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Comment by jhartmann | Hacker News Reader

Performance of DOM based rendering is very problematic and not unified across browser implementations. Canvas rendering will likely increase the performance of Google Docs, and make the UX more unified across platforms. Google Docs is really an application built on the web platform. HTML DOM rendering was never intended to give developers the control they need to build fully featured high performant applications, we just shoe horned things until they sort of work. I think this is a positive thing, UX will be better and the integration API's will become much cleaner and not depend on structure of how they design the UI. Concerns will be separated and the end result is something much cleaner, more performant, and more supportable.

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I think this is the real reason for the change as well. A few years ago Visual Studio Code underwent a similar change where rendering the terminal moved from using DOM to canvas. I never noticed a huge difference between the two methods but I imagine using canvas gave them a lot more flexibility in addition to being more performant.

Here's an article that talks about the switch to canvas for VS Code. The "5 to 45" times faster part really sticks out to me. Kind of surprised it took Google this long to do this with Docs.

https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/10/03/terminal-rend...

> Kind of surprised

I'd assume a significant cost-benefit tradeoff. For all its flaws, the DOM rendering algorithm is at least "document-like," so there's a lot of wheel-reinventing to do going from just using the DOM to a custom document layout implementation underpinning a canvas-targeted rendering algorithm.

Look at the Google docs generated html markup some time. It’s not making nice neat <p>’s and <h1>’s.

Yes, at OrgPad, we are writing our own rich text editor and if you want to use the DOM approach, you don't have much choice than to do it like this. You can see the WIP demo here (in Czech but it is quite visual): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkFJ1zcRjQY It is also written in ClojureScript. Some of the reasoning is here (in English, but 3 hours long): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UoIfeb31UU

How? I thought they blocked access to the native underlying document format. Or do you mean the HTML export?

I assume your parent means the result of clicking inspect element in the (pre-canvas) editor.

I personally didn't even bother checking out VS code because it was based on electron, and so I figured the performance just wouldn't be there because it's doing all of this awkward web stuff while trying to be an IDE.

I was completely wrong though. Using it, it really doesn't feel like a web app at all. It's really shocking and impressive. It feels like a text editor. Perhaps I should learn more about what they're doing.

The major problem I have with electron apps is that they eat memory for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

This happens with jvm applications as well, but you can limit the max heap size and force the garbage collector to work more, trading off speed for the ability to run more apps side by side.

AFAIK, you can't limit the memory used in electron apps, and they don't respond by sharing heap with their child processes. With enough extensions to make it usable, vscode easily eats GB of memory.

I like lsp. But I don't need vscode to do the rendering.

This isn't entirely the fault of Electron though, but the convenient data types exposed in a web environment. Beyond the baseline memory of running Chromium, you could use various tricks to keep memory very low such as minimizing GC (eg. declare variable up front, not within loops), use array buffers extensively, shared array buffers to share memory with workers, etc.

Is there a good guide to these techniques in modern JS? How likely are they to remain viable long-term?

Not sure on any particular guide, but I learned a lot from the old #perfmatters push from Chrome, getting a deeper understanding of what the JS engine does when you create an object, where it lives, how it interacts with the garbage collector and so on would be a good thing to learn about. Also it's generally only worth considering optimization for things that store a lot of data like arrays/maps. I don't see why these techniques wouldn't be good in the long term.

I definitely agree that it's easier to make webapps that consumer much more memory than it is using a lower-level language like C++, unless you're being careful.

> eg. declare variable up front, not within loops

I have trouble believing modern JS engines wouldn’t optimize this to the same thing.

Behaviorally they aren't the same thing, so that's not a straightforward mechanical translation. For example if the variable is an object instance then if escape analysis can prove the variable doesn't outlive the loop, then it can be put on the stack & then yes there wouldn't be any benefit to the suggested change. Although deoptimization makes stack allocation more complicated, so JS engines are more conservative here than say JVM runtimes.

But it's really easy for escape analysis to fail, it has to be conservative. So you can end up heap allocating a temporary object every loop iteration quite easily.

