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Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

workspaceupdates.googleblog.com

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Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#71

Post by thayne »

notyourwork wrote: post #3

I 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…

> For those more deep in web technology, I'd like to know if there are reasons to move to canvas for strictly technical merits.

Performance. My company switched from dom to canvas (and then to webgl) for a document-centric app a long time ago because of performance reasons. drawing to a canvas is much faster than updating dom. Also better control over how it displays. With dom you have to worry about differences in how differeny browsers render the same dom a loy more. Although that is less of an issue than it used to be.

There are downsides too though. Besides making it much more difficult for extensions to modify things, you also have to build your own spell check, because there isn't a browser API for that. However, I think google docs was already using google's own spellchecker.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#72

Post by larodi »

This is absolutely expected, reasonable and the way to go for an rich GUI app such as Google DOX. Particularly since WASM is so widely adopted, so does Canvas, WebGL etc... and Rust compiles to WASM, not to forget. So it was about time that some major apps ditched all the DOM glory.

Wonder whether they're using the greatly overrated Angular to render the canvas, i guess not, but that's for Google insiders to say.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#73

Post by Jaygles »

jcelerier wrote: post #48
altcognito wrote: post #38

The 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.

Looking at the DOM in isolation, its pretty quick. The primary reason web apps are slow is because the business logic is typically un-optimized.

I've encountered a web app that persisted its state by stringifying it and putting it into localStorage with every UI change. The resulting string was ~5MB and took 200-300ms each time (freezing the UI) on my tablet.

I've encountered an app that used an in-house built chart library using jquery and D3. For each chart rendered it created a 50MB array of x-axis labels that wasn't cleaned up when the chart was destroyed.

The reasons for why these inefficiencies exist is another topic. But there's nothing stopping someone from creating a complex web application that's performant.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#74

Post by hjek »

throwaway3699 wrote: post #28
nothis wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

File -> Download -> XLS

... which is a menu item you can reach through the canvas rendered by a giant blob of non-free JS.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#75

Post by ocdtrekkie »

sixothree wrote: post #56
notyourwork wrote: post #3

I 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…

I have a running theory - Google doesn't create a product unless it captures data in a unique manner compared to their other products. Maybe they have moved past this phase. Maybe I just don't see the collection happening here.

Docs value prospect isn't really consumer use at all: It's businesses and (mostly) schools, paying for G Suite licensing.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#77

Post by larodi »

hctaw wrote: post #43
jhartmann wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was indeed a very strong marketing move for... decades to convince people, like smart people, that document editing can be a web-based thing. Actually, now that the browser is so ubiquitous that GUIs sit on top of it (think Electron), then is time to ask the very obvious question - since everyone seems to agree that universal GUI is needed (proof: the browser) then is the browser the right universal GUI?

Not being heavily biased by any vendor, but really, is there anything better than XAML to describe user interfaces, that is also cross-platform and does not have the burden of DOM? Please - share examples.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#78

Post by cphoover »

lewisjoe wrote: post #30

We are working on a full-featured Google Docs alternative - https://writer.zoho.com . We are already capitalizing canvas technology for rendering documents across devices, except for the Web which still is DOM. Having a single codebase that renders across all platforms is our long-term motive, and it does require rendering to a cross-platform canvas backend - like Skia. I'm assuming Google Docs is already on that dir…

I love zoho's suite of free tools. When I first got started in web development business 10+ years ago, I used their invoicing tool, and thought it was perfect for a freelancer like I was at the time.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#79

Post by thayne »

silicon2401 wrote: post #64
hctaw wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I believe this 100%. After using google office for years (just because it's free and cloud-based), I recently tried MS Word and Excel recently at work. The different was mind-blowing. I forgot just how functional and straightforward MS Office is compared to the clunky, barebones google options. If I wanted a desktop-first, cloud-backed solution, what would be the most future-proof and durable? Can I use Open Office a…

> Can I use Open Office across OSes?

I would recommend Libreoffice over Openoffice, but yes (for both)

And you can of course backup to your cloud service of choice. The main benefit of google docs, o365, etc. Is real-time collaboration. But there is no reason why a desktop app couldn't support realtime collaboration with a suitable backend service.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#80

Post by est31 »

jcelerier wrote: post #48
altcognito wrote: post #38

The 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.

It depends on what you do with it. HN is extremely fast.
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