Earlier quoted context omitted.
> IMO, do the right thing for user agency & stick with higher level web stuff. Reinventing has many subtle pitfalls. This is great advice 99% of the time. But the browser has two big pitfalls which hurt google docs: 1. Browser rich text editing events are famously awful and inconsistent on different browsers and platforms. 2. Google docs wants the same document to render exactly the same on all OS / browser combinati…
> 2. Google docs wants the same document to render exactly the same on all OS / browser combinations. Thats not something that web browsers guarantee. Nor is it something Google Docs guarantees, since it still uses the browser for font shaping and rendering. The easiest way to demonstrate this is in Firefox, Settings → Fonts → Advanced → untick Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above ,…
One thing people do do all the time in word processors is mash enter until the next bit of content ends up at the top of the following page. If a user does that, then they print their document from a different computer, it should print correctly. The next content should appear exactly at the top of the next page. If the word processor does anything else, users will be frustrated and blame the software. Word and Docs both put in a ton of engineering effort to get this right.
(Educated users will insert a page break instead, but plenty of users don't know about page breaks. They still expect their documents to render correctly.)