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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

#581

Post by breck »

ImprobableTruth wrote: post #552
breck wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The way to fix this trend would be to reimagine the presentation layer of the browser as something other than a stack of hacks over hypertext, but so far nobody seems to have a good solution. About a decade ago I had the start of a Eureka moment on how to do this (back then — https://medium.com/space-net/spacenet-51aca95d49a2 , nowadays https://treenotation.org/ ). It seems to me we've missed a sort of fundamental…

How is this not just S-expressions with indentation instead of parentheses? What makes it different from say Sweet Expressions?

Common question. You cannot do column and matrix operations natively against S-Expressions (You need to parse the whole thing). This turns out to be very important and useful. S-Expressions need to be transversed in 1-D linear order.

When you two-dimensionalize S-Expressions and remove the parens, you get Tree Notation.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#582

Post by skyde »

dangoor wrote: post #563

In 2009, I joined Mozilla and started working on the Bespin[1] project, which Ben Galbraith & Dion Almaer had brought to Moz. Bespin was built with a canvas-based renderer. Bespin was way faster than other browser-based code editors at the time. Then the Ajax.org/Cloud9 folks came along with their Ace editor[2], which was DOM-based and still very fast. We ended up merging the projects. edit to add: and switching to D…

Can someone explain why https://makepad.dev/ is extremely slow and "unusable" on Microsoft Edge browser but run smoothly on Chrome? Is it because of bad WebGL perf on JavasSript perf in general?

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#584

Post by skyde »

ignoranceprior wrote: post #275
attilakun wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure but what you are suggesting is not outside the realm of possibility. There are already projects like https://makepad.dev/ which implement their GUI on top of WebGL. (Which is arguably more challenging than implementation on top of Canvas 2D.)

Visiting that website made my laptop's fans start running.

try using a better web browser ?

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#585

Post by Nullabillity »

4684499 wrote: post #239
est31 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ad blockers could still "scroll" through a website, run an AI model on it to discover the ad sections, and cut them out. Even a simple model that filters out visual animations and replaces them with a static would be useful as a large annoying component of online ads is the movement and blinking etc. that make it hard to focus on the content. Dark mode etc can, too, be implemented to work in terms of framebuffers onl…

Is there any ad blocker that blocks ads rendered within videos? It's possible doesn't mean it's viable.

SponsorBlock does a surprisingly good job: https://sponsor.ajay.app/

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#587

Post by p_j_w »

habryka wrote: post #541
sethhochberg wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Figma is one of my favorite examples of something which is a nontrivial webapp that avoid feeling like a webapp a lot of the time, even when running in a browser instead of their Electron wrapper. But their technical leadership contains some of the (arguably) most accomplished folks working in the Javascript world these days, they might be an outlier in this area.

Figma is built in Web-Assembly (compiled from C++) [1] and Canvas, basically sidestepping the vast majority of the web stack. That's why it's fast. [1]: https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-...

This exchange is absolutely hilarious to me. We've got people complaining about Google doing something while praising Figma for not being so foolish or evil and extolling them as being exceptionally clever. Except oops, turns out Figma is doing the same thing that is believed to be foolish or evil.

It turns out HN is prone to the same sort of knee jerk reactions as most every other "social news" site (even if to a lesser degree). Who would've thought?!

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#588

Post by Tyriar »

zerkten wrote: post #580
Tyriar wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't entirely the fault of Electron though, but the convenient data types exposed in a web environment. Beyond the baseline memory of running Chromium, you could use various tricks to keep memory very low such as minimizing GC (eg. declare variable up front, not within loops), use array buffers extensively, shared array buffers to share memory with workers, etc.

Is there a good guide to these techniques in modern JS? How likely are they to remain viable long-term?

Not sure on any particular guide, but I learned a lot from the old #perfmatters push from Chrome, getting a deeper understanding of what the JS engine does when you create an object, where it lives, how it interacts with the garbage collector and so on would be a good thing to learn about. Also it's generally only worth considering optimization for things that store a lot of data like arrays/maps. I don't see why these techniques wouldn't be good in the long term.

I definitely agree that it's easier to make webapps that consumer much more memory than it is using a lower-level language like C++, unless you're being careful.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#589

Post by criddell »

shadowgovt wrote: post #202
harikb wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

JavaScript is actually quite fast these days, especially if one has a compiler in the flow to narrow it to the set of operations that are known to be high-performance. And Google would be paying a lot of that cost anyway if the DOM is the render target, because what they gain in the render algorithm being precompiled assembly they lose in the JavaScript layer pushing the wrong abstraction around to trigger all that C…

> JavaScript is actually quite fast these days

Do you think a browser written entirely in JavaScript would be competitive with Chrome written in C++?

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#590

Post by beaconstudios »

ctoth wrote: post #512
vkou wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, because you don't want binary blobs to be deployed over the web, you would like users to download and install binary blob native applications... And that makes things better in what way, for whom, exactly?

Let's start with accessibility, because this is a field I am forced to be an expert in. Native "binary blobs" have access to the operating system accessibility APIs, and consequently any native app is a lot more likely to be accessible out of the box than something rendered to a canvas. People have spent literally decades building out APIs for the native platforms [0] [1] [2]. To think that a native app is equivalent…

it's viable to make accessible apps in DOM though - it's just canvas apps that can't be made accessible, and I agree with the GP that Google should not be trying to circumvent the DOM for the Docs interface.
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