[k__]

What's the benefit here?

Seems like it's touted as an innovation, but the only thing I see is that page breaks are gone.

Which isn't bad, I mostly use Google docs for online articles and to maintain a todo list, so things are now a bit cleaner.

But it doesn't seem like a big change...

[jrochkind1]

When creating docs only meant to be consumed online, the page breaks have gotten in my way before many times. Splitting up paragraphs because they don't fit on a page etc.

So I can see this change having a big effect on consumers. If by "how big a change" you meant "would anyone even care", I think people will care, yes. Including me.

How big a change was it to implement? I don't know.

Note in addition to not having page breaks, it appears to have several "responsive" features added too (from the OP description, I haven't played with it yet myself). Lines wrap at whatever your screen size is (including zoom level), and there is apparently some screen-size-responsiveness to at least some images too.

I couldn't say how difficult this was to implement, having no idea what the code is like, and knowing that large legacy codebases can make naive predictions of how difficult a given change might be unreliable.

[k__]

I didn't think about the costs of implementing it, but that it seems to be an discussion worthy topic here on HN.

But I don't understand why.

[JoBrad]

Right? Isn’t this just the Web Layout view that MS Word has had forever?

[spookthesunset]

Our org does a lot through google docs. Every single doc I created I had to fight the stupid page breaks. Like, I was never gonna print the thing so knock it off, google!

So yeah, I welcome this change big time.

[k__]

I didn't like the page breaks either, but I never had big issues with them.

[polote]

It looks prettier, it allows you to put blocks bigger than the content. For example you can have the content to be fixed sized 800px and then inside the content put a large table or an image that is full width, and it can also feel like a static website. That what Notion does, you can "publish your page to the web" that gives a public URL that anyone can visit, without feeling like they are inside Notion

[hadlock]

The last time I printed something written on google docs was probably 2012 or so, a printed copy of my resume

Limiting my docs to a IRL format doesn't make much sense to me, page breaks make no sense, with H1/H2/H3 etc you can just navigate the doc that way, and internal links work etc. No need to say "check out the flurple widget subsection on page 92" you just slack/email them the link to the subheader or H3 or whatever and bam they're there reading what you need them to look at, similar to markdown docs on github, but with all the manual formating GUI'd away.