Hey Michael, I'm Figma's editor. We enabled WebAssembly for the first time last year, but as that footnote mentioned, we invested a lot of time in recent months fixing bugs and working closely with the WebAssembly team. So the performance improvements from those WebAssembly optimizations are new.

Hi Michael! The bugs in Chrome at the time were bad enough that we had to disable WebAssembly entirely for Chrome & the desktop app. It's only very recently that we've been able to re-enable it for everyone to see the benefits through a combination of work arounds & working closely with the Chrome WebAssembly team.

In addition to that, the newly written renderer has only very recently been enabled for everyone, and we didn't even start writing that change until after the previous WebAssembly post was written. If you look at the zooming GIF in the post, the fundamental behavior of zooming has changed beyond it being just a faster computation.

Just imagine, a project file, which you can open natively with the weapon of your preference (figma, framer, sketch, you name it, etc.). That would be something marvelous.

That’s an almost impossible task. Would the file format be a superset of everything possible in all the tools? What happens when you open a file and the tool doesn’t support the features in a file? Are they just ignored? If you open a file in a tool that doesn’t support a feature, then resave the file, would the newly saved file include that feature? It could be carried across, but that behaviour should also be part of the spec. Given how bad some tools are at opening their own documents saved by a newer or older version of the tool, that might be asking too much.

Or, would the file format be a good subset? If so, how’s that different to what we have now with SVG? What other features would you like included, that aren’t part of SVG?

What about features that are server-backed? Things like comments typically don’t even live inside the files themselves.

Are you happy with most things to look similar, but all the small details (text rendering, shape antialiasing, gradient rendering) to alter from tool to tool? Because, they will. That’s unavoidable.

Would you want those decisions to be made by a committee, like the W3C? If so, are you happy to slow down innovation, and for all tools to be a different implementation of the same set of specs? I think that would reduce the range of tool choice drastically.

I completely understand the desire for a universal format, but I think it is an impossible task, especially if you want to encompass visual design, prototyping and the other aspects of software design.