on top in (native wasm) library code.
Then the universal GUI of the future could be the gutted out shell of a web browser (we'd just need wasm + the low level layout engine), running libraries for whatever UI framework you want to use, written in any language you like. A UI environment like that would be small, portable and fast.
That smells suspiciously like the Linux desktop environment. There was X. It was a minimal desktop environment. Then there were dozens of ones built on that… there was almost no way to have a consistent experience for a really, really long time.
Yeah, but the web isn’t very consistent already. The main set of common elements are buttons, links, form elements and scroll bars. Just about everything else is done custom on every webpage you visit.
I don’t think we should get rid of the common UI elements (if anything we need more of them & better APIs for them). But what Google docs, and flutter seem to really want is a simpler, more primitive way to create a layout out of those UI elements. Buttons and scrollbars are great. We need something more primitive than the DOM and CSS. Houdini is a solid start here.
Well, it’s clearly what the Google docs team wants. And it would yield higher performance for other similarly complex web apps (eg Figma). And allow native UI development in more languages (Blazor). It also looks to be the sort of thing the Flutter team want for web builds. And it could work well for the base system of chromeOS too.
For whatever reason, Google invests hundreds of millions each year into chrome, and trusts their engineers’ leadership on how to make it succeed. The question in my mind is if browser engineers themselves decide to push in this direction.
Chrome has been pushing Houdini [1] for years. It doesn't have special WASM integration right now AFAICT but it is basically a lower level layout & rendering API for the browser.
I've looked at Houdini again and I'm not convinced.
First, because it's more like OpenGL 3 (add more powerful APIs) than Vulkan (clean room design).
Second, it seems mostly abandoned. The page you cited lists multiple sub-proposals that have "No signal" even from the Chrome team. All mentions of Houdini I can find on developers.google.com are from 2018. I can't find anything about Houdini integration with WebAssembly, which is what I'd expect if development was ongoing.
Overall, I'm seeing everything I would expect to see in the timeline where Mozilla has no intention of ever implementing Houdini, and Google has decided it's not worth pursuing beyond what's already implemented.
The killer feature of Google Docs is the real-time collaboration. People willingly gave up a lot of editing and layout functionality to get that. It was so much better than sending drafts of documents back and forth in email.
I feel the need to argue that the browser is not the browser engine. An app sitting in a chrome tab is significantly different than an app built on electron, they just share some rendering code paths.
Electron apps have shown that you can use a browser's rendering engine to make high quality apps distributed on multiple platforms. They also have the benefit of persistence, filesystem access, hooks into native code should you need them (not WASM - mind you), you can implement true multithreading and explicit SIMD optimizations. You don't have memory limitations, and you don't have to worry about browser sandboxing, malicious or well intentioned extensions that break the experience, etc.
The browser is not the same platform as electron. I would guess that Google Docs would function much better in electron than on the web.
> An app sitting in a chrome tab is significantly different than an app built on electron, they just share some rendering code paths.
That isn't really true, Electron is basically a thin veneer over the Chrome browser, with NodeJS tacked on the side. Just take a look at the source code.
> Electron apps have shown that you can use a browser's rendering engine to make high quality apps distributed on multiple platforms.
Electron has shown that you can use a re-skinned browser and NodeJS to ship applications on all platforms capable of running Chrome. That ranges somewhere between "acceptable tradeoff" and "absolute overkill", depending on the application.
> You don't have memory limitations, and you don't have to worry about browser sandboxing, malicious or well intentioned extensions that break the experience, etc.
You still do have almost all of the limitations of a web browser in your rendering code, and you have none of the features of the web browser outside of it. The bridge between the two is inefficient.
Yeah, I'm wondering why Google isn't building a desktop version of their office apps in electron. I can practically hear the collective sigh of relief upon those landing in users ' laps.
> It was indeed a very strong marketing move for... decades to convince people, like smart people, that document editing can be a web-based thing.
I think this is overly reductive. There was a technical problem driving some of this; namely - document collaboration sucked (to some degree still does).
Moving documents online was a tradeoff - making the editor web based solves a bunch of problems but causes some other ones; desktop based cloud backed editing didn't exist (not that it's perfect now) at a time when you could get useful collaboration done with web based editors.
