Google Docs users, you are on notice: Code rewrite may break browser extensions

Over the next few months, Google plans to change the way its online word processor Docs renders its pages in web browsers, and collateral damage is expected. In a blog post on Tuesday, the Chocolate Factory said it plans to move Docs from HTML-based rendering to Canvas-based rendering "to improve performance and improve …

[heyrick]

What would be nice

Is that instead of worrying about rendering speed, they consider caring about rendering accuracy.

The Android app in print preview mode, the website editor, and the PDF that gets generated when you export or print...

...are all different. From things lined up using tabs to where page breaks happen. Essentially any of the "your page will look like this" views are broken, because, no, your page doesn't look like that.

[A Non e-mouse]

Re: What would be nice

If you bothered to read the article you'll notice that is one of the reasons they're switching to canvas rendering.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: What would be nice

Bit harsh, I read the article reasonably well it does come over mostly concerned with performance.

[Anonymous Coward]

Speed optimizations ARRGHHH DANGER!

This is the same chocolate factory that removed 'destructors' from Java, the garbage collector no longer collects all the garbage, and finalize() is never called and so lots of cleanups never happen because an object never gets told its done with and never gets freed.

All to make the garbage collector a bit faster. Oh boy, if you see them optimize for speed RUN AWAY!

Android is leaking bitmaps

finalize()

{

myBitMap.recycle();

}

Leaking handles, leaking resources, leak networks, leak leak leak.

It even leaks heap memory that the garbage collector doesn't know about, because, for example....

finalize()

{

CacheMat.delete(m_id);

}

...because some heap isn't reference by an object but rather an id and the garbage collector is ignorant of such complex relationships.

My god this is incompetent shit. Undermining the basic smartpointer system that an OS is built on to make a badly designed garbage collector run a little faster, by not collecting all the garbage.

That's not chocolate Google is shovelling. They are a shark-jump company, and if you want to build you work on their turds, be sure to grab an Android 8 tablet, play with apps, like YouTube for a few hours and realize it works. Then try the same tablet upgraded to Android 9 or worse Android 10..... see how it slows down?

This is Google now.

I have to restart activities daily, and reboot tablets weekly. Restarting the activity daily forces the graphics heap to be garbage collected. Rebooting* the tablet weekly, forces the service's heap to be garbage collected. Not using Google crappy incompetent products at all, forces Google's developer department to be garbage collected.

* I can't even exit the service and restart it again on a scheduler, I have to do a full reboot, because since Android 10, that service, even a foreground one, cannot start an activity. They (i.e. morons shoveling shit) suggest using notifications, having already mangled notifications.

So, an example use case, a background service spots a problem on a server that needs fixed immediately, can it pop up a dialog and get them to fix it? NO, because someone in Google decided that would be too distracting. Even if the user chose that software for that purpose, the shit shoveller knows better than the user and developer.

Pardon my angry rant, but I don't apologize for its underlying message. Do not use Google products expecting the same level of competence you recall from the past. This is not that Google.

[Jamie Jones]

Re: Speed optimizations ARRGHHH DANGER!

I agree. Google is terrible at removing / lockdowning / changing things on Android and youtube without the option / API to revert it.

I didn't know about the garbage collection, but I'm well aware of access to things being removed with no corresponding permission added to re-enable it. They've long ago dropped the pretense of being developer friendly, and now just want to make a consumer iPhone clone.

More and more things need root because either Google "no longer wants you to do that" or they are tightening up the underlying OS without adding an appropriate permission controlled API for apps that need them.

[Mike 137]

Re: Speed optimizations ARRGHHH DANGER!

"This is the same chocolate factory that removed 'destructors' from Java"

It was probably a Sun decision. Java 1.0 had automatic garbage collection and no explicit destructors. However I agree auto GC doesn't work at all well.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello?

"....to improve performance and improve consistency in how content appears across different platforms."

It is appearance consistency that is the requirement driver here. That's the brass ring for document renderers. You're going to get want you want (eventually). Using canvas is the means, the speed up is a bonus.

You get want you want. Other people get features removed.

While I can appreciate why they'd want to be very particular with text placement by using lowest-level code, not having a text-based representation is taking away the ability to extend Docs using add-ons. It is as though they were pulling rendering back under the OS covers - a form of obfuscation.

[teknopaul]

Re: Hello?

If you want true wysiwyg use Mardown, and don't convert to html.

kiss is the golden rule with text.

[TReko]

One browser to rule them all

and the next step is that Google Docs will only work properly in Chrome.