I just in the past month upgraded my main work laptop from 16 GB from 40 GB (8 GB soldered + 32 GB SODIMM). So your point is granted, but on the other hand, DDR4 prices have collapsed ~50% from 2018 (I couldn't believe it either, given all of the other semiconductor issues).

nice, but you are lucky to have laptop that have extra RAM slot. not everyone can do that.

Luck has nothing to do with it, the Macbook Pro users know what they're getting into.

I specifically bought this laptop with that in mind.

Solution: 64GB RAM. Never look back.

This is a first-world solution.

The majority of the problems with "Electron" are actually just problems with the development style used by the types of people who publish and consume packages from NPM.

We've gone from a world where JS wasn't particularly fast, but it powered apps like Netscape, Firefox, and Thunderbird just fine (despite the fact that the machines of the era were nothing like what we have today) and most people didn't even know it, to a V8-era world where JS became crazy fast, to the world we're in now where people think that web-related tech is inherently slow, just because of how poorly most apps are implemented when they're written in JS.

If you want to write fast code, including for Electron, then the first step is to keep your wits as a programmer, and the second step is to ignore pretty much everything that anyone associated with NPM and contemporary Electron development is doing or that would lead you to think that you're supposed to be emulating.

I agree, and this is something also I have witnessed in my own Electron project, where careful care was taken to write fast and memory efficient code. It doesn't really use that much memory compared to native applications when running, I've done comparisons.

I feel also that the problem is more with the style of javascript development rampant these days, where not a lot of care is taken into making memory efficient or even efficient code.

This has to do a lot of course with the high rise in people studying to become (mostly) web-developers, without any deeper degree in CS or understanding of how computers really work.

> I imagine using canvas gave them a lot more flexibility in addition to being more performant.

I'm perplexed because I don't expect canvas rendering to be faster - or necessarily more flexible - because the web is document-first: HTML and CSS were/are all built-around describing and styling textual content, and computer program source code files are invariably all textual content files. So while browsers all have heavily-optimized fast-paths written in native code for rendering the DOM to the screen with the full flexibility of all of CSS's styling features - so applications switching to canvas rendering will first have to contend with needing to reimplement at least the subset of CSS that they're using for their editor - and it has to run as JavaScript (or WASM?) - and I just don't understand how that could possibly be faster than letting the DOM do its thing.

I appreciate that DOM+CSS rendering is not designed-around monospaced text editing or with specific support for typical text-editor and IDE features which do indeed throw a wrench into the works[1], but I think a much better approach would be to carve-out the cases where the current DOM and rendering model is insufficient or inappropriate for those specific applications' purposes and find a way to solve those problems without resorting to canvas rendering.

That said, is this change because Google wants to use Flutter for a single codebase for Google Docs that would work across iOS, Android, and the web? Flutter does have a HTML+DOM+CSS rendering mode, but it's horrible (literally thousands of empty <div> elements in their hello-world example...)

[1] e.g. a HTML/DOM document is strictly an unidirectional acyclic tree structure, and CSS selectors are also strictly forwards-only (e.g. you cannot have a HTML element that spans other elements, you cannot isolate individual text characters, you cannot select a descendant element to style based on its subsequent siblings, or ancestor's subsequent siblings), and how the render-state of a document is also strictly derived from the DOM and so does not allow for any feedback loops unless you start to use scripts, which means you can't select elements to style based on their computed styles (unlike, for example, WPF+XAML, where you can bind any property to another property - something I think XAML implements horribly...), and I appreciate this makes certain kinds of UI/UX work difficult (if not impossible in some cases), but in the use-case of an editor I just don't see these as being show-stopper issues.

>I'm perplexed because I don't expect canvas rendering to be faster

...yet it is. Really.

Even though DOM paths are heavily optimized, they are extremely flexible, and that flexibility creates a wall in possible performance optimizations. In a context like word processor, precision is more important than your regular website (and across browsers!) so you end up implementing little hacks everywhere, pushing half a pixel here and another 1.5 pixels there.

