4 ms·

I suspect that latency can be reduced significantly by limiting tile sizes. They currently use 256x256 tiles, forcing a new tile transfer every time a mutating

I suspect that latency can be reduced significantly by limiting tile sizes. They currently use 256x256 tiles, forcing a new tile transfer every time a mutating user action takes place (e.g. a new character typed). A one-size-fits-all tile is unlikely to satisfy users of varying bandwidth and latency tolerance. Of course, further steps can be taken as well, such as adaptive resolution and client-side rendering extrapolation. Personally I commend them on a bold strategy. At the very least, they will have contributed to the body of alternative web application architecture patterns.

ygra 11y ago
I get the feeling that if continued in that direction it will be mostly a poor VNC clone.
- _wmd 11y ago
  I regularly use Microsoft Remote Desktop in full color mode over 3G from the UK against a machine hosted outside Paris, as an example of what's possible given enough effort, RDP is a bastion of pure awesomeness. I have on many occasions failed to notice I'm running gvim on the remote box compared to a local VM on my laptop. In full screen mode they're practically indiscernible if you aren't paying attention to the latency of your keystrokes. It's impressive enough that on a high bandwidth low latency connection, even small YouTube videos play well. RDP is heavily integrated into the OS, I'm not sure where it derives its advantage, but for example, dragging a window across the desktop (requiring massive region dirtying) is somehow almost flawless. For example it might be quite an easy affair to delegate compositing and blending to the client, such that the client has a full copy of the bitmaps being dragged around the screen. VNC is intentionally stupid by design and nothing like that (it hails from an era when a microcontroller was preferable for cost reasons compared to a computer in some hypothetical X terminal design - remember VNC is from the 90s). There is a ton of stuff Libreoffice can do this in this department to produce a compelling solution, alpha quality "release early release often" editions shouldn't be used to form a long term judgement, especially when examples of better implementations already exist, and there is real money on the table to motivate further innovation.
  - extra88 11y ago
    RDP doesn't have to be heavily integrated into the OS. VirtualBox uses RDP for remote display of guests regardless of OS [0]. There are a number of servers for Linux that implement RDP. [0] https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch07.html https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch07.html
    - _wmd 11y ago
      Yes, RDP is almost certainly a perfect superset of the VNC model -- unless VirtualBox's graphics drivers do tons of magic, chances are high that all its RDP server has to work with is a constantly changing bitmap to send differences for. AFAIK (and from anecdotal experience) Windows RDP beats that by a long shot (e.g. can preserve the semantics of Bitblt GDI calls and suchlike)

ygra 11y ago

I get the feeling that if continued in that direction it will be mostly a poor VNC clone.

_wmd 11y ago
I regularly use Microsoft Remote Desktop in full color mode over 3G from the UK against a machine hosted outside Paris, as an example of what's possible given enough effort, RDP is a bastion of pure awesomeness. I have on many occasions failed to notice I'm running gvim on the remote box compared to a local VM on my laptop. In full screen mode they're practically indiscernible if you aren't paying attention to the latency of your keystrokes. It's impressive enough that on a high bandwidth low latency connection, even small YouTube videos play well. RDP is heavily integrated into the OS, I'm not sure where it derives its advantage, but for example, dragging a window across the desktop (requiring massive region dirtying) is somehow almost flawless. For example it might be quite an easy affair to delegate compositing and blending to the client, such that the client has a full copy of the bitmaps being dragged around the screen. VNC is intentionally stupid by design and nothing like that (it hails from an era when a microcontroller was preferable for cost reasons compared to a computer in some hypothetical X terminal design - remember VNC is from the 90s). There is a ton of stuff Libreoffice can do this in this department to produce a compelling solution, alpha quality "release early release often" editions shouldn't be used to form a long term judgement, especially when examples of better implementations already exist, and there is real money on the table to motivate further innovation.
- extra88 11y ago
  RDP doesn't have to be heavily integrated into the OS. VirtualBox uses RDP for remote display of guests regardless of OS [0]. There are a number of servers for Linux that implement RDP. [0] https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch07.html https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch07.html
  - _wmd 11y ago
    Yes, RDP is almost certainly a perfect superset of the VNC model -- unless VirtualBox's graphics drivers do tons of magic, chances are high that all its RDP server has to work with is a constantly changing bitmap to send differences for. AFAIK (and from anecdotal experience) Windows RDP beats that by a long shot (e.g. can preserve the semantics of Bitblt GDI calls and suchlike)