Google Chrome 94 should address SVG render performance degradation issues introduced after v92 update

Chrome 92 was released back in July with a slew of security and productivity improvements and enhancements. Some of these include changes to per-site permissions, new Chrome Actions and Sharing Hub, and faster phishing detection.

But along with all of the goodies, a new issue also managed to slip through and has been troubling multiple users ever since. The issue involves web apps and causes them to degrade in performance.

Same render issue on Chrome – On the creation of my SVG, the use of methods getBBox() or getComputedTextLength() are problematic. It increases the rendering time.
Source

The performance woes lead to slower dragging and performance, lags, and rendering glitches. The count of tags has also seen abnormal jumps and changing ‘y’ attribute of an SVG element has become ‘painful’.

Upon a deeper dive, one will find that the problems can all be linked to SVG rendering leading to unreasonable increases in rendering issues and times.

The problem can be reproduced easily by performing the following steps:

1. open `chrome.html` file
2. enable “Paint Flashing” rendering feature in the browser console
3. click on any text (this changes the `x` attribute and the text element is shifted)
Source

The expected behavior should be only the SVGTextElement with the attribute change getting repainted. However, on Chrome 92, all the SVGTextElements in the SVG Document get repainted.

Due to all this, devs behind various apps have had to direct their users to the latest version of Firefox for the meantime.

Of course, other browsers like Opera, Vivaldi, and Edge aren’t an option since they’re all also based on Chromium just like Chrome, and are thus likely to be affected by the same problems.

One user even reported that switching over to the latest beta versions of Chrome, namely v93 and v94, doesn’t help either as they seem to have the same problem.

Both Windows and macOS are affected so the problem isn’t limited to a single platform.

Unfortunately, there is still no workaround available for the issue meaning that in order to get their clients to continue using the apps on Chrome, they’ll be forced to turn off critical application functionality.

But there is also good news. An issue for the Google Chrome SVG render performance degradation was opened up on July 31 on the Chromium bugs website.

This recently got marked as fixed in Chrome 94 Canary and the same should trickle down to the next beta and eventually stable version.

Thus, a solution should be rolling out soon either as a hotfix or through the stable Google Chrome 94 update that’s expected in a few weeks’ time.

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