Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Very impressive. Though I suggest you try it with Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 or Webkit Nightly (Firefox 3 works, but it's slow for large files).

I tried to create browser-based high-performance text manipulation application myself, but I never imagined to use Canvas.

For performance I used "contentEditable" DOM attribute [1] to piggyback on browser's native code. According to my unscientific subjective tests it's faster than Bespin's approach - a bit faster on FF3.1B2, a lot faster on FF3. Plus it works also on Explorer and Chrome (a kind of, it's buggy and freezes on large files).

Anyway, finally I had to switch to desktop application as the other parts of JavaScript/DOM/browser were not fast enough and also working with local files from JavaScript was very painful.

Still, after creating basically the same application twice, once in a browser and once as a desktop app, I can vouch for the bright future of fully browser based applications, once the performance would get there.

Going back from HTML+CSS+JavaScript to fiddling with widgets felt like going back from Python to C++ (and mind you, I fiddled with widgets in Python). You get the speed, but you pay the price elsewhere (my code more than doubled and user interface got a lot uglier).

Good luck to Mozilla/Opera/WebKit/Chrome folks, browsers as a platform are becoming awesome.

[1] http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/2007-10-26/multipage/se...



Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: