Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering
41–50 of 953 posts
Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering
#42I don't build extensions or work on much front end web lately but this reads like Google wants more control over their stuff. The web is becoming less open. > By moving away from HTML-based rendering to a canvas-based rendering, some Chrome extensions may not function as intended on docs.google.com and may need to be updated. > If you are building your own integrations with Google Docs, we recommend using Google Work…
The part I don’t understand is how in the world is a renderer written in JavaScript better performing than their own Chrome c++ code? With Edge being a Chrome clone and Safari being also performant browser, what are they worried about?
They will use WASM, and it will become big and clunky.
Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering
#43I don't build extensions or work on much front end web lately but this reads like Google wants more control over their stuff. The web is becoming less open. > By moving away from HTML-based rendering to a canvas-based rendering, some Chrome extensions may not function as intended on docs.google.com and may need to be updated. > If you are building your own integrations with Google Docs, we recommend using Google Work…
Performance of DOM based rendering is very problematic and not unified across browser implementations. Canvas rendering will likely increase the performance of Google Docs, and make the UX more unified across platforms. Google Docs is really an application built on the web platform. HTML DOM rendering was never intended to give developers the control they need to build fully featured high performant applications, we…
Microsoft Word, Pages and Open Office don't seem to be bottlenecked by rendering performance like Google Docs. Perhaps the browser is the wrong platform for document editing.
Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering
#44Maybe because I am out of loop with web development, but this sounds like a huge change to me. So instead of HTML elements, there will be just one big element, and everything will be rendered there? How will text selection work for example? Will Google Docs basically implement a GUI library like GTK, which renders everything itself, but for the web?
Looking at the example document linked in the article, it looks like each page is rendered in its own canvas tag.
Text selection and interacting with the content of the page seems to behave as expected.
Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering
#45I don't build extensions or work on much front end web lately but this reads like Google wants more control over their stuff. The web is becoming less open. > By moving away from HTML-based rendering to a canvas-based rendering, some Chrome extensions may not function as intended on docs.google.com and may need to be updated. > If you are building your own integrations with Google Docs, we recommend using Google Work…
The part I don’t understand is how in the world is a renderer written in JavaScript better performing than their own Chrome c++ code? With Edge being a Chrome clone and Safari being also performant browser, what are they worried about?
> With Edge being a Chrome clone
yes
> and Safari being also
yes
> performant browser,
no
Browser UI is so slow when compared to non-browser UI, it's infuriating.
Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering
#46So Dark Reader won't work anymore. Great.
Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering
#47Maybe because I am out of loop with web development, but this sounds like a huge change to me. So instead of HTML elements, there will be just one big element, and everything will be rendered there? How will text selection work for example? Will Google Docs basically implement a GUI library like GTK, which renders everything itself, but for the web?
And it puts the entire structure behind a giant blackbox. Yucky. As if fate tries to prove a point, I recently struggled with a random ass google docs document and just wanted to download and import to use in my own spreadsheet software. There probably would have been a Google Approved way of doing it but if there was, they intentionally made it hard. I ended up copying the HTML somehow. I guess that will no longer b…
I question if you even had such an experience or this is just a fud post because it is dead simple as was pointed out by a pervious posted...Too simple to have been missed
Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering
#48The dom is really, really fast, we have spent decades refining the process and there is deep tooling to support it built right into the browser. What a bunch of nonsense.
> The dom is really, really fast,
no, it is barely tolerable. Web apps in 2021 have trouble reaching the UI performance (latency) of early 2000 desktop software.
Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering
#49Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering
#50The dom is really, really fast, we have spent decades refining the process and there is deep tooling to support it built right into the browser. What a bunch of nonsense.
React (not just React, but they "meme"'d it) sold everyone on the DOM being slow. What they actually meant was that if you add & remove 5,000 elements one at a time in a loop, it's slow. If you don't do that it's plenty fast and all of React's tricks to "make it fast" are just overhead that are bloating and slowing down your "app". (FWIW, I actually kind of like writing React, if I must do front-end JS, so I'm not hating on it just for hating's sake)