Google's developing a monopoly Microsoft could only dream of 20 years ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Google's developing a monopoly

That's why some of us try really hard to have nothing to do with Google. Google is EVIL through and through (along with the likes of Facebook).

[Anonymous Coward]

Google's developing a monopoly

I recently moved to helloSystem, and when I found out that Google doesn't support the Falkon web browser, I installed LibreOffice and alpine mail client. At first I was going to try with Firefox, but after a lot of thinking my answer was "I don't need any more of their crap, so why bother?"

[Julz]

Re: One browser to rule them all

That is already true.

[karlkarl]

Re: One browser to rule them all

Yep, Google and Microsoft are both companies to simply not engage with.

I would chuck Apple onto the list too. Basically any large consumer IT company.

As for Oracle and IBM... They aren't great but they currently do slightly less damage to the IT industry.

[Claptrap314]

Re: One browser to rule them all

Talk to a SMB leader who is retired. Your comment regarding IBM is strictly current tense. As for Oracle, their evilness got too much in front for them every to hit the industry-level effectiveness of the others.

[Ilsa Loving]

Re: One browser to rule them all

Ok, saying Oracle is better than Google, Microsoft or Apple is just insanity. Oracle is very well known for screwing everyone and everything, to such an extent that Microsoft looks downright altruistic.

They are particularly fond of setting very aggressive licensing traps where they give you access to all features of their products, and then when you use them, not realizing they cost extra, they swoop in with contract penalties that are mindboggling punitive. But they will be "nice enough" to not charge those fees if you decide to buy all these extra products you don't want or need.

[WolfFan]

Re: One browser to rule them all

I just don’t use GoogleDocs. Problem done.

[Anonymous Coward]

Time to split the "browser"

So eventually browser have to use the same techniques operating system have been using for ages, if they want to deliver really usable applications.

Maybe it is time to split the "browser" into a document viewer and and application framework? So maybe we could have dialogs that could be moved around the screen again, and not confined to a "browser" window, and often not moveable at all, like in 1980?

But keep on reinventing the wheel, Google & C.... maybe in another decade or so web application will be where native applications were thirty years ago. Maybe if less time had been spent to find new ways to steal user data and behaviours, and used to develop useful application, we would have had something better already.

[Warm Braw]

Re: Time to split the "browser"

keep on reinventing the wheel

Minicomputers started off as relatively light-weight alternatives to mainframes and then gradually morphed into their equivalents. PCs started out as smaller versions of original minicomputers and gradually acquired all of the characteristics of a "modern" (c 1968) time-sharing system. Browsers started out as simple document viewers and you can now boot operating systems in them.

Unfortunately, the history of computing is to keep reinventing the wheel. Even more unfortunately, the wheel we have doesn't usefully define the security principles or protection domains required to secure today's remote application model (hence the constant breaches) and the universal application front-end is still a grotesque hack (a document viewer twisted into an interactive UI).

It is rather depressing that there has been so little effort over the last 10 years (when it would perhaps have been easier, before there was so much investment in the status quo) in addressing these fundamentals and so much effort devoted to inventing "new" languages and "new" coding frameworks, none of which materially moves us far forwards.

But maybe we're just destined to keep pushing that rock up the hill.

[Warm Braw]

Re: Time to split the "browser"

I specifically meant to write "principal", not "principle". The hazards of relying on a spell-checker.

[Anonymous Coward]

"the history of computing is to keep reinventing the wheel"

There's a little difference when you start with a little wheel because the computing power is not there at an affordable price, and when you give the user a "free" square wheel badly designed because in the meantime you can steal their data - and user fall in the trap of the "free" wheel and for reasons I can't understand fully adapt to use a square wheel with all of its bumps.

Now probably they will deliver a pentagonal wheel, which may be somehow better, but still far from a round wheel. And that's because they need to stubbornly mix contents, applications, and data slurping - since all their money come from the latter. So the problem is not only they are reinventing the wheel - it's how much time they're taking to reinvent it because the wheel is just the decoy for the users' data.

[nematoad]

Re: Time to split the "browser"

"Unfortunately, the history of computing is to keep reinventing the wheel. "

Well maybe, but to me it looks more like "gilding the lily" or perhaps more appropriately "putting lipstick on a pig".

There does seem to be a tendency for IT companies, once they have a foot in the door, to try to get a lock on their consumers so as to extract high rents and charges.

Personally I avoid the likes of Google, Amazon and Apple as much as I can, treating them like an infection and sanitising my systems after I use any of their services.

[chivo243]

Re: Time to split the "browser"

IMHO the modern browser is too powerful. Found this interesting read...

