[wolverine876]

I feel the tension when just looking at those screenshots, thinking of trying to utilize a large table in a website UI - JavaScript, scrolling, dynamic updates, the pauses and hangups, Internet latency, etc., plus the very limited capabilities.

Just give me my local spreadsheet app. Your web UI is never going to come close to that speed and functionality.

I understand that might not fit every use case, but I guess that any user unwilling to use a local spreadsheet will not be interested in the the 'big data' of the complete, large table. In that case, cut the large table to a small one, appropriate to your platform and users, and provide a link for the data scientists to download the full thing.

[bzzzt]

Think of multi user databases where you want the latest version of the data. Local spreadsheets would be a synchronization nightmare. Also, web applications are seldom one single sheet, but an intertwined view on lots of tables combined with custom functionality you can't replicate easily in a spreadsheet. And that custom functionality needs to be updated once in a while. The web has become the easiest software delivery platform: you only have to update the server side. Even if a web interface is a bit janky it's a better alternative than maintaining lots of native apps (only Windows, Mac, how many Linux distributions?) or one of the cross platform toolkits that don't ever work 100% right and still require you to test on every platform.

[wolverine876]

Those are good points. I was thinking only of one use case, but obviously there are many more. It makes me think someone might try to create a high-performance spreadsheet-like UI for web applications. I've seen some spreadsheet-like UIs, but none I looked forward to using - though Google Sheets isn't horrible. (Probably, if it could be done easily, everyone would be using it.)