[adpirz]

One of the things I was gobsmacked by the first time I used Figma years ago was its performance, which has only gotten better with time. From what I understand, they've built some custom stuff for WebGL for their renderer. Here it looks like it's powered by React. I'm curious if anyone's used both and can compare the performance of the two.

[throwaway0665]

Figma is the gold standard when it comes to performance and optimization, and is basically a native app that happens to be inside your browser. The co-founder and previous CTO Evan Wallace also created esbuild which powers most of the modern bundling tools.

The only other web app I can think of doing the same thing is Google Docs, which uses it's own canvas based renderer with an svg overlay for accessibility. I feel it's telling that Google thought leaning on their own browser (through HTML/CSS) wasn't even good enough for typesetting.

[purple-leafy]

This Evan Wallace fella sounds like an accomplished individual

[calebj0seph]

It's becoming more common. Confluence whiteboards is all WebGL, even the text rendering.

[robertlagrant]

Google Docs used to be Writely though; they acquired it. It predates Chrome.

[nasso_dev]

the switch to canvas rendering is recent though

https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-...

[robertlagrant]

Oh! I didn't know that. Fair enough - that does rather make the point.

[lopkeny12ko]

I've seen people say this a lot, and I have the exact opposite takeaway. Figma is one of the slowest and laggiest applications I've ever used and a shining example to me of why we need to stop building rich software experiences in web browsers.

On Linux + Firefox, basic navigation, like panning and zooming around in a file, is painfully laggy. In FigJam, try using the marker to draw any curved line--it updates at like 2 frames per second, which makes it completely unusable for handwriting text or drawing diagrams. Excalidraw, on the other hand, in the same browser, is perfectly lag-free.

Every time a designer sends me a Figma I just ask for exported images because using the website is an exercise in frustration. And don't even get me started on the impossible, spaghetti-on-an-infinite-canvas UX requiring endless zooming and dragging...

[superhuzza]

I use Figma every single day for work, and have virtually no performance issues, even with projects with 100s of frames.

I just tried using the marker in Figjam, and it works perfectly fine for me. I think you may be running into an incompatibility between your browser or settings and Figma.

As for the infinite canvas, this is very handy as a designer, it makes it much easier to work across multiple frames at once, such as quickly zooming out to look at the flow or building a prototype, all the while zooming in to fix issues.

[eddd-ddde]

I get what you are saying, but have you tried Clickup? For a glorified todo app, it manages to be so slow that Figma feels like a breeze.

I also happen to use Linux + Firefox and so I have to agree that it is definitely not a joy to use Figma, even for small projects.

[FractalHQ]

Why don’t you use a different browser to work with Figma files if yours can’t run it properly?