G

Google Workspace Updates

workspaceupdates.googleblog.com · Company blog · on HN since 2020

Google's official blog announcing new features and changes in Google Workspace, including Docs, Drive, Gmail and Chat.

What HN saysHN commenters point to it as the place that lists every new Workspace feature, and cite it for the Docs switch to canvas rendering.
113HN people shared it
62linked it in comments
68stories submitted
3.7Kstory points
3 months agolast shared
2020people per year2026

Most-shared posts

  1. 1
    Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering
    20 people · 1.2K points · first shared 2021 · 930 comments on HN
  2. 2
    More assistive writing suggestions in Google Docs
    6 people · 4 points · first shared 2022 · 2 comments on HN
  3. 3
    Easily format and display code in Google Docs
    4 people · 2 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
  4. 4
    Winding down Google Sync and Less Secure Apps support
    3 people · 428 points · first shared 2024 · 256 comments on HN
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
    Google Docs Canvas Based Rendering Update
    3 people · first shared 2021
  8. 8
    Import and Export Markdown in Google Docs
    2 people · 652 points · first shared 2024 · 135 comments on HN
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
    eSignature for Google Docs and Google Drive (Beta)
    2 people · 21 points · first shared 2023 · 5 comments on HN
  12. 12
    Google Chat spaces will be in-line threaded by default
    2 people · 4 points · first shared 2023 · 2 comments on HN
  13. 13
  14. 14
    Generate Data with Gemini in Google Sheets
    2 people · 3 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
  15. 15
    Adding more flexibility to functions in Sheets
    2 people · 2 points · first shared 2022 · 1 comments on HN

