Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#631

Post by axiosgunnar » Wed, May 12, 2021, 6:23 PM UTC

sp332 wrote: post #549

axiosgunnar wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How will it work, if they are sending binary WASM blobs? This is akin to saying "pi hole can block ads in .exe files"

The question is, who is sending binary WASM blobs? That ad data needs to come from an ad server, and if network requests to the ad servers are blocked, the ads will not load.

I see, that is a valid point. I suppose Google could provide dynamically including ad content into the WASM blob before serving it out to the browser, but I would agree if you said this is pure speculation.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#632

Post by thehappypm » Wed, May 12, 2021, 6:23 PM UTC

pwdisswordfish8 wrote: post #370

Ajedi32 wrote: post #213

I think this is actually one of the few cases where canvas-based rendering makes sense as a replacement for the DOM. Docs is a full-featured application which already has to re-implement a lot of DOM-like features in order to fulfill its primary function (things like text formatting and layout, spell checking, etc). Doing it all in canvas doesn't sound significantly more difficult than what they're already doing. The…

This is a great example of a comment written by a developer or some otherwise technical person who is so used to thinking and speaking in terms of trees that they can't see the forest, let alone the village it's situated next to and the people inhabiting it. Google Docs may be an app, but a big part of the app, and confirmed to be one of the reasons for the migration here, is the part that renders the document to the…

You know what I'm tired of? Slow apps. Google Docs is a great platform but performance has always been slow compared to native Office. I welcome this change. Draw the document quickly and make me more productive.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#633

Post by jgalt212 » Wed, May 12, 2021, 6:23 PM UTC

I'd be very curious to hear if they looked at SVG. I assume it's less peformant, but maybe for word processor it would be about equal. Easy to imagine canvas outperforming SVG for a spreadsheet app.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#634

Post by JaggedJax » Wed, May 12, 2021, 6:23 PM UTC

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 do like seeing the new Writer interface consistent across multiple applications, and it's very intuitive to use.

I do find this interface is slow to load of even semi-large documents, especially when large tables are involved. That and a few formatting/editing quirks are the only real complaints I have. Otherwise I find Writer a great alternative.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#635

Post by dahart » Wed, May 12, 2021, 6:24 PM UTC

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…

> The web is becoming less open.

Canvas and WebGL are both open standards, no? There are a million and one examples of losing openness, but I think this isn’t one of them.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#636

Post by bri3d » Wed, May 12, 2021, 6:24 PM UTC

vagrantJin wrote: post #438

bri3d wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A million times this - having worked in this space, nobody wants to do this. I understand the cynicism, but the affordances provided by the browser for things like accessibility are very painful to give up. This isn't some dark pattern attempt to cut out whatever "openness" remains on the web, or to convert the browser into a display-streaming client for some sinister DRM reason. In my past job, we rewrote our spread…

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.

The problem is that the escape hatch from document to application is completely broken. The DOM is fine for documents, but it's completely awful for applications. Admittedly, some things on the web that should be documents insist on being applications instead, but many things on the web aren't documents.

For these things, using the DOM is painful. When the pain becomes great enough, the biggest available escape hatch is pure native 2D rendering (canvas), which is a nightmare for accessibility and affordance to end-users. It would be awesome to have something else to escape to.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#637

Post by eitland » Wed, May 12, 2021, 6:24 PM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #505

eitland wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So basically they are recreating the problems from Flash in 2021, but now using web standards ;-) ? Here's me almost hoping that ADA lawyers will have many field days with this tech. Edit: since this time there is no good excuse for it.

One step up, two step down. Progress

"Poor boy shuffle"

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#638

Post by slaymaker1907 » Wed, May 12, 2021, 6:24 PM UTC

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?

Did you try using dev/canary Edge? It should pretty much be the same rendering engine and JS engine as Chrome. Definitely report this to the Edge team if you have the time (very easy to do from the dev version of Edge). In my experience, they are very responsive to bug reports and feature suggestions.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#639

Post by neysofu » Wed, May 12, 2021, 6:24 PM UTC

pwdisswordfish8 wrote: post #370

Ajedi32 wrote: post #213

I think this is actually one of the few cases where canvas-based rendering makes sense as a replacement for the DOM. Docs is a full-featured application which already has to re-implement a lot of DOM-like features in order to fulfill its primary function (things like text formatting and layout, spell checking, etc). Doing it all in canvas doesn't sound significantly more difficult than what they're already doing. The…

This is a great example of a comment written by a developer or some otherwise technical person who is so used to thinking and speaking in terms of trees that they can't see the forest, let alone the village it's situated next to and the people inhabiting it. Google Docs may be an app, but a big part of the app, and confirmed to be one of the reasons for the migration here, is the part that renders the document to the…

> Documents are the quintessential use case for the Web, full stop, and they're the direct object of whatever the verb form of "Google Docs" would be.

You seem to be basing your whole point on the misplaced idea that the web is great at displaying, nay was specifically made to display Google Docs' class of content. This is incorrect. At its core, Google Docs is a typesetting engine with semantics and features that don't align well with HTML+CSS. Typesetting is about graphics, the web (and HTML) is about content. They're very different use cases.

> [...] what this is is just shy of an abrogation of their responsibility to act as a steward for the Web

Google has no obligation, either moral or legal, to be a technical leader. They're simply a market player. The only way in which I care about this change is how it affects me as a user and it's nowhere near as catastrophic as you make it sound imho.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#640

Post by olliej » Wed, May 12, 2021, 6:24 PM UTC

Sample doc isn't editable affect, presumably to hide the fact that in addition to overriding standard scrolling it also doesn't support international text entry or, 50/50, standard and custom key shortcuts from the OS

[edit: I was right - cmd-f doesn't use the proper find ui, cmd-e doesn't update the search pasteboard, and cmd-f doesn't track the system search pasteboard.]