Hacker News Reader

Comment by modernerd | Hacker News Reader

Riad's writeup here may be interesting to you on the “why it's slow” part: https://riad.blog/2020/02/14/a-journey-towards-a-performant-...

I don't think it's fair to say the core team isn't doing much to improve or prevent degrading performance — they performance-test every PR: https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/contributors/co...

There's also a performance team (for general WP performance, but also covering the editor/JS) that meets regularly and posts minutes. https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/02/01/performance-team-...

Page performance from sites made with WP's block editor is pretty good compared to other editor plugins too, which probably matters more than editor performance (more people generally read a site than write it): https://wptavern.com/gutenbergs-faster-performance-is-erodin...

View on HN

As someone who tries to use Gutenberg to make "rich" pages, I disagree. A few weeks ago I was on the verge of emailing Mullenweg directly to ask if he himself uses the editor to write blog posts.

In 3 years they haven't fixed a simple issue like backspace jumping. For example, if you write a paragraph, then backspace to clear it - when the block is fully cleared you jump back to the top of the page rather than the block above it.

In other words, Gutenberg is not native to the editing experience. It's actually laughable how bad it is if you look at something like Ghost[0]. It's day and night difference in editing experience.

Another example is when you start adding "blocks" like CTA buttons and such. Why does the editor need to constantly render those elements in the editor itself? It completely bricks the writing experience. And I tried a lot of things, including switching browsers.

Some of my problems were resolved by removing plugins, but overall I have just decided to use Classic Editor[1]. I can, at the very least, write out the entire article and then switch to Gutenberg to style it the way I like.

It's stupid, but at least it works.

[0]: https://ghost.org/

[1]: https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/

> There's also a performance team (for general WP performance, but also covering the editor/JS) that meets regularly and posts minutes.

Rant incoming...

I would love to be involved with the performance team (it's what i've done for 15 years), but the problem of funding open source comes up. Key members of the team are Google employees and therefore paid to work on it. I by contrast am a solo developer with responsibilities, and every hour I would spend on the performance team is one that I can't spend on earning money or with my loved ones.

And in the end who benefits from the performance team? Every business who needs better performance. Automattic for not having to fund the work. The incentives don't align.

I say this having written a plugin that speeds up WordPress AJAX requests by 30-95% (dependent on the request). I'd love to open source it and it'd be an ideal contribution to WP... but it's taken a year to get this far and there's more to come

> Page performance from sites made with WP's block editor is pretty good compared to other editor plugins

Perhaps, but it's never been a great idea to use editor plugins at all.

> There's also a performance team (for general WP performance, but also covering the editor/JS) that meets regularly and posts minutes.

Gutenberg is about to enter its 6th year of development while the performance team has only just formed and is yet to contribute anything meaningful in this capacity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com