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You might want to build your WebApp in Canvas instead of HTML

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Re: You might want to build your WebApp in Canvas instead of HTML

#11

Post by groomlake »

I’m always curious how Google, Microsoft and Co. build their web apps - given that they need to work well on any computer, from a top-shelf speed machine to a potato with wires.

In my experience, Microsoft webapps (which now includes many of their desktop apps) are rather sluggish. Even the Copilot Chat website. How hard could it be to make a chatbox and a session transcript not be sluggish?

Re: You might want to build your WebApp in Canvas instead of HTML

#12

Post by amiga-workbench »

groomlake wrote: post #11

I’m always curious how Google, Microsoft and Co. build their web apps - given that they need to work well on any computer, from a top-shelf speed machine to a potato with wires. In my experience, Microsoft webapps (which now includes many of their desktop apps) are rather sluggish. Even the Copilot Chat website. How hard could it be to make a chatbox and a session transcript not be sluggish?

YouTube too. And I'm not even talking about the video player. Displaying a 4x4 grid of thumbnails seems to be some kind of herculean task.

Re: You might want to build your WebApp in Canvas instead of HTML

#13

Post by mister_mort »

amiga-workbench wrote: post #12
groomlake wrote: post #11

I’m always curious how Google, Microsoft and Co. build their web apps - given that they need to work well on any computer, from a top-shelf speed machine to a potato with wires. In my experience, Microsoft webapps (which now includes many of their desktop apps) are rather sluggish. Even the Copilot Chat website. How hard could it be to make a chatbox and a session transcript not be sluggish?

YouTube too. And I'm not even talking about the video player. Displaying a 4x4 grid of thumbnails seems to be some kind of herculean task.

I think some of the Youtube thumbnail stuff is lazy-loaded, so depending on the speed of your browser and connection it can just hang there doing nothing for a while.

Re: You might want to build your WebApp in Canvas instead of HTML

#14

Post by slopinthebag »

groomlake wrote: post #11

I’m always curious how Google, Microsoft and Co. build their web apps - given that they need to work well on any computer, from a top-shelf speed machine to a potato with wires. In my experience, Microsoft webapps (which now includes many of their desktop apps) are rather sluggish. Even the Copilot Chat website. How hard could it be to make a chatbox and a session transcript not be sluggish?

All of their webapps are garbage.

Re: You might want to build your WebApp in Canvas instead of HTML

#15

Post by nilslindemann »

groomlake wrote: post #11

I’m always curious how Google, Microsoft and Co. build their web apps - given that they need to work well on any computer, from a top-shelf speed machine to a potato with wires. In my experience, Microsoft webapps (which now includes many of their desktop apps) are rather sluggish. Even the Copilot Chat website. How hard could it be to make a chatbox and a session transcript not be sluggish?

The text entry of the Google AI is a catastrophe. Not scalable, sometimes text lines are half hidden, the cursor disappears on empty lines, it eats line breaks after sending the text. I reported it via mail, Google never answered.

Re: You might want to build your WebApp in Canvas instead of HTML

#16

Post by esperent »

groomlake wrote: post #11

I’m always curious how Google, Microsoft and Co. build their web apps - given that they need to work well on any computer, from a top-shelf speed machine to a potato with wires. In my experience, Microsoft webapps (which now includes many of their desktop apps) are rather sluggish. Even the Copilot Chat website. How hard could it be to make a chatbox and a session transcript not be sluggish?

Microsoft web apps are sluggish on my i7 with 64gb of RAM. But it's not performance issues, I think. It's networking, they have some crazy interconnected backend spread across about 20 systems and everything you do is going to need to wait for all of those to talk with each other. Switching HTML to canvas isn't gonna fix it.

Re: You might want to build your WebApp in Canvas instead of HTML

#17

Post by lisperforlife »

I call this the bluebox problem. Back when I worked for SAP there used to be this control called the bluebox control that embedded a browser (shdocvw) into a C++/MFC app. Almost every single annoying UI bug came from that control. I see the same now in the other direction. Every 5 years we come up with the bright idea to use browser as a distribution engine for a UI surface that is rendered by a box. This has historically never worked. I just wanted to recount applets, activex controls, flash, flex (also flash), silverlight, flutter ... and now this. The issue is developer tooling, screen readers, browser extensions and all the other small things that are difficult to account for.

Re: You might want to build your WebApp in Canvas instead of HTML

#18

Post by croes »

groomlake wrote: post #11

I’m always curious how Google, Microsoft and Co. build their web apps - given that they need to work well on any computer, from a top-shelf speed machine to a potato with wires. In my experience, Microsoft webapps (which now includes many of their desktop apps) are rather sluggish. Even the Copilot Chat website. How hard could it be to make a chatbox and a session transcript not be sluggish?

The Copilot Char got even worse.

The scrollbar is blocked on the bottom by the chat window. Keyboard navigation page up, page down, arrow up, arrow down only work if you are inside inside the answer window otherwise you get a totally different scroll behavior.

On Edge you can’t change anything of that per extension because MS block any change

Re: You might want to build your WebApp in Canvas instead of HTML

#20

Post by proc0 »

And of course, if you're going to go with Canvas, might as well go all the way and write the app in a cross-platform way in one of the many languages that supports Web Assembly and then compile to Web (which then gets embedded into Canvas). That way you could target more hardware and give users more options. There is some overhead but in my opinion browsers should be a backup UI for when you're away from a work station.
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