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I fail to understand why not use the native browser rendering engine, or at least SVG for the UI. It must be cheaper in resources (memory, network, cpu), easier to make accessible and easier to render

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Anecdotally, in the very early days Figma rendered its UI entirely in canvas, but we eventually switched over to React for the UI. It ended up being far easier for development cycles and for accessibility/integration with existing browser features.

I thought you guys recently rewrote everything to be in WebGL instead?

Go inspect the source and see for yourself, the UI is normal HTML.

I think their UI is react but the actual drawing canvas is WebGL.

I always thought it was so cool Figma just rendered to a canvas! Oddly enough I ran into this at my previous job doing browser isolation when we got a bug report that Figma wasn’t displaying properly in our browser.

Makes sense to switch the rest of the UI to react though, just for how many people know it.

The main reason was just because this engine was entirely built for native platforms originally in C++ (not for the Web). This is a port, hence why the UI is running in WASM/WebGL.

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