A purpose built engine that writes directly to the framebuffer of a canvas without dealing with legacy cruft has the potential to be a lot faster - if you know what you are doing. Google has no shortage of devs who know what they are doing so here we are.

> Google has no shortage of devs who know what they are doing so here we are.

They also have no shortage of devs who advance crazy ideas that somehow gain adoption... like starting a new general-purpose programming language in 2007 without generics nor package manager.

They aren't that optimized, this small team changed Chromium's DOM to have better cache utilization and more coherent access patterns with data-oriented/SoA and got 6X speedup in some animation use cases:

https://meetingcpp.com/mcpp/slides/2018/Data-oriented%20desi...

> HTML and CSS were/are all built-around describing and styling textual content, and computer program source code files are invariably all textual content files.

HTML and CSS are fairly well optimized, but dynamic HTML and the DOM were an afterthought. If you could throw out a lot of the guarantees about DOM behavior, you could make a much faster browser, but you'd also break the web.

> because the web is document-first: HTML and CSS were/are all built-around describing and styling textual content

They were built to display static textual content. Moreover, they were built to display static textual content on 90s-era computers in a single rendering pass. IIRC two-pass rendering didn't appear until some improvements around tables in early 2000s.

For that, yes, they are quire fast. Anything else? Nope.

Document display and document editing are rather different tasks. The DOM was built for the display of static documents. Dynamism was slowly added over the years through JS, and eventually CSS (animations, transformations, etc). But the underlying purpose of the browser rendering engine has remained the same, which is to display static documents. It's not surprising that a client built from the ground up around the concept of displaying static documents doesn't do a good job of allowing users to edit documents in a WYSIWYG kind of way. That has never been its job!

The web is (or at least was) document-first, yes, but Google Docs is an extremely heavily-featured WYSIWYG word processing and desktop publishing application that happens to be distributed on the web (in addition to other platforms). The fact that you're (sometimes) using Google Docs to generate a simple document that could easily be represented with simple HTML does not imply that Google Docs itself is a natural candidate for being implemented with simple web APIs like DOM.

Now, I think if the contentEditable API were significantly more robust and consistent across browsers, it could have been viable to build extremely complex WYSIWYG editors using the DOM. Most of the popular rich text editor libraries for the web are essentially compatibility layers around the contentEditable API that attempt to normalize its behavior across browsers and present a more robust API to the developer. These libraries are popular and do work pretty well, but based on my experience with them it's no surprise that an app as popular and extensive as Google Docs would constantly bump into the limitation of this approach. (My impression is that Google Docs never used contentEditable and instead wrote their own layout and editing engine that manually rendered out DOM, and they're now changing that to render out to canvas.)

> My impression is that Google Docs never used contentEditable and instead wrote their own layout and editing engine that manually rendered out DOM, and they're now changing that to render out to canvas.

Back before Google owned Google Docs, it was a non-Google company and website called Writely, and their website was basically a document-hosting system tied to a fairly stock `contentEditable` editor.

This was around 2005 - back when every web-application development client would insist that users have WYSIWYG/rich-text editors - of course they had no idea how WYSIANLWYG (What you see is absolutely nothing like what you'll get) those WYSIWYG editors are like.

I could see how this could be faster.

At the end of the day, after the browser does all of its highly optimized processing of the dom, html, and CSS, it is issuing drawing commands that are the same as the ones you make on canvas. Canvas skips the in-between steps.

If you're in a situation where you know you want this text at this location on the page, it may be simpler to just draw what you want verses trying to arrange a DOM that will cause the browser to draw what you want. Especially if you're already doing pagination, at which point you're already doing the text breaking and layout anyway, and you're just trying to tell the browser in a high level language to give you the same low-level results that you already have in hand.

It looks like they're just doing this for text within a page, BTW. I looked at the sample document and the page scroller is DOM, and the individual pages are canvas of text, overlaid with an SVG containing the images.

