Why does Penpot run so laggy in Safari?

Troubleshooting
1

First, let me disclose my hardware and software information:

  • Hardware: 14-inch MacBook Pro M2 Max, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD

  • System: macOS 14.2.1, I use OrbStack to run Docker, and the version of penpot is the latest.

  • Browsers: Safari Version 17.2.1 (19617.1.17.11.12), Chromium Version 120.0.6099.129 (Official Build, ungoogled-chromium) (arm64), and neither have any extensions installed.

  • Due to the inability to upload the video, you can watch it in my Craft.

  • As seen from the video, Safari has serious performance issues when dragging and zooming, but this does not occur in Chromium.

  • I did not test Firefox because I turned off WebGL.

  • The files here are all simple jpgs.

  • I am not sure if anyone in the community has encountered the same problem, or if it is just a Safari issue.

1 Like
2

Hello @Ralph thanks for reporting this. Chrome is the faster and most efficient browser when working with Penpot, however we are working to improve the performance in general.

3

However, both are online services, and Figma performs the same in Safari and Chrome.

And I don’t usually use Chrome. I downloaded Chromium just for testing (I use Chromium, not Chrome).

There are other options in this world besides Chromium, and I hope you can understand that.

4

It is laggy not only in safari, but in chrome-based browsers also unfortunately

1 Like
5

I’m starting to think this performance degradation is related to how Penpot and the browsers handles the rendering of images… I’ve tested recently leaving two files opened for a while, one with and another without images and the only file that started lagging was the one with the images (good quality ones) inside, the other had just a brief slowdown and came back as soon as Started to mess with it…

can’t say if Safari is more or less affected by that but is something that I’ve noticed so far.

1 Like