Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

Re:Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering by mattgreenrocks on Wednesday May 12, 2021 @11:51AM (#27131723)

I had these exact complaints about web apps many years ago, and I was dead wrong. Nobody cared that web apps were slow, had/has horrible UX compared to native apps, and feel janky by comparison. These demos elicit similar feelings. Now, they're not as fast as I like, but they feel better than most webapps already. (It reminds me of Flash, actually.)

If the Flutter dev experience is good enough, this will eat traditional web apps slowly. In a way, the web was designed for this sort of scenario: a delivery mechanism agnostic of the client implementation. We've gone from pushing server-generated HTML to megabytes of JS + SPAs, and now a WASM/Canvas hybrid seems inevitable.

It all comes down to how well these perform on mobile devices, what the dev experience is like, and how the end product feels. There's still a lot up in the air, but, I'm honestly impressed with the progress shown by Flutter here. There's still a host of considerations unaddressed (including accessibility) that I hope they have an approach for.

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Re:Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering by mrighele on Wednesday May 12, 2021 @12:02PM (#27131860)

Despite their shortcomings webapps won because they had a number of advantages that native lacked, most of all software distribution.

What has flutter to offer that a regular webapp lacks? (not performance, it seems)

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Re:Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering by mattgreenrocks on Wednesday May 12, 2021 @12:47PM (#27132364)

SPAs to Flutter is a much smaller step conceptually than native to Web. Most of the world is using a Blink-based browser of some sort already. Updates are pushed aggressively.

> What has flutter to offer that a regular webapp lacks?

Google branding, novelty, more sane dev UX. I'm not saying those are good reasons to choose it, I'm just extrapolating from how the industry works.

Let's be honest: end users basically just put up with whatever devs release at this point. It doesn't matter if the end product murders battery life, doesn't fit the target platform, and steals their data. It's not like switching to some less-than-web-native framework is somehow a bridge too far for end users.

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Re:Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering by tomatotomato37 on Wednesday May 12, 2021 @01:30PM (#27132897)

Your last point made me think: for all the flak the gamer demographic gets for being over entitled and toxic, they seem to actually ultimately end up with nice things like programs that run at a performance you'd expect from a modern computer and don't swamp you with creepily-targeted ads

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Re:Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering by brabel on Wednesday May 12, 2021 @12:40PM (#27132279)

The fact that it (the same code base with minor changes) runs on desktop and mobile platforms?

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Re:Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering by mattgreenrocks on Wednesday May 12, 2021 @12:59PM (#27132497)

Great point. It is striking to me how similar many of the modern languages are for various platforms (thinking of Rust, Kotlin, and Swift here), but it is still quite difficult to share business logic among web, Android, and iOS devices because of language differences.

If Dart/Flutter is good enough for all of those platforms, that is quite the value proposition.

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Re:Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering by morelisp on Wednesday May 12, 2021 @12:04PM (#27131878)

Resume lines.

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Re:Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering by lazysheepherd on Wednesday May 12, 2021 @12:38PM (#27132259)

This is correct, I am afraid.

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