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

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#901

Post by simonh » Thu, May 13, 2021, 11:51 AM UTC

thu2111 wrote: post #899

snewman wrote: post #858

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Distribution. It is so, so, so much harder to get most users to install an app, especially for casual purposes ("please add your notes to this doc") which is often how people first come to Docs.

That's a common belief but there are a lot of exceptions that mean we should question how true this really is. 1. Mobile-first, mobile-only apps. 2. Minecraft or really any game. 3. The proliferation of Electron apps that are basically downloadable versions of the website. 4. Apple's own suite of apps. Keynote is pretty darn popular. In the case of a user who is really, really unmotivated to comment on a doc, sure. T…

I think a major advantages for me are easy bookmark-ability and sharing via URLs to people who may not have the app. You can bodge workarounds for those things in an offline app, but now the bookmarks aren't in my browser or I have to copy them to it, or the people I share the doc to are just looking at a browser rendered viewer or something.

While Docs hits 95% of my needs there's still that 5% and I suspect most of those are held back by the current implementation architecture. Hopefully moving to a Canvas based system will enable them to more easily add complex features.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#902

Post by josephg » Thu, May 13, 2021, 11:57 AM UTC

withinboredom wrote: post #878

josephg wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then is the browser the right universal GUI? Absolutely not; but the web has became the behemoth it is through an absurd amount of money and engineering work. Chrome (well, Chromium) has 34 million lines of code now[1]. If we assume any competing universal GUI platform will need a similar amount of engineering effort, there's a very small list of companies in the world who have the resources to fund an effort like…

That smells suspiciously like the Linux desktop environment. There was X. It was a minimal desktop environment. Then there were dozens of ones built on that… there was almost no way to have a consistent experience for a really, really long time. I really don’t want to do that again.

Yeah, but the web isn’t very consistent already. The main set of common elements are buttons, links, form elements and scroll bars. Just about everything else is done custom on every webpage you visit.

I don’t think we should get rid of the common UI elements (if anything we need more of them & better APIs for them). But what Google docs, and flutter seem to really want is a simpler, more primitive way to create a layout out of those UI elements. Buttons and scrollbars are great. We need something more primitive than the DOM and CSS. Houdini is a solid start here.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#903

Post by teddyh » Thu, May 13, 2021, 12:12 PM UTC

It is surprising to me how blind Google is to the second-order effects of this is. Suppose that this model of rendering pixels to canvas is a success. Suppose it is adopted by various content serving systems like WordPress, JavaScript frameworks, etc. Now Google Search has nothing to index! The whole web just became completely unsearchable. Google Search, and all web search as a concept, becomes mostly useless.

You might think that Google assumes that they’d be served special content to index, but I remember the shenanigans that people used to pull with serving the Google bot one set of content and actual page visitors other content, and how Google has to continually fight against this to preserve the relevancy of search results. If canvas rendering becomes normal, Google will have no way to fight against this anymore, and Google search results will be dominated by links which does not contain the promised content.

It’s possible that Google thinks that Google is big enough that nobody will opt out of being searchable by Google, but consider Facebook. Facebook content is basically impossible to find using Google, and everybody wants to be the new Facebook, right?

As I see it, the efficacy of Google Search rests on a few premises which were true in the 1990s:

1. Web content which is created without indexing in mind will be able to be indexed by Google.

2. If web content creators have indexing in mind, they want Google to index the content, and the path of least resistance will allow Google to do it.

3. If web content creators want to play funny games and serve one set of content to Google and other content to site visitors, this is difficult and requires playing a constant game of cat-and-mouse with Google.

If canvas rendering becomes the new thing, all three of these things reverse and becomes false. How, then, could Google Search stay relevant? Why would people pay to advertise on Google if Search becomes useless? Especially when Facebook ads exist, and Facebook is where people spend more than 90% of their web time on, anyway.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#904

Post by yhoneycomb » Thu, May 13, 2021, 12:30 PM UTC

google234123 wrote: post #759

yhoneycomb wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly if they did that I think I’d strongly consider paid alternatives to YouTube. Most of the channels I like are on curiosity stream/nebula. I’ve never subscribed because I don’t feel like I have a reason to. But that would definitely give me a reason.

Or you could just pay for Youtube which removed ads.

I’d rather not support a monopoly

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#905

Post by kroltan » Thu, May 13, 2021, 12:33 PM UTC

______- wrote: post #424

kroltan wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] rendering to canvas allows programmers to have pixel perfect control over the look of their applications across all devices. Canvas-based fingerprinting due to rendering differences is a thing, so using the canvas is not pixel-perfect either. Creating an UI library atop of that is a lot of work, though to be fair certainly manageable by Google. Remember, a UI library is not just about putting things on the sc…

> Canvas-based fingerprinting due to rendering differences is a thing, so using the canvas is not pixel-perfect either Luckily Firefox asks you if you want to use the HTML5 canvas API. You can specifically whitelist some pages to use the canvas API and stop it from running by default on all your other browsing. Also: you may want a dedicated browser just for Google's whole ecosystem so they can't track you across the…

> Luckily Firefox asks you if you want to use the HTML5 canvas API.

