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Comment by greysteil | Hacker News Reader

PM at Figma here (for dev tools, not slides).

What happened to Allen here sucks. I've messaged the team so we can dig into this specific case. More generally, we know that Slides needs to be bulletproof when presenting, and nothing less than that is acceptable.

As an FYI, we _do_ use Figma Slides internally for pretty much everything, from internal meetings to major events. As a PM I use it every week, and our internal feedback channel for Slides is super active with folks like me requesting improvements. Figma is also a pretty unique place, where it's more likely our senior leadership request quality improvements than chase for deadlines - we know how critical the user experience is. We don't always get it right, but when we don't we're committed to fixing it.

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> As an FYI, we _do_ use Figma Slides internally for pretty much everything

I think this is part of the issue. How much of the internal use stays within the editor view? Do you have any internal stakeholders who won’t click a Figma link and instead want a PPT or PDF? Because those are normal requests for presentations - but not ones that you’d find with internal use.

For example, there needs to be a way to export to PDF that’s less than several hundred MB. And the PPT export is hopelessly broken - the outputs look like a clipped ransom letter.

I'm usually building my slides in Figma (the original app), and I've learnt to run the PDF exported by it (hundreds of MB) through Adobe "Compress PDF" online utility that gets it to <10 MB. Would be great for the Figma-exported PDF to be small right away.

on a tangent, being in the video industry, for me to see a file only in the hundreds of MBs wouldn't even get my attention. it's funny how used to the boiling water one gets when it happens slowly. of course a PDF is not a video file, so maybe something would feel hinky???

It’s amazing how small text and images, even compressed video, can get compared to uncompressed video.

Caring a little bit will help save a bunch of space.

Does video these days really ever exist uncompressed other than when it's in transit, like through an HDMI cable or in a frame buffer?

Does anyone store uncompressed video these days? Honest question.

sending files over email is just extremely common, staying lower than 15mb is almost a requirement to facilitate easy communication in many businesses

Also, I tend to have OneDrive sync my active projects, including the steerco and update slidedecks, to my iPad, to read on my iPad when travelling or commuting. Small decks are so much more pleasant to deal with, and can easily sync over a mobile connection

Regardless of the specific bugs he ran into, it is a product that only works well online, despite how difficult it is for a user to know for sure ahead of time what kind of connection will be available when it counts. Isn’t that just a fundamental miscalculation for this type of product? It’s almost guaranteed to put a certain percentage of your users in an embarrassing situation in front of an audience.

>despite how difficult it is for a user to know for sure ahead of time what kind of connection will be available

In 2025 it's a safe assumption to assume the user always has internet access. I've never had to worry if I will have internet access when I go to an event.

This is a bad assumption to make. There are infinitely many reasons why the internet could be not working currently. This is just lazy engineering and a lack of testing.

Which is why you need to weight then by likelihood. There will always be an infinite amount of things that can go wrong.

That doesn't change the fact that your point about internet always being available is not accurate at events with lots of people where networks may struggle or be overwhelmed, and there is a lot of interference. Not to mention, devices can have issues, there can be interference, etc.

The user will always have internet access - except when it suddenly drops out during that one critical meeting.

Doing a presentation at a conference? The hotel promised there would be "internet", but failed to mention all 10.000 attendees would be sharing a 10Mbps link. Doing a presentation at another company? They've got an overly-aggressive firewall on the guest network, so Figma isn't loading - and your provider decided to temporarily block your 5G tethering due to "misuse". Presenting a keynote at Computex? Guess Figma is having an outage, better tell the hundreds of journalists to come back tomorrow!

Your internet may have always worked so far. Are you willing to bet your career on some random 3rd party internet connection - or Figma itself - never having an outage?

>drops out during that one critical meeting

The article said that it handles drops of internet connections fine.

>sharing a 10Mbps link

You aren't streaming a video.

>They've got an overly-aggressive firewall on the guest network, so Figma isn't loading

Figma is an industry standard tool. It would be unlikely to be blocked.

>and your provider decided to temporarily block your 5G tethering due to "misuse"

You can probably present directly from your phone in this case.

>Guess Figma is having an outage, better tell the hundreds of journalists to come back tomorrow!

I guess so. Or the journalists can watch the livestream or a recording.

Sometimes I read comments and wonder how someone could be so divorced from reality.

> The article said that it handles drops of internet connections fine.

I ... don't think it does? It states the exact opposite at least twice:

> Just because you have a presentation open and loaded, doesn’t mean you can present it. If you are offline when you actually click Present, it will barf.

> Once you are presenting, you can click to “download” the presentation to be available offline – but be careful not to close the tab or it will undownload!

> Doing a presentation at another company? They've got an overly-aggressive firewall on the guest network

This happened to me lol. I copied a demo video from our landing page, and the host company somehow blocked our CDN, so the demo slide is just a blank page. Have to mouth the whole demo from memory, not too bad but it's really awkward.

No, it absolutely is not safe to assume that the user has Internet access, or that if they do the access is fast or reliable.

Figma Slides does not need fast and reliable internet.

Events are actually one of the last places in the populated world without reliable internet, either from dead zones in a lot of facilities or overloaded wifi & local networks.

In 2025, what service provider are you using that never has service disruptions?

Having disruptions is handled fine as shown in the article.

Try connecting to the Wi-Fi at the London ExCeL or the Paris Expo sometime and then say that again with a straight face.

turn up during pre-conf, check your slides with conf IT, works beautifully.

Day of conf, 100x the number of users. Things go boom.

You never actually did try to have a conference talk did you?

When I walk into a client's office for a meeting, I like to be able to plug into a projector and talk through my slides (which I export to PDF for simplicity). I don't want to have to ask for a guest Wifi password or anything else technical. As a result, I usually give presentations offline, unless the projector needs me to connect over the internet. Sure I could tether my laptop to my phone, but why add a dependency?

There is an offline feature, it just didn’t work properly.

Having offline access to documents is a solved problem in cloud-backed apps, including Figma. All of the comments about the cloud component must be from people who have never used Figma. It’s not an inherently broken thing, it was just broken in Slides.

Figma’s other tools are generally good. That’s why it’s so confusing that they released Slides in such a broken state.

But I’m talking about Slides, not Figma in general. Presentation software actually working correctly when you have your presentation is mission-critical.

Thanks Grey – other than the presenting-at-an-event flow I do really did like the Figma Slides experience, so this is great to hear. The world is better off with a strong Figma.

This is the epitome of “on our low latency 10 Gbps dedicated link to our servers it works fine!” response that I’ve learned to expect from all large corporations.

Now try your product, but use only WiFi tethering to spotty 4G… shared with fifty other people and tell me your cloud service “just works”.

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