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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

#601

Post by andrewingram »

danShumway wrote: post #414
recursive wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their own renderer has to support all of HTML and CSS. Slapping some rectangles on a raster surface has a lot less to worry about.

Well... sort of. For specific apps, or parts of apps, yes. Doing less is how you make things faster, highly agreed. And sometimes canvas allows you to do that, and then your app is much faster. The problem is that in many cases, moving to canvas eventually turns into having a UI framework that renders to canvas, which turns into a layer of abstractions that handle keyboard and mouse events for you, including stuff li…

Are you sure you meant Figma? It's an image editor, not a framework.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#602

Post by jl6 »

munificent wrote: post #535
rektide wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This tech is called CanvasKit, and it scares the shit out of me. Google has, in this case, carefully written a proprietary custom API to take the role of Web Extensions (albeit with far more controls/restrictions/less flexibility) for Docs, but as more and more web properties switch to using Flutter with CanvasKit, we'll see less and less of the web be hypertext, less of the web be scrapeable, less of the web have go…

> The web implies hypertext, the web implies user-agents that fulfill the user's desired agencies. That's entirely valid for many things people put on the web, but clearly not all. A document editor is not hypertext with agencies fulfilled by the user-agent. The web now supports a wide range of user experiences, and the "text + links" model is great for a subset of those, but not all. The fact that some apps are movi…

Just imagine the sheer glee on the faces of the marketing department when their SEO experts tell them there is a technology that allows them to push pixels in peoples' faces while making it harder for users to engage in "unauthorized content use" and harder to block ads.

The web is about to get a whole lot more user hostile.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#603

Post by littlestymaar »

avereveard wrote: post #522
paxys wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the entire point. DOM is meant for structured web pages, not web apps. If you want to build complex web apps it is better to use your own renderer..which is exactly what Google is doing with Docs.

We should just port wine to webassembly and be done with it

http://www.boxedwine.org/

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#604

Post by sambroner »

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…

Is Zoho investing in WASM to do other canvases? I'd love to learn more about that solution.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#605

Post by ska »

nvrspyx wrote: post #92
silicon2401 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I prefer LibreOffice over Open Office, but I believe both are cross-platform (Linux, Windows, macOS). Then, I'd just use Dropbox or similar to save the files to for cloud storage. The only downside is no real-time collaboration. You can also look into Collabora, but I don't have any experience with it. If you don't require Linux support or if the web is tolerable for Linux, I personally recommend the Microsoft Office…

> The only downside is no real-time collaboration.

This isn't a small thing for many users.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#606

Post by tshaddox »

Sophira wrote: post #520
tshaddox wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think the open nature of the web gets in the way. Those developers could quite easily generate a screenshot of the website they’re building and ship the screenshot instead of the HTML/CSS/JS.

They could... except: a) It would be completely inaccessible to blind users; b) Sometimes devs want to be able to give users some choice, like copying text, and this is impossible with your proposed method. These two reasons alone mean it's undesirable for devs to use these, and they're problems that Canvas addresses - albeit by letting the devs have that choice, but not the users .

There are several other ways to prevent copying text or making it difficult, some of which probably don't impact screen readers (although I'm skeptical that many developers would be intent on preventing the copying of text while also caring about screen readers). And, of course, if the developer wants to allow copying text, that's trivial. How does canvas give a developer more ability to choose which things the user can and cannot do?

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#607

Post by mumblemumble »

brabel wrote: post #525
blackbrokkoli wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for saying "claims to". Copy pasting a response I made elsewhere: This is making a mockery of accessibility. It's the equivalent of having a company that actively discriminates against everyone not passing a internally developed test to check whether you are a "neurotypical" and then respond to criticism by pointing at the wheelchair ramp you installed on one of your entrances. If I can't copy paste words f…

I said "claims to" because I don't know how I can verify if it is. The other person responding to me correctly mention how they suggest tools to scan for accessibility issues on iOS and Android, but they don't say how to do that on the web... have you managed to somehow figure out what is not currently working, exactly? Regarding performance: Chrome uses Skia to render the DOM, why do you think rendering Flutter, als…

The thing is, when you're shopping for GUI toolkits, "try it and find out" isn't a great decisionmaking rubric. Partially because there are a zillion of them and you simply can't try them all, and partially because learning one is expensive and time-consuming, so, unless you genuinely enjoy that kind of thing, you kind of want to pick one in one shot.

Meaning that, in a slate of options where one of them can definitely do something you need, and another one where the official story seems to be ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and the examples you've seen seem to indicate that it's at least something you need to go out of your way to accomplish, there really isn't any injustice in deciding to expend no further mental energy on the latter.

That said, if you want spend your own time digging in and finding out, be my guest.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#608

Post by murukesh_s »

xxpor wrote: post #578
jackcviers3 wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The major problem I have with electron apps is that they eat memory for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. This happens with jvm applications as well, but you can limit the max heap size and force the garbage collector to work more, trading off speed for the ability to run more apps side by side. AFAIK, you can't limit the memory used in electron apps, and they don't respond by sharing heap with their child processes. Wit…

I just in the past month upgraded my main work laptop from 16 GB from 40 GB (8 GB soldered + 32 GB SODIMM). So your point is granted, but on the other hand, DDR4 prices have collapsed ~50% from 2018 (I couldn't believe it either, given all of the other semiconductor issues).

nice, but you are lucky to have laptop that have extra RAM slot. not everyone can do that.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#609

Post by ComputerGuru »

skyde wrote: post #582
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?

Edge or Edgium?

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#610

Post by NoGravitas »

nindalf wrote: post #453
vagrantJin wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dom isn't trash. Its good enough. We just need to stop making it do things it wasn't supposed to. That's why things like electron make sense a little bit. Not perfect but sensible.

> We just need to stop making it do things it wasn't supposed to This is a thread about Google Docs. Your suggestion to the Docs team is to ... stop? Just shut down their product?

Yes? Most of the web really ought to be shut down. It's just providing negative utility to society.

Alternatively: return to monke.

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