What HN people wrote when they linked it

crazygringo · 2024-02-08
G Suite (now Workspace) absolutely is, a ton: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/ This lists literally every new feature it gets. Browse to your heart's content. Here's everything specific to Slides: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/search/label/Google%20Slides I think Sheets has seen the most improvements since that's what power business users need, followed by Docs.
peutetre · 2024-11-27
> It’s going to be extremely hard to get even decent results without targeting real DOM instead of going pure-canvas, and you can’t get excellent results without doing so. Sure you can. Google Docs switched to canvas three years ago: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-Canvas-Bas… This wasm application renders to canvas and works fine for me: https://bandysc.github.io/AvaloniaVisualBasic6/ This one too: https://flutterweb-wasm.web.app/ Flutter and Google Docs gave up on the DOM because they couldn't get it working well enough, consistently enough across browsers. When you draw to canvas you get more consistent results because you control all the drawing.
mdaniel · 2024-04-08
https://plus.google.com/share?url=https://skimfeed.com heh, I was actually curious enough where the serial killers linked that URL to, and the answer is Workspace blog: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2023/04/new-community-features… that's it, no "oh, hey, you seem to have followed an outdated URL" just "blogspot is awesome" Hat tip to the big G for successfully encoding a trailing space into their blog post title, too
xnx · 2024-03-21
Google Chat is pretty good and still under active development with the rest of Workspace. A good place to keep up-to-date on new features is their update blog: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/
agentdrtran · 2022-07-22
Yeah, it's not great. We had to add logging into our custom app to get around this. The only thing you'll see in logs when adding a delegate is the OAuth log entry for Gmail, which doesn't tell you a lot. As far as I can tell, adding a delegate or forward isn't even logged anywhere, and being able to see what a delegate is doing was added as a feature only a few months ago: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2022/03/gmail-delegate-logging…
gepeto42 · 2022-02-25
There is, though it is not ultra granular. They introduced it last year and we mention it in the guide. https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2019/03/more-control-over-2-st… Essentially you can enforce 2FA or not, then, you can allow ANY method, any method BUT telephony based (calls and SMS), or hardware security key only. The middle option for most people is a great one as it allows Google Prompt (push notifications) as well as Google Authenticator style OTPs, plus security keys.
kevincox · 2023-07-10
Personally I hate GMail. 1. Threads are collapsed into a 1-dimensional list making moderately complex discussions hard to follow. 2. Deleting many messages is very slow. With Thunderbird I can mash <Delete> while scanning subjects and pause for a second to see the actual message body. I get a lot of email that I need to sort through or be aware of so my morning generally consists of quickly (15min) going through up to 100 conversions and getting quick status updates or just deleting uninteresting threads. For whatever reason doing this in GMail is a complete slog. (I'm not sure why, they have the <y> shortcut to archive and have a preview pane but it is just way slower, maybe they need to precache a few messages on either side of the current one?) 3. Threads are based on subject meaning that unrelated messages get grouped together. (Apparently this was changed in 2019 (https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2019/03/threading-changes-in-g… but I've definitely seen this issue for at least a year after that announcement when I stopped using GMail) I do admit that most of GMail is pretty good. But for me these limitations are enough to really impede my workflow. I've found that Thunderbird is the least-bad option for me. However Thunderbird's performance is quite poor. I do have 350k messages downloaded locally but even opening my empty inbox sometimes causes lockups. IIUC this is because Thunderbird is mostly single-threaded but apparently there…
Arathorn · 2022-03-05
The competitive gap with Discord in terms of media quality is probably something like: * Need a low-latency SFU. This should be very doable; not only are there a lot of good FOSS SFUs to build on top of these days, the history of the Matrix team is actually that we built VoIP stacks fulltime before we shifted focus to Matrix, and we've built MCUs and media servers of all flavours in the past. MSC3401 should also give us a competitive edge given latency will be automagically minimised by using the physically closest decentralised SFU, thus letting anyone bring their SFU to the party. * Needs a SFU with good rate control (and/or FEC). This is probably the single most important thing to get right in terms of quality. Signal wrote up a good overview of why: https://signal.org/blog/how-to-build-encrypted-group-calls/ * Excellent noise cancellation (and background noise elimination, microphone scratch noise elimination etc). Ideally you need something like https://krisp.ai/ or https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/06/background-noise-reduc… in the mix - but doing this in an E2EE-friendly and privacy preserving manner is Hard. However, just like we solved E2EE full text search by doing it clientside and making the indexes gossipable between your clients (https://github.com/matrix-org/seshat), we'll have a go at doing something similar for this problem too. * Excellent automatic gain control. The importance of normalising/compressing…
maxloh · 2026-06-08
I don't know why this was flagged, but you are right. Google Docs [1] and OnlyOffice [2] also employ the canvas method to render office documents, and have found it reliable and consistent among different browsers. [1]: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-Canvas-Bas… [2]: https://helpcenter.onlyoffice.com/faq/technology.aspx
jason_oster · 2026-05-24
