ThinkFree Office review

It’s hard to avoid a double-take the first time a ThinkFree Office application appears in your browser.

Without the Internet Explorer or FireFox logo in the window’s top bar, you wouldn’t know you were working within a browser. The suite’s three online applications run in Java and provide a convincing experience. Unfortunately, the first instance of the word processor uses a whopping 110MB of system memory, though subsequent windows use considerably less.

All three applications look similar to their equivalents from Office 2003, and they aren’t too far off when it comes to features. All three have vector graphics functions and autocorrect, and Write underlines misspelled words as you go along. Some important functions are missing, though. You can’t add comments to Write documents, for example.

For the most part, the applications are responsive, but we noticed that features requiring communication with ThinkFree’s servers, such as save, took a few seconds. Closing an application with unsaved changes produced an unreadable error dialog box. Luckily, you can download identical versions of the three applications to use without an internet connection.

ThinkFree’s applications are slick and its Webtop manager lets you share documents and organise them through tags. It’s not as extensive as OpenOffice.org, but its core applications are better than Google’s equivalents.