The big question I have is how they manage to deal with stuff like IME (input method editors) and how they manage to work with the keyboard on mobile (looks like they don't do mobile though).

> The big question I have is how they manage to deal with stuff like IME (input method editors) and how they manage to work with the keyboard on mobile (looks like they don't do mobile though).

A common technique used in other web-based editors for other content-types (like online video editing, online image editors, etc) work by creating a hidden <textarea> or <input type="text"/> and giving that element focus - and then updating the manually-rendered content in response to normal DOM events like 'input', 'change', 'keydown' (if necessary - the 'input' event should be preferred, ofc). Because a "real" DOM element with native IME and soft-keyboard support is being used to process user input there's little to no degredation of the user-experience.

...though the user does lose the ability to do things like drag text-selection handles. Alternative approaches include instead making the textarea very visible and instead positioning it directly on-top of the manually-rendered content and using as much of the browser's built-in support for styling input elements and input text to match the manually-rendered content as closely as possible - but also hiding the manually-rendered content to avoid confusing the user. They may have a toggle to allow the user to choose between "simple-edit with live preview" (i.e. hidden textarea) and "edit mode". This technique isn't confined to just the web: lots of desktop software (especially in the days before WPF, JavaFX, etc) that needed to allow the user to precisely edit text within a design-surface would just instantiate a native textbox widget directly on-top of the text's location in the design-surface. It wasn't just 2D art software that did this, but also at least a few WYSIWYG-ish HTML editors (prior to contentEditable) did this. I actually wish this technique would come back (despite its clunkiness) simply because Markdown+Preview is far, far better than a WYSIWYG contentEditable widget where an inadvertant mouse-click or drag would create a `float` disaster - or bugs where elements wouldn't be closed correctly and so ending-up breaking the entire website layout...

I like the hacking mindset to make something work even if the odds are against it but the better approach would be to fix the DOM APIs and to do the necessary performance work instead of basically throwing all the responsibility on some library and the web developer.

I haven't noticed the change either, scrolling is somewhere less than 60fps on new Mac hardware.

It's the only thing about VS Code I would change: have it use native APIs for text rendering so we can get the same framerate as native apps.

Microsoft Word, Pages and Open Office don't seem to be bottlenecked by rendering performance like Google Docs. Perhaps the browser is the wrong platform for document editing.

Microsoft Word and Pages both also have web apps, for years, that are 'bottlenecked by rendering performance' (would put it as 'clearly would be improved by better rendering performance', as you're noting)

I believe this 100%. After using google office for years (just because it's free and cloud-based), I recently tried MS Word and Excel recently at work. The different was mind-blowing. I forgot just how functional and straightforward MS Office is compared to the clunky, barebones google options.

If I wanted a desktop-first, cloud-backed solution, what would be the most future-proof and durable? Can I use Open Office across OSes? What would be the best cloud backup service these days? (just a general question to readers)

> Can I use Open Office across OSes?

I would recommend Libreoffice over Openoffice, but yes (for both)

And you can of course backup to your cloud service of choice. The main benefit of google docs, o365, etc. Is real-time collaboration. But there is no reason why a desktop app couldn't support realtime collaboration with a suitable backend service.

There are lots of reasons.

There must be exactly zero reasons—not lots—why they can't, since some native applications do, in fact, support realtime collaboration.

What do you prefer about Libreoffice? I've used both once or twice but not enough to really learn anything about them

LibreOffice is an actual active project; OpenOffice is a political ghost entity.

Very good to know, thanks!

The only time I've ever seen real-time Google Docs collaboration has been during meetings which should have been an email. Total waste of everyone's time. Not to mention the horrible UX of people constantly moving their cursor around and moving text around. I'd suggest that pass-the-baton style collaboration would be a much better UX if you absolutely must collaborate real-time on creating a document. Which I find the premise to be incredibly dubious to begin with.

Even if actual realtime collaboration is rare, there are other collaboration features that are missing in most desktop equivalents, like getting notified of changes, being able to mention people in comments, etc. that I do see used quite a bit.

