Comment by KronisLV | Hacker News Reader

Comment by KronisLV | Hacker News Reader

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> MapLibre GL JS[2]

Here's a nice example of the maps in action (though the other links also have showcases): https://openmaptiles.org/docs/website/maplibre-gl-js/

The transitions seem really smooth and the user experience is pleasant... until I open them on an Android device that came out just 2 years ago (one of those rugged models), in Firefox.

I'm sure that the slowness has something to do with rendering vector data, because all of the sudden those maps become unusable - slow zooming, slow loading (possibly the data is fetched reasonably quickly, just slow to display), slow scrolling. In a word, laggy. When looking at an area of my choice, using the vector maps (even after letting them load fully) I get probably less than 10 frames per second so panning feels choppy.

On the other hand, the raster maps are basically what you'd get when panning across an image - the latter experience remains reasonably smooth. There, the only disadvantage is the typical swapping out of raster tiles as you zoom in or out, but that's a small nuisance at best, apart from the visual difference in quality.

Have a look at OpenStreetMap, which the first link uses for its data: https://www.openstreetmap.org

As it currently stands, if we all used only vector data, I feel like a lot of people on lower spec devices would be left out. I wonder whether any serious tests have been made on the battery usage or performance of both types, but even tests this simple show that there are certain problems with the current implementations of vector maps.

I actually did a blog post about this just now, with a video example of the two types of maps running side by side: https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/vector-maps...

Note: this isn't meant to be a super accurate comparison, but rather a quick look into some of the immediately apparent practical differences in what the user experience is like.

> The transitions seem really smooth and the user experience is pleasant... until I open them on an Android device that came out just 2 years ago (one of those rugged models), in Firefox.

My daily driver is a Samsung Galaxy S4 (2014) with LineageOS and Firefox (Fennec F-Droid, no google services).

Your link works pretty well, it took a few seconds to load the map, but zooming and panning is quite smooth, it seems.

Edit: panning is much less smooth on openstreetmap. It's faster to bring in new features when zooming, but you have to endure blurry text and less details for half a second or so. Also, you can't rotate the view. IIRC google maps renders text locally to solve that.

> Your link works pretty well, it took a few seconds to load the map, but zooming and panning is quite smooth, it seems.

This is exactly why I recorded a video and put one in that blog post - because sometimes people that are running even the same software will have vastly different experiences. At the end of the day "But it works/doesn't work on my machine." is just the reality that we need to deal with - which will vary for someone with a weaker or more powerful device, certain browser, certain drivers and so on.

> Panning is much less smooth on openstreetmap.

I'd say that from the best to worst for me it'd go a bit like this: Google Maps (application) > OpenStreetMap (web) > Google Maps (web) > MapLibre GL JS (web)

> It's faster to bring in new features when zooming, but you have to endure blurry text and less details for half a second or so.

Same here!

> Also, you can't rotate the view.

I can't rotate the view in Google Maps (web) either, only in the native app.

For me, the web maps also seem to use raster tiles, whereas the application seems to use vector data, added more info in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33712150

That's strange, it works flawlessly on my 2018 phone, although that has a Snapdragon 845 which was considered the fastest SoC available for Android phones at the time. How is the Google Maps, OsmAnd, or Mapbox experience on your phone? They also use vector map data.

If you need to support old underpowered devices you can serve raster tiles to them. I don't know how to automatically detect which type to send to a device, one way would be to just time how long it takes to render a frame of vector data and switch to raster maps if the device is too slow, or at least present the user with the option.

[0] https://www.mapbox.com/maps/streets (Press "Preview Style")

> How is the Google Maps, OsmAnd, or Mapbox experience on your phone? They also use vector map data.

Google Maps (in Firefox) seem to be slow when loading data in, but decent when panning around. Though it does appear that they're using raster based tiles (I can quite literally see pixels when I zoom in, before the new tile loads and replaces the one for the previous zoom level).

Google Maps (Android app) seem to be really smooth when panning around, but also similarly slow when loading data in. Zooming is a bit sluggish, but not as bad as vector tiles when viewed through the browser.

I also remember using the HERE maps application a long time ago on an even slower device, somehow those performed way better than Google Maps application though.

My suspicions: a browser might have greater overhead, maybe not everything plays nicely with Firefox or my hardware. The slow data loading seems to be caused by the CPU/GPU instead of the network connection, because if new tiles are loaded in while I'm panning around, the movement also lags.

> If you need to support old underpowered devices you can serve raster tiles to them. I don't know how to automatically detect which type to send to a device, one way would be to just time how long it takes to render a frame of vector data and switch to raster maps if the device is too slow, or at least present the user with the option.

This is a good idea, provided that the people serving the maps would be interested in supporting both formats.

Firefox seems to have very inconsistent behaviour on Mapbox/Maplibre sites. I deal with a lot of bug reports with no pattern to them except Firefox is slow but on the same device, Chrome is perfect...

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