Microsoft has done an amazing job convincing the office world they need Windows, when they don't need a single feature that it provides in 99% of cases.
Can this be done on Linux? Frequently. Can it be done in a web browser? Rarely effectively and often not at all.
File comparison, hard applications, legacy code, can be compiled to WASM and run quite well in the browser. The pieces are in place to do it, they just need polishing and tuning to make it ubiquitous. Even Excel could be compiled like this but again MS wants to own you and pin you over a barrel while extracting everything they can from you, so Excel won't be available. But many/most Spreadsheets can be done in Libreoffice, or code or no/low code alternatives.
Not when you're working on proprietary/confidential/classified information.
>But many/most Spreadsheets can be done in Libreoffice, or code or no/low code alternatives.
Not when you're working on spreadsheets that you need to send to organizations that heavily rely on MS Office.
Why not? The WASM approach the OP is suggesting works entirely locally, the web is simply pushing client code to your browser.
Because "the web is simply pushing client code to your browser". Untrusted code. Which may violate the confidentiality of you document. I still don't get it why companies which deal with "confidential information" are very happy to put those documents in the cloud. But ... it is their data and they decide what to do with it.
Is the WASM "untrusted"? Sure, I guess, all code you haven't written yourself is "untrusted" by default. Why would a native application shipped via CD or download be any more "trusted"?
Oh and it's soooo slow :(
However Excel Online breaks down quickly with large file sizes, loses formatting and struggles mightily with complex macros.
[1]: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/new-condit...
This is annoying, but already much better than the Windows story, because you can customize things right down to the kernel level and generally get the result you're looking for in a pretty direct fashion. I now have it set up so that it detects the model of keyboard I plugged in and redirects specific models to specific macro layers - a seemingly obvious two-keyboards use case that can be a serious hassle on Windows without resorting to a hardware solution.
And that browser more likely is owned by oogle...
For example: right now, it's impossible to edit a document online with Track Changes without showing all the changes (which makes documents practically unreadable). And you don't even have pages online, documents are shown with a continuous layout where it's difficult to know where pages start and end.