But my experience is that realtime collaboration is useful. In particular, immediately after emailing a doc to multiple people it is not at all unusual for more than one person to be actively looking at commenting on, and maybe changing the document at the same time.

I prefer LibreOffice over Open Office, but I believe both are cross-platform (Linux, Windows, macOS). Then, I'd just use Dropbox or similar to save the files to for cloud storage. The only downside is no real-time collaboration. You can also look into Collabora, but I don't have any experience with it.

If you don't require Linux support or if the web is tolerable for Linux, I personally recommend the Microsoft Office suite. There's the obvious compatibility concern because nearly everyone uses those, they have real-time collaboration built in for both desktop and the web, comes with OneDrive storage, and will obviously be extremely future-proof. I cannot recall a single time any of the apps have crashed on me on both Windows and macOS, so I think it's pretty "durable".

> The only downside is no real-time collaboration.

This isn't a small thing for many users.

IMHO HTML documents backed by a versioning system (probably fossil or pijul rather than the overly complex git) are the way forward for documents where content is much more important than presentation.

While “text in a VCS” is a great option, it’s obviously far less usable than something like Google Docs, and you still don’t get real-time collaboration, which can be really nice.

Yeah... I'm wondering though, Fossil is based on SQLite - a database - and databases are designed to solve the issues arising when multiple users try to change the same data. (Also, fossil by default works in "autosync" mode.) So it should be "easy(er)" to make a real-time collaboration tool based on Fossil ?

P.S.: By researching this, I've stumbled on a (barebones) alternative to Google Docs : HackMD/CodiMD/HedgeDoc : https://demo.hedgedoc.org/

I also prefer desktop-first, cloud-backed solutions, but I have quite the opposite experience. Working with MS Office has been a pain and I've been a happy Google Docs user for about 10 years. My wife who isn't an especially technical person also finds Google Docs quite a lot more intuitive and laments when she has to use MS Office products for work (she is a consultant for Microsoft including their 365 line of business and her whole firm makes pitch decks in Google Slides before converting them to MS Office to present at Microsoft meetings--IIRC for the Azure and other b2b lines of business they don't even bother with MS Office). Note that my wife and I (like most of our age group) grew up on MS office, so it's not a question of familiarity.

Google Docs just built a better product and MS Office still hasn't caught up. I wonder if this is because or in spite of the browser target?

What makes Google Docs a better product than MS Office? Can you provide some examples of features that are better in Google Docs?

Copy a few cells from a Google sheet and paste it in an email, then do the same with Excel. Collaborate on building out a document from scratch with 10 people in Google sheets vs Excel.

Excel is a monster, and much more powerful than Google sheets in many ways, but in my experience, Google docs apps are a little better for collaboration, and they integrate a little tighter with each other.

Google docs is their document editor. Sheets is a part of GSuite.

I've also never had trouble pasting a spreedsheet selection into a word document. Email is a nightmare in general though.

I'm not sold on collaboration personally. I've had to do it a bunch since the pandemic began and I've found it to be an anti pattern. One of the big inconsistencies is that cells in sheets don't update while being edited while collaborating, which is not great if you have a spreadsheet heavy workflow. Docs is impossible to replace that though, because it's auto formatting is draconian and always seems to reset its preferences. When editing docs we spend more time formatting them then creating the content.

> I'm not sold on collaboration personally. I've had to do it a bunch since the pandemic began and I've found it to be an anti pattern.

How much of this is really related to technology? I do a lot of writing in both Word and Google Docs and see different sets of problems for both products. Having a group of people jump into either and expecting a good product (and experience getting there) is unrealistic.

With the pandemic, I think people have been trying lots of things without understanding what will be most effective. At least early on, there was a feeling that people had to be seen to be productive. It's nothing like real remote work.

For important docs, I still come back to having individuals write their content and only then does one person attempt to assemble it. The individuals often need their own independent reviews and consultation anyway before they have a decent draft. In some ways it improves visibility and helps with keeping folks on schedule too.

