We reworked the parts of Quixli that run thousands of times a session — so typing stays smooth on heavy pages, the editor loads quicker, and your content is better protected. Nothing to relearn; it just feels better.
The best performance work is the kind you never see. You don't get a new button or a settings toggle — you just notice that typing keeps up with you, that the editor opens faster, and that a page packed with diagrams and tables no longer feels heavy.
That's the kind of work we just shipped. We went deep into the editor's hot paths — the code that runs on every keystroke, every selection, every page load — and cut out the wasted effort. Here's what changed.
Typing That Keeps Up With You
Every editor has to track what you've changed so it can save your work. The trick is doing that cheaply.
Previously, parts of the editor were doing more work than necessary on each keystroke — re-examining the whole document to decide what had changed. We rewrote those paths to react only to what actually changed, and to do the expensive work once, when it's time to save, rather than continuously as you type.
The result: on long or complex pages — the ones with tables, diagrams, charts, and images — typing stays fluid. The heavier your document, the more you'll feel the difference.
Smarter, Quieter Auto-Save
Auto-save should be invisible: it protects your work without ever interrupting you. We tightened the save logic so it triggers precisely when it should, avoids redundant work, and can't trip over itself during rapid edits. Your work is captured reliably, and the editor spends its energy on you, not on bookkeeping.
Toolbars That Appear Only When Needed
Quixli has a rich set of context toolbars — one for images, one for tables, one for each kind of embed and diagram. Previously, a large number of these were always present in the background, each quietly watching for changes even when you were just typing a paragraph.
We replaced that with a single, smart controller that figures out what you've selected and shows only the one toolbar you need, exactly when you need it. While you're writing plain text, none of them are doing any work at all.
Why this matters: fewer moving parts running in the background means more of your device's effort goes into the thing that matters — responding instantly to your input.
Faster to Open
Some features — interactive diagrams, charts — depend on powerful libraries that are wonderful to have but heavy to load. We changed how these are delivered: instead of loading everything up front, the editor now fetches those libraries only when a document actually uses them.
The result: opening a document is quicker, because you no longer pay the loading cost for diagram and chart engines on pages that don't contain any. When you do add a diagram, it loads on demand — seamlessly.
Smoother With Heavy Content
Diagrams and charts are expensive to draw. We made sure the editor only re-draws them when something about that specific element actually changes — not every time you edit elsewhere on the page. Scrolling, typing, and editing around rich content all feel noticeably smoother as a result.
More Reliable Real-Time Collaboration
We also fixed a subtle issue in how collaborative documents are managed when you move between pages, which could previously cause content to appear duplicated. Collaboration is now cleaner and more predictable as you navigate around your workspace.
Safer by Default
Performance wasn't the only focus. We also hardened the editor against a class of security issues — the kind you should never have to think about, because we handle them for you:
- Protected exports and link previews. When Quixli fetches a remote resource on your behalf — generating a PDF, building a link preview — it now validates the destination to prevent requests from being pointed at private, internal network addresses.
- Sanitized diagrams. Content that can be shaped by collaborators — diagram definitions, drawings, grids — is now sanitized before rendering, closing off a way that malicious markup could have been smuggled in.
- Sandboxed embeds. Embedded third-party content (videos, designs, documents) runs in a tighter sandbox, with stricter limits on what it can access.
- Safer published pages. We fixed how certain values get written into exported and shared HTML so that file names and links can't break out of their intended place in the markup.
None of this changes how you work. It's simply a stronger floor under everything you do.
And One Crash Fix
While we were in here, we also tracked down and fixed a stubborn crash that could occur when embedding PDFs in development builds — a deep interaction between how the PDF engine and the dev bundler load code. Embedding rich content is now more robust.
The takeaway: a great editor should disappear, leaving only you and your ideas. This round of work removed wasted effort from the busiest parts of Quixli, made the editor lighter to load, smoothed out heavy pages, and quietly strengthened your content's security. You won't see most of it — you'll just feel a faster, calmer editor.
