I've had tons of friends, family, and co-workers complain that Google Docs' performance is astonishingly shit, and the UI terrible. I know one non-nerd writer who does all his writing in some old-ass version of OpenOffice (yes, not even LibreOffice) specifically because he finds Google Docs' poor performance intolerable—so bad that a giant, slow hog like OpenOffice is much better! For my part, I use Pages, because it's got about 2% the effective impact on my overall system responsiveness, of having a Google Docs tab open, and doesn't have painful input latency like GDocs.
It's free and available everywhere, so you're not imposing on anyone when you share a doc with them. That's the appeal. ~Nobody I know actually likes it. Googlebucks delivering free service is the reason it's dominant. Easy to win a competition by burning cash.
Users would prefer a better product (I'm certain a much better one could even be delivered in the browser—Google's god-awful at writing efficient customer-facing software, especially on the Web) but GDocs wins due to subsidies and network effects. Its winning has little to do with whether customers would prefer native (or just somewhat better in-browser) software.
Native v. non-native, maybe they don't care, but good, yes, they care.
> I’d argue “users crave native experiences” is the engineer thinking. I have friends, family and hundreds of coworkers using Google Docs. No one cares.
They care. They just can't put in words that engineers understand.
"This is slow", "why can't I copy-paste?", "why is it laggy?", "why does my laptop het up?", "why do I have to wait X seconds for this to open"... All these are "users crave native experiences".
On top of that there are power users. Who may not be engineers, but who rely on certain things that exist in the system. From shortcuts (half of which are hijacked by the browser) to offline use to ...
On top of that a decade of moving everything to web tech has taught users to expect shittiness. Many don't even know that it shouldn't take 10+ seconds for an app containing nothing to open. And yet, here we are. Especially if it's an "app" on a spotty network connection.
When I say "no-one cares" I don't mean "they complain endlessly but accept it", I mean "they don't complain". They don't find Google Docs slow (nor for the record do I). They are happy with the solution in their hands.
Copy and paste on the other hand is a great example of the circular logic at work here: it is an issue and when browsers propose an API to fix the issue everyone throws up their hands and says "clipboard access? in a browser?!?!?" just like they are in this thread with filesystem access. Same with offline access via service workers. So it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy: web apps are inferior because they don't have features native apps have... and they shouldn't be allowed to have those features because native apps are superior. So around and around we go with the same old debate, the only losers are the users that want to just get on with things.
> When I say "no-one cares" I don't mean "they complain endlessly but accept it", I mean "they don't complain". They don't find Google Docs slow (nor for the record do I).
Again: it's because no one ever asks the right questions or actually watches people work. Or watches these apps in general.
Last year Google Docs consumed 20% of CPU on an M1 to scroll a two-page empty document. "They are happy with the solution in their hands".
> Copy and paste on the other hand is a great example of the circular logic at work here: it is an issue and when browsers propose an API to fix the issue everyone throws up their hands and says "clipboard access? in a browser?!?!?"
Nope. It's not "circular logic". If you look at iOS which actually has app sandboxing that you want on desktop (and that people keep complaining about), you are now notified when an app accesses clipboard. Why? Precisely because of the numerous issues with apps accessing clipboard data.
Again, it's funny how in the name of privacy you're literally arguing for giving web sites all the same access as the desktop apps that you complain are security nightmares.
> Again: it's because no one ever asks the right questions or actually watches people work.
This thread is getting nowhere but I'll leave it with this: the attitude you've outlined here is really patronizing. That these users can't possibly have valid opinions about the tools they use, if they dare to be happy with them they are wrong because you know better than they do. How dare they not care about 20% CPU usage! How dare they!
> it's funny how in the name of privacy
at no point have I made an argument that has anything to do with privacy
> the desktop apps that you complain are security nightmares
nor have I ever claimed desktop apps are security nightmares.
Like I said, I think I'm comfortable wrapping up my contributions here. I don't think conversation beyond this point is productive.
> This thread is getting nowhere but I'll leave it with this: the attitude you've outlined here is really patronizing.
It's not.
> That these users can't possibly have valid opinions about the tools they use, if they dare to be happy with them they are wrong because you know better than they do. How dare they not care about 20% CPU usage! How dare they!
You're ascribing thoughts and words to me that I never said or thought.
> at no point have I made an argument that has anything to do with privacy
What argument did you then make? We're literally in the context of why these things are the way the are due to privacy concerns
> I don't think conversation beyond this point is productive.
I don't think it was ever meant to be productive with opening like "you're thinking like an engineer and can't ever imagine what a user thinks or does"
They absolutely care, you just don't listen because you are so self centered you think your opinion and needs are more important.
Users CONSTANTLY bitch about how slow the internet is, and people who grew up with microsoft office in school complain about how mediocre google docs is.
But this is mostly (?) a historically contingent result of Google heavily advertising for Chrome while Microsoft dragged its feet to have an easy to use package manager, sandboxing, maybe flawed (?) rights management for Windows (a Windows Store comes with it's own issues if controlled by Microsoft of course).
I’d argue “users crave native experiences” is the engineer thinking. I have friends, family and hundreds of coworkers using Google Docs. No one cares.