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Re:Felt by injidup on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @12:50AM (#31984428)
What nonsense! Gave up after reading this.

""" Where typical internet maps take 30+ seconds to load after each pan and zoom """

What typical maps are the talking about?

Re:Felt by kart23 on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @02:25AM (#31985001)
ironically, performance is terrible with most of their demos, and I'm using chrome on a decently powerful desktop.

https://felt.com/map/San-Diego-Zoo-Virtual-Tour-LC3QHLPxR4yw...

Re:Felt by cnity on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @04:29AM (#31985773)
After a bit of an inspection, it looks like they segment the viewport into multiple canvas elements. I don't think repositioning loads of canvas elements by translating the parent div in CSS is the most performant approach, but I may be wrong.

It would likely be more performant if the map view was a single canvas and panning, segmentation and so on was done in a buffer and rendered to the canvas by blitting the pre-rendered sections, or something along those lines. Maybe even rendering the sections to WebGL textures and using a WebGL context for the canvas.

Re:Felt by aschleck on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @10:43AM (#31988804)
You're right that using canvas/WebGL will be much faster. It seems the embeddable Google Maps JS library recently moved in this direction, though it appears they kept the layers of stacked divs (almost certainly for backwards compatibility with existing users who have HTML layers that need to be kept in sync.)

But something fun to notice with Felt is that the rendering library (LeafletJS) is using transform3d to do 2d translations (instead of just using translate), so you may wonder "why?" At least in Chrome (and it seems in Safari) if you use transform3d the browser is more likely to keep the div in its own layer. This will reduce a lot of the paint/compositing time, and make the frame rate dramatically better. Of course in this case the micro-optimizations are irrelevant in comparison to Felt's JS performance problems (which on my machine appears to be due to projecting 2000 points from lat/lng space to pixel space every frame.) Choosing to project points every frame is super confusing because the whole point of the translate/transform3d optimization is to avoid having to recalculate pixel space during the latency-sensitive pan interaction. Odd.

Re:Felt by ev0lv on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @09:18AM (#31987872)
This guy codes! No seriously, this is great feedback for the devs.
Re:Felt by sen on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @02:51AM (#31985158)
Wow the performance on that is absolutely terrible. I'm on a gaming PC and it bogged me down so hard the tab started freezing up.
Re:Felt by criddell on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @09:59AM (#31988260)
Yeah, it's borderline unusable for me too, but it is a beta so I'll reserve judgement.
Re:Felt by BbzzbB on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @10:58AM (#31989004)
Same. Could it be HN overwhelming their servers rather than the tool itself?
Re:Felt by bil7 on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @11:27AM (#31989350)
there's no way they've implemented each pan, move and zoom to require a server roundtrip. Their client side is not performant.
Re:Felt by BbzzbB on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @11:40AM (#31989553)
Thanks for the clarification.
Re:Felt by bil7 on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @11:26AM (#31989333)
same here on an m1 macbook pro
Re:Felt by lionkor on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @03:49AM (#31985525)
i7-9700k @ 4.9 GHz, RTX 2070 here, no other tabs open, absolutely unusable still. Firefox Nightly with hardware acceleration. Yikes.
Re:Felt by Traubenfuchs on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @03:46AM (#31985496)
Performance is so bad, the page crashes regularly and repeatedly on my iPhone 13 pro. It‘s unusable.
Re:Felt by schleck8 on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @05:28AM (#31986148)
https://felt.com/map/Appalachian-Trail-Thru-Hike-9BZ2GWGGKQ1...

I just loaded this big map on a pixel 4a and while it was laggy, it still responded and didn't crash

Re:Felt by hbn on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @10:09AM (#31988366)
It seems like they don't support Safari or anything other than Chrome (and all browsers on iOS are technically Safari)

I tried it in Safari on my i9 late-2019 MBP and (after dismissing the warning message) I was barely able to move around.

Re:Felt by cr3ative on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @07:34AM (#31986940)
This is... unusable, on a decent Macbook Pro using Chrome.
Re:Felt by tagyro on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @06:44AM (#31986596)
after the initial load and warning to switch to chrome, it's running pretty smooth in safari on a m1 macbook air
Re:Felt by madeofpalk on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @06:55AM (#31986676)
On my MBP w/M1 Pro, it's terribly unresponsive trying to zoom.
Re:Felt by CamelRocketFish on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @02:52AM (#31985161)
I was exactly the same. As soon as I read that hyperbole I immediately closed the page. You’re either dishonest or perform terrible tests which means I’m not going to trust much else of what you write on your landing page.
Re:Felt by nik736 on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @02:07AM (#31984888)
Using Firefox their maps are taking a long time to load after each pan and zoom. lol.
Re:Felt by 8n4vidtmkvmk on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @03:36AM (#31985426)
they meant they take 30 seconds whereas competitors take 300ms. just a little slip up
Re:Felt by ryanbrunner on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @09:50AM (#31988171)
Maybe they started this project in the late 90s with the goal to unseat Mapquest.
Re:Felt by krstffr on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @02:02AM (#31984852)
A bit sad as the thing that made me decide to not even try their app (which looked cool!) was the abysmal performance (in FF).
Re:Felt by zimpenfish on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @01:41PM (#31991308)
Given the context, "Never wait for a dataset to load again. Where typical internet maps take 30+ seconds to load after each pan and zoom, ...", it seems to be specifically talking about loading and rendering new bits of data taking 30+ seconds when you pan and zoom, not just panning and zooming the map itself.
Re:Felt by jhugo on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @01:21AM (#31984596)
Yeah, it was really hard to take it seriously after reading that.