Google sheets is the specific example that I hate. In my experience, it's often laggy and clunky. You can't even scroll smoothly: the window MUST snap to row/column lines. When I realized that google sheets has such a laughable shortcoming, I knew I needed to get out of google office eventually.

i think copying some cells from excel into outlook, which i guess is the comparable transaction, works pretty well - what doesn't work for you? Maybe I am just missing out on some amazing functionality by not using google docs.

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 took me over an hour of fiddling with various formatting boxes to figure out how to turn it off. Any word processor that doesn't have the capability to do that has some appeal to me.

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 a word processor or sending around formatted docs that aren't PDF I fully expect people to be looking at you sideways.

> 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.

Unfortunately I do agree with this. I think a lot of tech isn't a matter of "what's the best?" but instead "what's the least bad?". I don't think Office is perfect but I think it's a lot less bad than google. I don't think MacOS is great but it's a lot better than windows for certain things, and vice versa. IMO unless software puts the user first in allowing customization and control, the best we can ever get is good instead of great.

What makes Google Docs a better product than MS Office? Ignorance and Dillusions.

Google Docs seems so bare-bones. I recently couldn't find a way to format a series of chunks of text within a Google Doc as code, and I'm pretty sure that it simply doesn't support styles for anything but headings and body text. It just doesn't seem to be the same kind of tool as Word.

Maybe an heresy around here, Microsoft Office with SharePoint backed server.

A free OneDrive account is enough, plus Office 2016+ autosave function, with the added bonus to have a cloud version of word to edit in collaboration your document on the go

I have had the exact opposite experience—I've used Google Docs for 10 years now, and in every way it manages to exceed Microsoft Office in usability. You're right that Google Docs can sometimes feel a little barebones, but it makes up for it by being very easy and straight-forward to use. In 10 years of using Google Docs, I can count on one hand—across probably tens of thousands of documents—the amount of times I've been missing something so critical to my work that I've needed to use an Office product.

(That said, I'm really excited about the recent changes Microsoft is making for Excel, with LET and LAMBDA, and I look forward to trying it out again in the future. Maybe this is the thing that finally gets me to switch! I've also enjoyed doing some more ~fancy~ graphic design in Pages on Mac, but overall the clunkiness was just so frustrating that I can't in good faith recommend it to anyone)

The best approach for a desktop first cloud-backed solution is possibly to have a VDI with Windows (on AWS for example), and use Microsoft Remote Desktop from your preferred physical computer to access it.

I have multiple desktop Macs in my various homes but I only use them for web browsing and RDP to the same Windows VDI.

It was indeed a very strong marketing move for... decades to convince people, like smart people, that document editing can be a web-based thing. Actually, now that the browser is so ubiquitous that GUIs sit on top of it (think Electron), then is time to ask the very obvious question - since everyone seems to agree that universal GUI is needed (proof: the browser) then is the browser the right universal GUI?

Not being heavily biased by any vendor, but really, is there anything better than XAML to describe user interfaces, that is also cross-platform and does not have the burden of DOM? Please - share examples.

> 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. And Apple, Microsoft and Facebook have very little strategic incentive to care. (React Native notwithstanding). Google is trying with Flutter - but we'll see.

I wonder if maybe the the right direction is up. WASM is already supported by all major browser engines. I'd love to see a lower level layout & rendering API for the browser, exposed to wasm. We could do to the DOM what Vulcan did to OpenGL. And like opengl, if it was designed right, you should be able to reimplement the DOM on top in (native wasm) library code.

Then the universal GUI of the future could be the gutted out shell of a web browser (we'd just need wasm + the low level layout engine), running libraries for whatever UI framework you want to use, written in any language you like. A UI environment like that would be small, portable and fast.

[1] https://www.openhub.net/p/chrome/analyses/latest/languages_s...

I really like that scenario, but I don't think market forces are moving towards it.

Then again, we got wasm, and that feels like a miracle in itself.

