Microsoft has elucidated how it’s enhancing the web experience of Office through collaboration between Office and Edge teams, Office applications are available across various platforms and are regularly updated with new features.
The most straightforward way to utilize them is through web versions, where applications like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel can be used directly in the browser without any payment required.
While web versions might not always offer the full set of features provided by Office, they do cater to most, if not all, of your basic needs.
Microsoft confirms that web-based Office applications, much like messaging apps and video conferencing, are notably complex to implement, this complexity stems from hosting these versions, involving thousands of CSS units and several thousand nodes in the Document Object Model (DOM) tree, sending numerous HTTP requests when loading pages.
As a result, it’s crucial to construct these versions in a manner that ensures optimal performance without compromising functionality, to meet this requirement, the Edge development team has implemented several new DevTools capabilities, specifically designed to diagnose and rectify performance issues within Office.
The team noticed a significant increase in CPU utilization during PowerPoint’s web launch, and Edge developers realized an error in the implementation of the CPU data collection process in Chromium, instructions were being executed when they should have been waiting for the next event to start.
According to Microsoft, detecting this issue was challenging in simpler app versions but was observed during PowerPoint testing due to its complexity.
The Edge team managed to resolve the problem, which generally helped the PowerPoint team gain a more accurate picture of load performance, benefiting anyone else using DevTools.
Source maps are now also supported in Edge’s performance and memory tools. These source maps automatically display the full file names and non-minified functions, making issue resolution significantly easier.
Similarly, the Word team discovered a delay of 75 milliseconds in recalculating designs during the investigation of web version performance, causing Word’s launch to slow down.
By utilizing Edge’s performance tools, developers identified an inefficient execution of a JavaScript function as the cause and subsequently resolved it.
Microsoft emphasizes that this collaboration between Office and Edge development teams has enabled them to build better products that benefit both teams, other web developers, and their product users.
