Hacker News Reader

mcintyre1994

These changes look really nice! Out of interest does anyone know what the most common use cases for canvas are? The article says "30-40% of web pages have a <canvas> element" which is way higher than I'd guess. Is it used by ad networks or something like that that could increase the percentage a lot?

View on HN

Probably the majority of these would use Canvas2D for a mix of: fingerprinting, tracking/ad tech, feature detection, font metrics, CPU rasterization & pixel manipulation. Occasionally it will be used for specific elements, games, artworks, animations, font rendering, video effects, image resizing, and sometimes entire applications (Figma, Google Docs, Google Maps, although they likely all use WebGL Canvas for performance & control).

> Is it used by ad networks[…]?

It’s gotta be this. This article is about increasing awareness of canvas. It wouldn’t be needed if 30-40% of sites were knowingly using the tag.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com