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Comment by Pasorrijer | Hacker News Reader

As an officer worker, there are many many things I do that cannot be done in a web browser. File comparison tools, macros and complex excel queries, hard applications for both new and legacy critical programs...

Can this be done on Linux? Frequently. Can it be done in a web browser? Rarely effectively and often not at all.

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I can vouch for personal experience with macros and Linux, since I made my return to it this month. It's not ideal yet, but it's workable, and there's a generational transition taking place while moving from x11 to Wayland, since the two have different notions of input, so you have to wander through some compatibility stuff to find your way.

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.

They were talking about Excel macros, not sure if you're talking about the same kind of macros.

That's fair - I would still be curious to know what percentage of office workers run Windows that don't actually need to.

Isn't Excel feature-complete in the browser now, macros and all?

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365

VBA macros aren't supported. Last time I checked even conditional formatting wasn't supported, although I see now it was added in January 2022 [1]. Even so, as with many other features, the web UI is different and more limited. Links to documents stored locally or on an SMB share don't work. Scrolling through thousands of rows is laggy. Generally, Excel Online is useless for the complex spreadsheets used in large enterprises, which themselves are often workarounds for the limitations of the web apps the enterprise is supposed to run on.

[1]: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/new-condit...

In theory, yes.

However Excel Online breaks down quickly with large file sizes, loses formatting and struggles mightily with complex macros.

Just wait till they start running those "native" programs in a VM on a server and streaming the UI to you in a browser for interaction.

Last i heard they experimented with windows running in the cloud and the user having just a kind of thin client. It is hilarious that 20 years after SUN's "The network is the computer" and some years after freedesktop's initiatives "wayland", "X is obsolete" "X on network sucks", Microsoft is coming doing just this.

I'd have to say that, today, all of those can be done in the browser except Excel.

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.

>File comparison, hard applications, legacy code, can be compiled to WASM and run quite well in the browser.

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.

> Not when you're working on proprietary/confidential/classified information.

Why not? The WASM approach the OP is suggesting works entirely locally, the web is simply pushing client code to your browser.

> 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.

I think you're still misunderstanding. The documents don't need to be "in the cloud", the WASM in your browser can operate on them locally.

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"?

You lose most of the advantages of running a software in your browser though.

Can you explain what you're thinking?

OneNote is still a pig in the browser. Every day it has to reload and loses track of all the folders in the notebook so I have to reload them all again.

Oh and it's soooo slow :(

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