Really? Where? I know you can disable it in about:config, but not that it was asked of the user. I have used Nightly for years and never seen such a dialog.

Unless you did mean about:config, but I don't know how that works with a whitelist either.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#906

Post by stuffbyspencer » Thu, May 13, 2021, 12:54 PM UTC

teddyh wrote: post #903

It is surprising to me how blind Google is to the second-order effects of this is. Suppose that this model of rendering pixels to canvas is a success. Suppose it is adopted by various content serving systems like WordPress, JavaScript frameworks, etc. Now Google Search has nothing to index! The whole web just became completely unsearchable. Google Search, and all web search as a concept, becomes mostly useless. You m…

I highly doubt Google would embrace something that kills there business without having a plan.

Off the top of my head I can think of 3 scenarios:

1. Google is investing in tech that allows them to index canvas-rendered items (putting them far ahead of all other search engines if they are the only ones with this tech)

2. Google will put out an "index.txt" guideline ushering in a new way to create SEO content for the internet (there are problems here but, like with anything, they can be addressed in time)

3. Google might ditch indexing altogether and look into alternative ranking methods (curation groups? popular in your social sphere? heavier reliance on ads?)

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#907

Post by FreezerburnV » Thu, May 13, 2021, 1:11 PM UTC

datavirtue wrote: post #832

ufmace wrote: post #761

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I like it better sometimes for having less features. MS Word has such a massive number of formatting features that interact in complex ways that there's plenty of ways for your document to end up formatted in a weird way and to be very difficult to figure out exactly where the switch is to make it not do something. I think one time I had a document where the entire doc was highlighted in yellow, and it to…

I haven't seen a word processing document in a professional setting for many years now (didn't realize it until just now). Who uses a word processor these days? Writers certainly don't use that garbage. I use text editors so I can think about the content and if it is going to get prettied up with fonts it goes into a target system that supports markdown (confluence, git, email, etc..). If you are flummoxing around in…

> Writers certainly don’t use that garbage.

I hate to inform you that, yes, writers do indeed use “that garbage”. I’m married to an author who regularly uses Scrivener to write. But anytime she has to send anything to anyone she has to convert to a Word document and send that out. Everyone uses Word that she interacts with. (Though author friends of hers might also use Scrivener for their writing)

Writers who understand git, let alone Markdown, are going to be extremely rare. You’re in a bubble if you haven’t encountered how dependent the writing field is on Word documents.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#908

Post by ______- » Thu, May 13, 2021, 1:31 PM UTC

kroltan wrote: post #905

______- wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Canvas-based fingerprinting due to rendering differences is a thing, so using the canvas is not pixel-perfect either Luckily Firefox asks you if you want to use the HTML5 canvas API. You can specifically whitelist some pages to use the canvas API and stop it from running by default on all your other browsing. Also: you may want a dedicated browser just for Google's whole ecosystem so they can't track you across the…

> Luckily Firefox asks you if you want to use the HTML5 canvas API. Really? Where? I know you can disable it in about:config, but not that it was asked of the user. I have used Nightly for years and never seen such a dialog. Unless you did mean about:config, but I don't know how that works with a whitelist either.

> Really? Where?

https://www.ghacks.net/2017/10/28/firefox-58-warns-you-if-si...

It says 'HTML5 canvas image data' which is probably different than what I said (HTML5 canvas API). Sorry for any confusion.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#909

Post by ComodoHacker » Thu, May 13, 2021, 1:35 PM UTC

brundolf wrote: post #837

snewman wrote: post #680

Speaking as one of the original three authors of Google Docs (Writely), but zero involvement in this project (I left Google in 2010): I'm seeing a lot of comments asking how JavaScript-on-Canvas could possibly outperform the highly optimized native code built into the browser engines. It's been a long time since I've really been involved in browser coding, but having written both Writely and, farther back, several na…

A good open-source example of this type of problem is CodeMirror (a code-editing widget for the web). To achieve syntax highlighting and everything else, it basically fakes every single aspect of text editing in a browser context - even the cursor and text highlighting - replacing the native versions with pixel-placed DOM elements driven by JS. It receives raw events from an invisible textarea and does everything els…

VS Code and the likes do the same, right? I'm pretty sure this all will soon be optimized, if not already are.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#910

Post by est31 » Thu, May 13, 2021, 1:36 PM UTC

asciimov wrote: post #216

est31 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ad blockers could still "scroll" through a website, run an AI model on it to discover the ad sections, and cut them out. Even a simple model that filters out visual animations and replaces them with a static would be useful as a large annoying component of online ads is the movement and blinking etc. that make it hard to focus on the content. Dark mode etc can, too, be implemented to work in terms of framebuffers onl…

It will be like cutting out the ads in a newspaper. Lots of holes, everywhere.

I'm ok with ads in a newspaper. I can ignore them safely and blend them out. Many online ads nowaday blink or do other dark patterns to make ignoring them harder though. I hate that.