On the extreme end, a web app can do all of its own rendering in a canvas with WebGL/WebGPU. Some apps do exactly this: Figma, Google Maps, Google Docs. Just to name a few. (edit: Earlier I claimed PDFjs uses canvas, but it does not. I was confusing it with Google Docs [1].) It's a thing you can do. But it is very bad for extensions and extension developers for the same reasons that Java applets, Flash, and Shockwave were bad for the web. These apps are difficult for end users to customize. It's a real bane to tinkerers. And it's a shame that "view source" has slowly grown completely useless over the decades. [1]: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-Canvas-Bas…
troupo · 2026-05-20
From the discussion linked in the Webkit repo: --- start quote --- Philip: First, google slides is written in svg, so that won't change with this. But google docs is using canvas, so they might be a candidate. … they might want to integrate this peicemeal, this API allows them to start to adopt the feature slowly, --- end quote --- This reads to me like "Google Docs decided to go with canvas sometime ago [1], found it to be too hard, so pushed Chrome to have a way to support HTML in Canvas. The rest is just post-hoc justifications" [1] https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-Canvas-Bas…
avaer · 2026-03-05
Is this basically a CLI version of [1]? If so, I'm glad Google is being forward thinking about how developers actually want to use their apps. Better this than a Google dashboard, or slopped together third party libs. I know Google says they don't support it, but they'll probably support it better than someone outside of Google can support it. [1] https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2025/12/workspace-studio.html
mikae1 · 2025-12-19
Google broke up with RSS in 2013[1]. :D To be fair, they re-implemented feeds for YouTube and added feed support in Google Workspace the other day[2]. So perhaps there's hope. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Reader [2] https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2025/12/introducing-feeds-app-…
IshKebab · 2025-02-04
> Were employees ordered to implement PRs to go through all code and auto-remove all mentions of "master" and "whitelist" from public facing code (not just internal identifiers) Uhm, yes. Yes they were. Here's one example: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/09/renaming-whitelisted-d…
pimlottc · 2024-11-30
Google Docs has gotten much slower now that they render everything in a canvas [0]. It’s fine for some things but for large docs it’s painful. 0: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-Canvas-Bas…
adobrawy · 2024-11-03
You can hide appointment schedules in desktop view: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2023/10/new-google-calendar-ap…
slightwinder · 2024-08-23
> 'Sides, I hear that Gmail is phasing out IMAP. :-? No, just unsecure access: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2023/09/winding-down-google-sy…
tomeraberbach · 2024-07-23
Should be rolled out to everyone by sometime next week See this heading: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2024/07/import-and-export-mark…
paulgb · 2024-07-17
It's only available in certain paid versions (https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2022/12/format-display-code-go… Which is too bad, it's the one thing keeping me from writing design docs in google docs.
eb123 · 2024-05-24
I've been using Sheets's regex functions for over a year, they're really helpful for basic data transformation. Excel also got a "split" function much later than Sheets did. I was excited to read on the Sheets blog that Sheets finally will have a table functionality, which Excel has always had: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2024/05/tables-in-google-sheet…
Macha · 2024-05-07
Don't know what the parent poster thinks, but what is happening is this: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2023/09/winding-down-google-sy… Which means that basically only apps that are approved by Google for OAuth can use IMAP in the near future.
nasso_dev · 2024-05-01
telotortium · 2024-04-29
Google Docs has switched entirely to Canvas for several years at this point: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-Canvas-Bas…
spacebanana7 · 2024-04-26
Gmail, Exchange and iCloud mail all seem to fall back on plaintext when TLS is unavailable. Apparently gmail displays hazard icons in the UI if an email isn’t sent over TLS. I’ve not found precise documentation about Thunderbird’s behaviour. https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2020/04/improve-email-security… https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/sec100a75d12/web https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/email-encryption
thedougd · 2024-03-15
Add BIMI to your list. If you're large enough, you'll want it for at least marketing reasons. And yes, it feels like another cash grab. https://bimigroup.org/ https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2023/05/expanding-gmail-securi…
verdverm · 2023-12-21
I do not find your pricing any more desirable or palatable I currently use DocuSign, for my plan, it would be more expensive to use this I really want a self hosted, self branded, embedded solution with API access. You have this, but it is only available in the most expensive Enterprise plan. I'm not an enterprise and there is no discount for self hosting My plan, given the open core alternatives are missing the mark for me, is to use the Google Workspace solution included in what we already pay (https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2023/08/esignature-google-docs… I'm open to reconsidering if you offer the right features at an acceptable price. I'd prefer a fixed price for self hosted, rather than something based on users and docs sent counts ...thoughts from a potential customer...
judge2020 · 2023-08-24
I wonder how much dogfooding there is at Discord. Do they really use it for their main work communications? Maybe falling back to Google Chat (which looks like it's now a usable experience[0]) for SRE and war room type issues. 0: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2023/02/new-google-chat-spaces…
vintagedave · 2023-05-22
Yes - Google Docs implements the document page rendering via canvas. It replaces the previous implementation which used HTML for layout. https://zapier.com/blog/google-docs-canvas-based-rendering/ https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-Canvas-Bas…

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