Products · Product
SVG
Raised as a usability problem by 45 people on Hacker News over 18 years (2009–2026), in 39 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Complex SVGs render inconsistently, making results hard to get rightUnreviewed
20092026- Complex SVGs render inconsistently across browsers and renderers, making results hard to get right2025-12-12
- Mildly complex SVGs take GBs of RAM and over a minute to render2025-09-15
- Complex SVG graphics render differently across browsers, so output can't be relied on2025-04-13
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 49 complaints
- Clicking a thumbnail to preview turns the button into the control for manipulating the background2026-03-19
- After previewing a background, scrolling on mobile makes the images disappear until refresh2026-03-19
- Sticky notice covers a third of the mobile screen with no way to dismiss it2026-03-18
- Complex SVGs render inconsistently across browsers and renderers, making results hard to get right2025-12-12
- Adjoining polygons show visible seams because edges alpha-blend, and no fix can be found2025-12-12
- Rendering over about 100 DOM elements takes multiple seconds to show2025-12-11
- Mildly complex SVGs take GBs of RAM and over a minute to render2025-09-15
- Complex SVG graphics render differently across browsers, so output can't be relied on2025-04-13
- Site's dark theme is broken, so the graph can't be seen2024-07-29
- Related APIs are abandoned, deprecated, or hard to find2024-06-22
- Scrollable area looks like the finished display, so scrolling with the mouse fails and confuses2023-12-07
- Couldn't figure out how to add click actions to SVG elements2023-10-05
- Browser SVG event handling causes problems the author had to work around2023-06-07
- Site slows to a crawl in Safari; each click takes seconds to register2022-05-28
- Content scales with window size, becoming huge or unreadable on large monitors2021-12-03
- Site is very slow to respond even on a fast machine2021-12-03
- Cannot size or position SVG elements responsively; paths lack percentage and em units, so layouts break when resized2021-04-01
- Hard to make SVG icons render crisply; they end up partially blurry2021-02-24
- Including icons requires searching, downloading, and embedding SVGs, which clutters code and is hard in some cases2020-11-05
- Verbose, idiosyncratic SVG and CSS create too much mental overhead for developers2020-02-12
- Small interactive SVG demos are hard to find, unlike past Flash content2019-10-29
- Spec feels confusing, with inconsistent and arbitrary graphical elements2018-06-13
- Selecting a few thousand elements makes the editor slow to a crawl2017-11-26
- Inline SVG doesn't show up as written in the DOM inspector2017-11-21
- Dragging crispEdges boxes makes them flicker and appear to crawl as the box width changes2017-08-16
- Namespace mistakes produce silent errors and developers must hand-type long namespace strings2017-05-25
- Writing SVG by hand feels unfriendly and unintuitive2017-04-21
- Too many ways to do the same thing, making it hard to implement correctly2017-04-20
- Pattern unit defaults are complex and don't work for common tasks like corner-anchored repeats2017-04-20
- Exported SVGs have endless nested groups and clutter that are hard to work with2017-01-09
- Aligning an overlaid SVG chart with flexbox layout needs lots of scripted workarounds2017-01-09
- Multi-line text and kerning/tracking are very hard to implement with SVG and Canvas2016-12-16
- SVGs default to 300x150 and need effort to size as 100% width2016-09-26
- Cryptic browser error messages with no stack traces or error location2016-08-14
- Ctrl-click opens browser context menu instead of inserting point; quad/bezier options not obvious2015-10-27
- On OSX, ctrl-click opens context menu and leaves app stuck in add-point mode2015-10-26
- SVG markup has bad naming, verbose syntax and strange grouping and ordering2013-10-23
- Detailed SVG images freeze the iPad and make scrolling laggy2013-10-01
- Pages full of SVG icons render sluggishly compared with PNG versions2013-10-01
- Large detailed SVG images perform terribly on iOS devices2013-09-18
- SVG-based visualization is so slow in Firefox that it becomes unusable2013-06-22
- Implementing text word wrap in SVG is painful, slow and impractical across languages2013-04-09
- Designers struggle to produce SVG that browsers actually render correctly2013-01-27
- Interface is not nice or usable enough, so the author forked it2012-10-26
- Complex SVG charts render very slowly and choppily in Firefox2012-07-21
- Multiple ways to do the same thing make SVG files hard to understand and modify2012-06-23
- Sliding animation is so slow it renders only two frames on Android2012-06-23
- Buggy, incomplete browser SVG support makes it hard to know what works where2011-06-27
- SVG is awkward to use in applications2009-02-19