Posted on Wednesday 30 November 2005 - Popularity: unranked
When I first heard about plans to create a word processor for web browsers I was really skeptical, mostly because I feared too see clones of real applications that don’t add anything new and maybe even struggle to replicate the originals performance and feature set. However, after playing around with Writely for a while, I’m positively surprised. The really cool thing is that you can invite others to share your documents (by e-mail address) and than edit documents online with them. Similar to a Wiki you can view your documents complete revision history and roll back to any version. All documents can be downloaded to your desktop as Word or HTML and you can post directly to your blog. Currently the only downside I see is that the list of supported browsers isn’t too big:
- Camino: 1.0a1 or higher
- FireFox: 1.0.3 or higher, except for 1.5b1
- Internet Explorer: 6.0 or higher
- Mozilla: 1.4 or higher, except for 1.4.1
In other words, Safari and Opera can’t run this web application right now. I’m using Firefox so that didn’t bother me too much, but for all Safari and Opera users out there, lets hope a future version of Writely will add support for your favorite browser because this is really cool and (currently) completely free.
Fredi
