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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

#311

Post by EvanAnderson »

entropicdrifter wrote: post #284
nine_k wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adblock / pihole technical impossibility, too.

Maybe they could bypass it in Chrome, but it wouldn't make it impossible to use for anyone smart enough to set up a pihole.

The WASM code will eventually implement its own DNS analog (or use DoH with a pinned certificate). It'll all be completely opaque TLS to your Pi Hole.

Your Pi Hole is the same thing, functionally, as the tools a nation state hostile to human rights uses to filter the Internet. You'll get the same treatment that they do.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#312

Post by barbecue_sauce »

mihcsab wrote: post #303
stefan_ wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what Flutter on the web is, by the way. You can try it out here: https://gallery.flutter.dev/#/ and marvel at the impossible to select text, one of the many affordances violently excised here. If it wasn't still incredibly slow even on a cutting-edge Zen3, Nvidia 3070 system they might almost be on to something here.

It`s not slow on an old intel i3 laptop and on a motorola one phone. I keep seeing these comments about flutter web with different examples, they are never slow on my old devices. Also you can make the text selectable if you want to.

As a user or as a developer?

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#313

Post by whoopdedo »

pdkl95 wrote: post #99

Ever since WebAssembly was first introduced, I thought it was obvious[1][2] that the end game for those that want to control the web is sending opaque binary blobs of code that only use the browser for the canvas tag's framebuffer. Font rendering and layout can all easily be accomplished by embedding libraries like freetype. This breaks all forms of user control - like ad blockers - and turns the web back into cable…

> turns the web back into cable TV.

You mean turns the web back into Flash. Which is somehow worse.

How are they going to make this accessible? I doubt any screen readers would be able to recognize text drawn that way.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#314

Post by spankalee »

This is one reason I think projects like Servo are potentially very beneficial even well before they can render every legacy quirk you find on the open web.

Instead of bringing a custom rendering engine to the web via WASM and canvas, it'd be better in so many ways to bring a subset of spec-compliant HTML rendering to embedded contexts. If your content renderer can run on Servo, and render the same in modern browsers, you can use HTML as the basis for cross-platform rendering.

At least I would hope that would be possible by now so we don't have to write renderers for every platform anymore.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#315

Post by ko27 »

asciimov wrote: post #261
bozzcl wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, how is decrypting the WASM blob illegal?

I should have chosen my words more carefully, but the blobs with ads will have some sort of DRM on them, which is technically illegal to decrypt and cut out.

I fail to see how DRM is related to WASM

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#316

Post by d-yakovlev »

strogonoff wrote: post #201
dmitriid wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it can't be done in HTML+CSS in a performant way.

VS Code feels performant enough, with its complex functionality IMO exceeding Google Docs, and yet I don't think it is using canvas. I believe it comes down to strategic design that avoids unnecessary layout and reflow events in the UI. That said, the UI of VS Code (the desktop app) only needs to run in Chromium. And generally Google Docs could be a different enough beast that it can’t take advantage of the same tric…

some of VS Code has been canvas-based since 2017 - https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/10/03/terminal-rend...

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#317

Post by addison-lee »

eagsalazar2 wrote: post #277
pdkl95 wrote: post #99

Ever since WebAssembly was first introduced, I thought it was obvious[1][2] that the end game for those that want to control the web is sending opaque binary blobs of code that only use the browser for the canvas tag's framebuffer. Font rendering and layout can all easily be accomplished by embedding libraries like freetype. This breaks all forms of user control - like ad blockers - and turns the web back into cable…

Man, this is a very dramatic interpretation of their intent. Docs doesn't even have ads. They actually do have issues rendering consistently across browsers (I ran into this just like 2 days ago where something that had been carefully laid out on Chrome looked different in Safari). My bigger criticism of this is that I imagine it was a very large refactor at a time when docs has barely evolved for years and still rem…

Ahh yes because Google, an ad company, will never implement this where they do have ads.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#318

Post by tbodt »

jorvi wrote: post #224
spijdar wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Presumably they'll eventually port Chrome to WASM. Then they can completely control the browsing experience. ...what? As opposed to shipping binary executables for an OS/arch combo, they'll ship a binary executable for WASM, and then a second binary executable for the OS? If they want to take Chrome closed source and make it fully obfuscated, they can do that already, with or without WASM. Chrome is already closed-…

> and we know Chrome has secret sauce in it not from the repos Does it? I thought they have pretty much identical performance.

It's minimal, not much beyond widevine and a set of hard coded API keys for things such as sync. The code that uses the API keys is all open source, only the keys themselves aren't.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#319

Post by specialist »

One step closer to Display PostScript. Woot!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript

As the original HTML-hater, I've been joking for a while that we're slowly, painfully recreating X-Windows.

I've been wondering if I'll live long enough to see a return to sanity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#320

Post by frosted-flakes »

comboy wrote: post #285
pdkl95 wrote: post #99

Ever since WebAssembly was first introduced, I thought it was obvious[1][2] that the end game for those that want to control the web is sending opaque binary blobs of code that only use the browser for the canvas tag's framebuffer. Font rendering and layout can all easily be accomplished by embedding libraries like freetype. This breaks all forms of user control - like ad blockers - and turns the web back into cable…

Web scrapping. Companies will just push their data to the giants. I did not read that sequence when I first heard about wasm. You made me sad. Of course there will be scrapping, using machine learning and GPUs and whatnot but it's... maybe I'm just old.

Do you mean scraping? If you meant scrapping, I certainly don't think the web should be scrapped.
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