WebAssembly Ends Browser Preview With Initial API & Binary Format

[caligula]

Office suites are huge terrible monsters while Google Docs runs in a browser and is great, and so on.

I kind of doubt they actually work with larger data sets. E.g. Google Sheets isn't that responsive if you have a project with a dozen of sheets and like ~20000 lines, 30 columns per sheet. We actually managed to corrupt the G Sheet so it ended up read-only during simple manual data collection, and we started from scratch with a imported backup few times with the same corrupted results. Sure, this can be fixed, it's a bug.

Other thing is, it's obvious that the perf on the web platform scales really bad compared to e.g. gnumeric. I can run the same sheet on a Pentium 3 when using gnumeric. Modern $1500 Skylake i5 ultrabook with 16GB of DDR4 has issues with performance even when the internet provides offers a 100M+ fibre. For example, when opening a sheet, it can take 6 seconds before the equations in the sheet get re-evaluated. When scrolling the sheet, it can be damn slow and unresponsive. With gnumeric no issues. Don't get me even started with RAM usage.

Native apps, yes, but they are either not truly cross-platform (a bunch of different applications), or to be cross-platform they suffer lower quality usually.

I'm a bit worried with the quality of realtime apps in a browser. Maybe having each tab in its own process helps, but so far my Firefox extensions prevent this. I play some MIDI/SID (C64) songs with a JavaScript player and the playback halts several times each day due to some hangup in other tab's JS engine. Needless to say, the same overclocked i7 7700k plays the same song just fine without a single glitch in a native player when I'm simultaneously converting h.264 to h.265 with handbrake (16 threads) and compiling the kernel with make -j8. Sure the CPU is hot @ 90°C, but it just works and schedules timeslices just fine for the player. You just can't expect that kind of extreme performance in a browser.

[starshipeleven]

Other thing is, it's obvious that the perf on the web platform scales really bad compared to e.g. gnumeric.

Little nitpick, Gnumeric isn't a office suite.

And of course I was not talking of major data crunching usage like yours, but what most office people do (a few orders of magnitude less).

I'm a bit worried with the quality of realtime apps in a browser. Maybe having each tab in its own process helps, but so far my Firefox extensions prevent this.

It can be sure fixed in FF, that's an immature feature for now.

Afaik Chrome is multithreading since years (each tab and also plugins/extensions run as a separate processes, it breeds like a rabbit), you might want to try that out and see if it can handle what you want, to have an example of "mature" multithreaded browser.

You can also try a clean FF out in a VM or by force-enabling electrolysis. I dumped all extensions that were preventing it and still had to force enable it, but I don't use FF as a player anyway, I only wanted to avoid the bullshit-page-hanging-the-whole-browser issue.

You just can't expect that kind of extreme performance in a browser.

Don't confuse performance with proper process isolation (and prioritization).
To run a music player you don't need a quad-CPU xeon-phi computing node, you need the player running on its own process, so that it won't be affected by other processes hanging or dying or whatever.

[ldo17]

E.g. Google Sheets isn't that responsive if you have a project with a dozen of sheets and like ~20000 lines, 30 columns per sheet. We actually managed to corrupt the G Sheet so it ended up read-only during simple manual data collection, and we started from scratch with a imported backup few times with the same corrupted results. Sure, this can be fixed, it's a bug.

Never use a spreadsheet as a database.

[ldo17]

A webapp can pull off a Continuum-like effect pretty easily (good websites do this all the time, it's called "responsive design") without requiring bullshit OS-specific integrations like Continuum, or the limitations of current cross-platform development framewors (that don't support 100% all features of all platforms, more like a 60%).

The Web is not magic. This just means the browser becomes the “cross-platform development framework”. And instead of supporting 60% of platform features, it becomes more like 30%, because of the security issues, limitations of JavaScript/HTML etc.

[ldo17]

Many developers do not want to expose their code to users to many reason (IP, security, etc.).

Downloading code to the users’ machines and expecting to keep it secret from them is just ... words fail me.