Attacking the internal network from the public Internet using a browser as a proxy.

https://www.forcepoint.com/sites/default/files/resources/files/report-attacking-internal-network-en_0.pdf

We have shown a chain of attacks that can all be made from the public Internet, even in face of a

firewall: via a victim browser you can look for hosts and open ports on the internal network, fingerprint

the open ports and finally exploit them. The only security issue needed for this attack chain to work is

that the service to exploit is vulnerable to CSRF. Other than that, every step of the attack relies on things

working as intended.

[Claptrap314]

Re: Time to split the "browser"

BTW, you guys hiring?

[ecofeco]

Chrome?

Well there's your first problem.

[Graham Dawson]

Re: Chrome?

Remember when Chrome was the lightweight, nimble alternative to moribund Firefox?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Chrome?

My first access to the web was via telnetting to a VAX, then a X.25 PAD etc etc.

[Julz]

Re: Chrome?

Telnet, telnet, pah. When I wer a lad. I had to get up before I went to bed to harvest electrons to feed into the puter, before I flipped the switches to boot the executive. Then I could feed the paper tape I made the day before to load a driver for the teletype. Then I could get to play startrek...

[TimMaher]

Re: Startrek

Fabulous!

They upgraded it to be really modern.

You could play it on a terminal running VM370.

That was at the beginning of the eighties.

[Peter Gathercole]

First using the web...

Do you mean the Web, or the Internet.

The Internet existed years before the Web, using things like Archie, Gopher and let's face it, FTP.

The Web proper started with NCSA Mosaic, although there were HTTP enabled programs the predated Mosaic.

[Peter Gathercole]

Re: Chrome?

Remember when Firefox was the lightweight alternative to Inernet Explorer and Netscape Navigator?

[Christoph]

Accessibility?

How well will this new rendering work with screen readers for people with poor vision?

[Androgynous Cupboard]

Re: Accessibility?

That's an excellent question, and from my cursory knowledge of Canvas I expect the answer is "very badly indeed". Almost certain you can't mark up internal content in a Canvas.

[Tom 7]

Re: Accessibility?

If your document that needs formatting that's not available in O'Level HTML the chances are you wont be able to remember what that particular feature was meant to mean anyway.

[vtcodger]

If it ain't broke ...

Google has replaced "Don't be evil"

with "If it ain't broke, break it" ?

[Meeker Morgan]

I use Google docs as one of my emergency back ups.

You mean there are people who use it as their primary office application?

Do such people perhaps also not keep local copies?

Or would understand that last sentence?

Whom the gods would destroy ...

[deive]

"which is unacceptable if we want to maintain a smooth 60 frames per second (FPS) in the terminal"

In what version of the universe does a terminal need to render at 60 FPS for??

[Tom 7]

Its not like HTML hasnt got and formatting options and fonts.

Reinventing the wheel and trying to streamline things by getting rid of those ugly bolts around the middle.

[Claptrap314]

Re: Its not like HTML hasnt got and formatting options and fonts.

HTML is designed for a specific sort of thing. That thing has never been general documents. Google Docs has been trying to square the circle from the start.

[Elledan]

Bypassing the OS

Ultimately this shows what the end game for 'browsers' will be, in so far as they aren't yet: a single runtime that provides access to the hardware, including 3D acceleration in the case of WebGL. This effectively means that 'web applications' can be written in a manner that's independent of the underlying OS, albeit with significant limitations and loss of performance. This is something which e.g. those who have experience with PhoneGap and Electron can attest to.

While this may seem like an obvious benefit, to have this level of portability, there are some major complications. The first is that HTML & CSS obviously weren't designed with this kind of abuse in mind, and the split nature of rendering engines between being a presentation engine and a full-featured CLR (or JSVM, if you wish) causes major optimisation issues.

The second problem is that of security. WebGL allows for unrestricted access to one's GPU driver by any random bit of code that runs in the browser. Whereas the .NET CLR and JVM have certain restrictions in place as well as the benefit of only running local applications, browsers are obviously designed to run every bit of application code it comes across while browsing the WWW.

Effectively, one of Javascript's major contributions to cybersecurity has been to change 'don't open random executables' to 'assume any site & online ad will steal your data and encrypt your files'.

None of this feels right, and Google's dominance over this whole 'common web runtime' (CWR?) is worrying at the very least.

[steviebuk]

When...

...are they going to allow a document to have both landscape and portrait pages in the same document instead of one or the other only.

[Claptrap314]

Re: When...

When they completely abandon HTML. Or--"extend" it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: When...

HTML has no concept of landscape or portrait. Apples and bananas.

[Claptrap314]

Re: When...

Umm... that's what I was implying with "completely abandon" HTML.