[mrkcsc]

OK but thats simply doesn't perform.

You can't say "only rendering what is visible should be handled by the browser" and call that a solution unless you have a magic wand to make Chrome/other browsers do this.

The browser doesn't do this, and so you can either do what you say and have your browser freeze when you load up a million line diff, or you can fix things within your control which is what the author is doing.

[charcircuit]

I just tested it now and Chrome does not freeze when opening up a page with a million lines of code. I repeated a file from the Linux kernel 600 times to reach over 1.1 million lines and I put each line in a div so I could alternate red and green background colors.

>you can fix things within your control

Blink is open source. Improving the browser is fully within your control and since browser automatically updates these optimizations will make it to your end users in a relatively short amount of time.

[amadeus]

Would love to see a website that makes everything DiffsHub does without making any of the work necessary. Making it all obsolete would be a huge step forward for the web. We support diffs that exceed 36 million lines, with syntax highlighting, comments, bundled into a reusable library for anyone to use.

Also this works in all browsers, fixing blink doesn’t help move the web forward.

[charcircuit]

I agree. I'm tired of these sites with glitchy scrolling and broken search due to trying to reimplement the browser in javascript.

>fixing blink doesn’t help move the web forward.

Historically making one browser engine faster encourages other engines to also be made faster. And realistically Blink has the majority of the browser market share, so it is the most important one to optimize for. Trying to move the web forward shouldn't be the primary goal. The primary goal should be making a good experience for the user. Niche engines like Firefox's just aren't worth caring about due to its low market share.

[amadeus]

Glad we solved glitchy scrolling for now (the title of this blog post was “on rendering diffs”, not “searching diffs”). Browser search on a 36 million line diff would not by great, but it’s something we hope to have a solution for. One step at a time.

[charcircuit]

If the solution for searching big pages was built into the browser then it would be fixed for every site instead of requiring each site to use a library or fix it themselves.