Well, it’s clearly what the Google docs team wants. And it would yield higher performance for other similarly complex web apps (eg Figma). And allow native UI development in more languages (Blazor). It also looks to be the sort of thing the Flutter team want for web builds. And it could work well for the base system of chromeOS too.

For whatever reason, Google invests hundreds of millions each year into chrome, and trusts their engineers’ leadership on how to make it succeed. The question in my mind is if browser engineers themselves decide to push in this direction.

Chrome has been pushing Houdini [1] for years. It doesn't have special WASM integration right now AFAICT but it is basically a lower level layout & rendering API for the browser.

[1] https://ishoudinireadyyet.com/

I've looked at Houdini again and I'm not convinced.

First, because it's more like OpenGL 3 (add more powerful APIs) than Vulkan (clean room design).

Second, it seems mostly abandoned. The page you cited lists multiple sub-proposals that have "No signal" even from the Chrome team. All mentions of Houdini I can find on developers.google.com are from 2018. I can't find anything about Houdini integration with WebAssembly, which is what I'd expect if development was ongoing.

Overall, I'm seeing everything I would expect to see in the timeline where Mozilla has no intention of ever implementing Houdini, and Google has decided it's not worth pursuing beyond what's already implemented.

I think you have just described in broad strokes what will happen in the next decade of GUI development.

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.

I feel the need to argue that the browser is not the browser engine. An app sitting in a chrome tab is significantly different than an app built on electron, they just share some rendering code paths.

Electron apps have shown that you can use a browser's rendering engine to make high quality apps distributed on multiple platforms. They also have the benefit of persistence, filesystem access, hooks into native code should you need them (not WASM - mind you), you can implement true multithreading and explicit SIMD optimizations. You don't have memory limitations, and you don't have to worry about browser sandboxing, malicious or well intentioned extensions that break the experience, etc.

The browser is not the same platform as electron. I would guess that Google Docs would function much better in electron than on the web.

> An app sitting in a chrome tab is significantly different than an app built on electron, they just share some rendering code paths.

That isn't really true, Electron is basically a thin veneer over the Chrome browser, with NodeJS tacked on the side. Just take a look at the source code.

> Electron apps have shown that you can use a browser's rendering engine to make high quality apps distributed on multiple platforms.

Electron has shown that you can use a re-skinned browser and NodeJS to ship applications on all platforms capable of running Chrome. That ranges somewhere between "acceptable tradeoff" and "absolute overkill", depending on the application.

> You don't have memory limitations, and you don't have to worry about browser sandboxing, malicious or well intentioned extensions that break the experience, etc.

You still do have almost all of the limitations of a web browser in your rendering code, and you have none of the features of the web browser outside of it. The bridge between the two is inefficient.

An app sitting in a chrome tab also shares its user interface, which is a problem when your app starts deviating from a simple HTML document.

Yeah, I'm wondering why Google isn't building a desktop version of their office apps in electron. I can practically hear the collective sigh of relief upon those landing in users ' laps.

The killer feature of Google Docs is the real-time collaboration. People willingly gave up a lot of editing and layout functionality to get that. It was so much better than sending drafts of documents back and forth in email.

That and just being able to send one to anyone to collaborate on it quickly. That's the big thing that makes web apps so compelling.

> It was indeed a very strong marketing move for... decades to convince people, like smart people, that document editing can be a web-based thing.

I think this is overly reductive. There was a technical problem driving some of this; namely - document collaboration sucked (to some degree still does).

Moving documents online was a tradeoff - making the editor web based solves a bunch of problems but causes some other ones; desktop based cloud backed editing didn't exist (not that it's perfect now) at a time when you could get useful collaboration done with web based editors.

I'm not saying this was the only thing going on, but reducing it to just "marketing" misses the mark, I think.

The way that word processors are designed, essentially as very smart linked-lists of objects, would've actually allowed for the document collaboration very early on. We can perhaps speculate dozens of reasons why dis did not happen, but I guess it was for strategic reasons. But it will and is happening.