I'm not saying this was the only thing going on, but reducing it to just "marketing" misses the mark, I think.
The way that word processors are designed, essentially as very smart linked-lists of objects, would've actually allowed for the document collaboration very early on. We can perhaps speculate dozens of reasons why dis did not happen, but I guess it was for strategic reasons. But it will and is happening.
Is about right making the point that IMHO the desktop office processor is far from dead, actually I would imagine a comeback of desktop UIs because they are so much easier to get right, especially when you have complex forms (which all business software has) or custom GUIs (such as those in software like Blender, Photoshop, Lightroom, etc).
Question is did people really needed the collaboration feature so much, or as much as it was praised for decades... When it shows that source code (which IS one very important content) is being developed not collaboratively in real-time in the browser, but with the aid of various version control systems (CVS, SVN, GIT etc.) that is neither real-time, nor collaborative in the sense that Google DOX is.
So the whole collaboration thing is fun to have, great thing to demo, but perhaps not the killer feature.
Question is whether other features were more important and thus got implemented in the office packages. Such as enterprise integration capabilities and very powerful and well crafted WYSIWYG that is only possible with custom built engine.
Let's be honest - the most complex apps that is typically running on an average desktop OS is the browser and the word/spreadsheet processor. Back in the day the browser was not a VM and was not that complex. And as OpenOffice showed - this is not very easy to get right. As WPS Office (the Chinese office) showed - even if the presentation layer is fast/correct, it is not really that easy to (originally) come up with it nor integrate it with other enterprise services.
One may wonder whether MS Office was created to run best on Windows, or was it that Windows is made so to enable good run of MS Office and the integration of all this mandatory software that constitutes the modern enterprises... (again, trying to be as unbiased as possible)
> Question is did people really needed the collaboration feature so much, or as much as it was praised for decades... When it shows that source code (which IS one very important content) is being developed not collaboratively in real-time in the browser, but with the aid of various version control systems (CVS, SVN, GIT etc.)
This is a good point. I don't think realtime collaboration is so important, but multiple author collaboration is. And "track changes" is a sort-of good-enough solution, but painful.
I've had good luck collaborating on documents (research papers) using latex and source control, but that assumes (a) participants are comfortable with both and (b) the storage format is amenable to revision control. Most word processing doesn't work well like this because you can get the document into a broken state in ways that are hard to recover from, and many of the users have no mental workflow map for "source control"
TeX/LateX or orgmode/Markdown type approaches have an advantage here for complicated collaboration.
These days a lot of collaborative stuff is being done outside of spreadsheets and word processing docs, the lines are blurrier and the collaboration is broader. In the "old days" a wiki might have done the trick for this but people want richer environments too. Not sure what he answer really is.
Microsoft Word and Pages both also have web apps, for years, that are 'bottlenecked by rendering performance' (would put it as 'clearly would be improved by better rendering performance', as you're noting)
Google docs is worth it for the coorporation, but if you are writting for yourself, or anything seriously it is simply not good enough, but I don't think the performance is the issue.
This mode of argument seems odd to me. Google is announcing a solution to the problems they were having with the platform. Wouldn't the criticism "Perhaps the browser is the wrong platform for document editing" only be appropriate if Google was complaining that they have been unable to fix the problems?
The fact that, while developing for a given platform, you can encounter problems and fix them, doesn't seem to imply that there's something wrong with your choice of platform.
The browser is the wrong platform for anything that isn't an HTML document, and not only for performance reasons, but perhaps much more importantly : for interface reasons.
For instance : in your typical windowed program, when you press "Alt", it's supposed to show the Menu, which you can then quickly navigate using keyboard shortcuts. You can't do that properly inside the browser because it's going to conflict with the browser's own Alt-Menu.
Based on inspecting the DOM of the read-only preview document they link to, my guess is that they will be using traditional DOM elements for much of the editing UI. There appear to be many empty DOM elements that are there to hold various toolbars and other UI elements. And for what it's worth, there seem to be empty DOM elements intended to be read by screen readers.
If I wanted a desktop-first, cloud-backed solution, what would be the most future-proof and durable? Can I use Open Office across OSes? What would be the best cloud backup service these days? (just a general question to readers)