"SVG Thumbs" vs "PowerToys SVG add-ons"

[xmha97]

Is this app faster than PowerToys for viewing SVG files? Why?

[ThioJoe]

Yes it's much faster but technically not as accurate for SVGs that use rarer SVG features or more complicated properties.

In my testing, the PowerToys thumbnails takes about 1 second each to generate. With this one it's about 5-7 milliseconds. So literally 100x as fast.

As much as I'd love to be able to say so, that's not actually because mine does anything magically fast (in fact most other SVG thumbnail generators are just as fast). Rather it's because the strategy used by the powertoys extension is so slow.

As for why it's so slow, I posted this in another issue thread: microsoft/PowerToys#24393 (comment)

Apparently the reason it's so slow is that for every single thumbnail it copies the SVG to a temporary file, spins up a new process to open a hidden webview browser window which renders the svg, then saves that as a bitmap file to disk and exits, which is then read by the original handler process 💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀

The reason it uses WebView2 is because it supports truly the full SVG spec, but it's a heavier API. There's probably a better way to implement it I imagine though.

[xmha97]

Thanks for the explanation and making this app.