Figma rebuilt its rendering engine in the browser to make collaboration unavoidable

By the early 2010s, professional design software — Photoshop, Sketch, and their predecessors — had always run as native desktop applications working on local files, because that was the only architecture capable of rendering complex vector and raster graphics fast enough to feel responsive.

Dylan Field and Evan Wallace, who met studying computer science at Brown University, saw a different possibility in April 2011 when Wallace built a real-time fluid simulation, called Water, that ran entirely inside a browser tab using WebGL — a graphics API built for 3D applications, with no plugin or download required.

Built the rendering engine in the browser, so every open tab shared live state; showing another user's cursor and edits became a natural extension.

Desktop apps editing local files have no mechanism for shared live state, making collaboration structurally impossible.

By running the rendering engine in a browser tab connected to a server, every open tab already shares the same state.

Showing another user's cursor and edits becomes a simple extension of the existing architecture, not a separate system.

Solving the hard rendering problem first meant the collaboration feature arrived nearly for free once the foundation existed.

When a feature keeps failing as a bolt-on, consider rebuilding the foundation so the feature becomes a natural consequence, even if it means years of invisible infrastructure work.

Figma grew from a two-person hackathon proof-of-concept into design software used by roughly 13 million users by 2025, the year the company went public on the NYSE. 3 billion, one of the largest software IPO debuts of the decade — competitors including Adobe, whose 2022 attempt to acquire Figma outright for $20 billion was blocked by regulators, never matched Figma's browser-native collaborative architecture with a comparable retrofit of their own desktop tools.