For design tools to be effective, speed is essential. If there are delays in the wrong places, it totally ruins the illusion that the tool is an exten

File loading, dragging & zooming is up to 3x faster

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Style Pass

2022-01-13 20:30:10

For design tools to be effective, speed is essential. If there are delays in the wrong places, it totally ruins the illusion that the tool is an extension of your mind and body. Imagine the frustration of trying to pound in a nail when the hammer trails behind your hand by half a second.

We want Figma to be an extension of your creative mind. To meet that goal, we need to remove as much friction as possible from the process of placing your ideas into a visual space to discuss, collaborate on and convert into working software. To reduce that friction, we need an ongoing focus on Figma’s performance.

Since the beginning, we’ve tried to design every feature with performance in mind. When we discover targeted performance wins through careful analysis of our code (running on real documents that users share with us), we take them. Occasionally, however, opportunities to reap huge wins present themselves.

Earlier this year, we figured out that restructuring our document renderer and ironing out WebAssembly bugs could make Figma significantly faster. We worked on these optimizations for months. The reward was massive improvements in zooming, dragging and file loading speed (up to 3x faster!) in dense files.