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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

#551

Post by Mavvie »

mihcsab wrote: post #441
aardvarkr wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just loaded it and it ran awfully. We all have anecdotal experiences and it doesn’t make yours any less valid than mine but it does point out that they don’t show much besides what you personally experienced.

wdym by awfully? This makes me crazy, the gallery loaded instanltly, every item I click loads instantly, no problem with scrolling. There is a five second loading delay on the phone when the app loads, the items after that open just as fast as on the laptop. The only thing I saw that didn'r run smoothly on my weak phone is the flutter plasma demo[0], but it runs without any tearing on the laptop. [0] https://flutterp…

I clicked the "Shrine" app on a 6-core MBP, it took about 3 seconds to render the main gallery page and I got an entire 4 frames rendered during that time.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#552

Post by ImprobableTruth »

breck wrote: post #443
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 way to fix this trend would be to reimagine the presentation layer of the browser as something other than a stack of hacks over hypertext, but so far nobody seems to have a good solution. About a decade ago I had the start of a Eureka moment on how to do this (back then — https://medium.com/space-net/spacenet-51aca95d49a2 , nowadays https://treenotation.org/ ). It seems to me we've missed a sort of fundamental…

How is this not just S-expressions with indentation instead of parentheses? What makes it different from say Sweet Expressions?

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#553

Post by hctaw »

cellularmitosis wrote: post #513
worldsayshi wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switching to canvas sounds like a very roundabout way to handle an issue related to the dom growing out of hand. Surely unmounting pages that you you're not currently looking at should work? Of course there could be many reasons but we're left to speculate...

You can ditch the off-screen rendered pages but you are still stuck with the entire 1000-page data structure. Should your current line be on page 997 or 998? You have to calculate the size of every line of every page to answer that.

Efficient 3 dimensional position or range queries (line/column/page) is a pretty well studied problem. You don't need to query every point of the space to answer anything.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#554

Post by tomatotomato37 »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #465
mrighele wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite their shortcomings webapps won because they had a number of advantages that native lacked, most of all software distribution. What has flutter to offer that a regular webapp lacks? (not performance, it seems)

SPAs to Flutter is a much smaller step conceptually than native to Web. Most of the world is using a Blink-based browser of some sort already. Updates are pushed aggressively. > What has flutter to offer that a regular webapp lacks? Google branding, novelty, more sane dev UX. I'm not saying those are good reasons to choose it, I'm just extrapolating from how the industry works. Let's be honest: end users basically ju…

Your last point made me think: for all the flak the gamer demographic gets for being over entitled and toxic, they seem to actually ultimately end up with nice things like programs that run at a performance you'd expect from a modern computer and don't swamp you with creepily-targeted ads

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#555

Post by slver »

nofunsir wrote: post #508
slver wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you honestly believe they won’t implement copying a sentence.

I honestly believe they WILL implement copy paste... ... along with tracking exactly what you copied, when, where you hovered your mouse, inserting all sorts of features into your copied piece of “plain text” ... along with the ability to force-turn off copying from server side whenever it benefits them. You WILL use ChromeOS (by another name) and you WILL like it

All of this is done without canvas. Maybe less drama would help.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#556

Post by blt »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #162
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-…

I didn't express that very eloquently. I expect there will be a WASM-based browser embedded within some (most?) websites, eventually. The public-facing webserver will serve-up the WASM-based "inner browser" and nothing else. Content will only be accessible via the "inner browser". Determined attackers will be able to extract the keys used by the "inner browser", for sure, but the average person won't be able to. It'l…

Wow, this is plausible and disgusting.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#557

Post by satyanash »

Canvas will become de-facto, just like React did. Once that happens, indexing and scraping the web won't be trivial anymore. One would have to "opt-in" to using HTML/CSS to make sure that their page would be indexable. Clearly also indicates that Google is willing to give up on its web-indexing capabilities in the long term, now that they have a stronghold on the Mobile app marketplace. Most likely spells doom for websites, further making "apps" the norm.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#558

Post by dang »

altcognito wrote: post #38

The dom is really, really fast, we have spent decades refining the process and there is deep tooling to support it built right into the browser. What a bunch of nonsense.

Please don't call names in HN comments. Your post would be fine (well, a little unsubstantive and flamebaity, but nothing too serious) without the swipe at the end.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. We're trying for a bit higher quality of discussion here, if possible.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27130438.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#559

Post by warkdarrior »

delroth wrote: post #397
pwdisswordfish8 wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Displaying documents" and "displaying editable documents" are two completely different beasts. The web browser has never dealt well with displaying editable documents, the closest standard that exists is contentEditable and pretty much everyone agrees that it sucks and is not fit for complex use cases.

All web pages are editable currently, they are editable via Javascript. Not sure the distinction you are making is meaningful. The only thing we are missing is a good edit UI.
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