Proton Docs appears a lot like Google Docs: white pages, formatting toolbar on the high, stay indicators displaying who’s within the doc with their title connected to a cursor, the entire deal. That’s not particularly stunning, for a few causes. First, Google Docs is massively well-liked, and there are solely so some ways to model a doc editor anyway. Second, Proton Docs exists largely to be all of the issues which can be nice about Google Docs — simply with out Google within the combine.
Docs is launching today inside Proton Drive, as the most recent app in Proton’s privacy-focused suite of labor instruments. The corporate that began as an electronic mail shopper now additionally features a calendar, a file storage system, a password manager, and extra. Including Docs to the ecosystem is sensible for Proton because it tries to compete with Microsoft Workplace and Google Workspace and appeared to be clearly coming quickly after Proton acquired Standard Notes in April. Normal Notes isn’t going away, although, Proton PR supervisor Will Moore tells me — it’s simply that Docs is borrowing some options.
The primary model of Proton Docs appears to have most of what you’d count on in a doc editor: wealthy textual content choices, real-time collaborative enhancing, and multimedia assist. (If Proton can deal with picture embeds higher than Google, it may need a success on its arms only for that.) It’s web-only and desktop-optimized for now, although Moore tells me it’ll finally come to different platforms. “All the pieces that Google’s received is on our roadmap,” he says.
Since this can be a Proton product, safety is every part: the corporate says each doc, keystroke, and even cursor motion is end-to-end encrypted in actual time. Proton has lengthy promised to by no means promote or in any other case use your person information, which can attraction to extra individuals than ever now that there are such a lot of questions on how your paperwork and knowledge are used to coach AI fashions. (For what it’s price, Google says it additionally doesn’t use your content material to coach its fashions.)
Proton is simply one of many corporations making an attempt to supply privacy-focused options to Google and Microsoft, and thus far, none of them have made a dent in these corporations’ dominance. However Proton’s merchandise have improved so much in the previous few years, and it’s getting nearer to providing all of the issues some customers would possibly want to modify. (One large factor lacking? Spreadsheets. Good luck taking Excel down, Proton.)