Is about right making the point that IMHO the desktop office processor is far from dead, actually I would imagine a comeback of desktop UIs because they are so much easier to get right, especially when you have complex forms (which all business software has) or custom GUIs (such as those in software like Blender, Photoshop, Lightroom, etc).

Question is did people really needed the collaboration feature so much, or as much as it was praised for decades... When it shows that source code (which IS one very important content) is being developed not collaboratively in real-time in the browser, but with the aid of various version control systems (CVS, SVN, GIT etc.) that is neither real-time, nor collaborative in the sense that Google DOX is.

So the whole collaboration thing is fun to have, great thing to demo, but perhaps not the killer feature.

Question is whether other features were more important and thus got implemented in the office packages. Such as enterprise integration capabilities and very powerful and well crafted WYSIWYG that is only possible with custom built engine.

Let's be honest - the most complex apps that is typically running on an average desktop OS is the browser and the word/spreadsheet processor. Back in the day the browser was not a VM and was not that complex. And as OpenOffice showed - this is not very easy to get right. As WPS Office (the Chinese office) showed - even if the presentation layer is fast/correct, it is not really that easy to (originally) come up with it nor integrate it with other enterprise services.

One may wonder whether MS Office was created to run best on Windows, or was it that Windows is made so to enable good run of MS Office and the integration of all this mandatory software that constitutes the modern enterprises... (again, trying to be as unbiased as possible)

> Question is did people really needed the collaboration feature so much, or as much as it was praised for decades... When it shows that source code (which IS one very important content) is being developed not collaboratively in real-time in the browser, but with the aid of various version control systems (CVS, SVN, GIT etc.)

This is a good point. I don't think realtime collaboration is so important, but multiple author collaboration is. And "track changes" is a sort-of good-enough solution, but painful.

I've had good luck collaborating on documents (research papers) using latex and source control, but that assumes (a) participants are comfortable with both and (b) the storage format is amenable to revision control. Most word processing doesn't work well like this because you can get the document into a broken state in ways that are hard to recover from, and many of the users have no mental workflow map for "source control"

TeX/LateX or orgmode/Markdown type approaches have an advantage here for complicated collaboration.

These days a lot of collaborative stuff is being done outside of spreadsheets and word processing docs, the lines are blurrier and the collaboration is broader. In the "old days" a wiki might have done the trick for this but people want richer environments too. Not sure what he answer really is.

Google docs is worth it for the coorporation, but if you are writting for yourself, or anything seriously it is simply not good enough, but I don't think the performance is the issue.

The browser is the wrong platform for anything that isn't an HTML document, and not only for performance reasons, but perhaps much more importantly : for interface reasons.

For instance : in your typical windowed program, when you press "Alt", it's supposed to show the Menu, which you can then quickly navigate using keyboard shortcuts. You can't do that properly inside the browser because it's going to conflict with the browser's own Alt-Menu.

Based on inspecting the DOM of the read-only preview document they link to, my guess is that they will be using traditional DOM elements for much of the editing UI. There appear to be many empty DOM elements that are there to hold various toolbars and other UI elements. And for what it's worth, there seem to be empty DOM elements intended to be read by screen readers.

This mode of argument seems odd to me. Google is announcing a solution to the problems they were having with the platform. Wouldn't the criticism "Perhaps the browser is the wrong platform for document editing" only be appropriate if Google was complaining that they have been unable to fix the problems?

The fact that, while developing for a given platform, you can encounter problems and fix them, doesn't seem to imply that there's something wrong with your choice of platform.

I hope so. Just one example, but when you use the API to export HTML, nested lists aren't actually nested.. they just inject increasing padding on subsequent LI tags. This is ridiculous and causes big issues for me, but I'm sure they had to do it for formatting purposes. So hopefully they can give us semantic HTML now that it's not coupled to the editor.

I get performance but for text based content, is canvas the best medium to render it?

Flutter uses renders everything on Canvas and performance and usability are terrible. Not even scrolling works properly.

So no, I doubt it’s inherently cleaner.

The canvas actually seems less performant when I compared it now. Scrolling is not as smooth. Click `Save as copy` and try it out.

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