Office Web Apps

From the official blog of the Office Web Apps team, some details about their offspring became known.

The following browsers will be officially supported:

• Internet Explorer 7 and 8
• Firefox 3.5 on Windows, Linux, Mac
• Safari on Mac

However, any user will be able to use Office absolutely in any browser. In this case, the team does not give any guarantees for the performance of the “application”, but it will not block access for unsupported browsers.

Unfortunately, even supported browsers will not have completely the same functionality. For example, Internet Explorer allows you to programmatically work with the clipboard, in contrast to Firefox. In such cases, a warning will be displayed to the user.

')
But the most interesting thing is how Silverlight can help improve Office Web Apps:

• loading will be faster
• quality and accuracy in drawing text at 100% scale
• Text settings are completely governed by cleartype tuner , a mechanism that controls how many CLs you want to see on the pages. CL tuner is available not only for Windows 7, but also for older versions.
• highlight accuracy when searching
• work with the clipboard in any browser

Silverlight help will also be felt in PowerPoint Web App:

• smooth animation
• the size of the slide will vary with the size of the window

However, drawing and animation of Silverlight is not required.
Let me remind you that the online version of Microsoft Office is expected in early June 2010, which is not intended to fully replace the application.