🚀 Call for testers: the dev branch is FAAAST — Help battle-test it before release

[tinchox5]

Hey snapDOM community! 👋

We just landed a big performance overhaul on the dev branch and we'd love for the adventurous among you to try it against your real-world apps before it ships.

What's new

The capture pipeline got a deep rework: fused tree passes, parallelized network phases (images ∥ backgrounds ∥ fonts), smarter caching that no longer invalidates itself between captures, fewer per-node allocations in the clone hot path, and a leaner rasterization path (no more full multi-MB SVG decode just to read a header, async canvas encoding).

Zero fidelity cost: all 47 visual regression baselines pass unchanged — same pixels, less time.

The numbers 📊

From our benchmark suite (Chromium, headless), comparing dev against the published 2.16.0:

Scenario	Improvement
Complex DOM captures (grids, cards, nested styles)	1.12×–1.20× faster — the gap grows with DOM size
Image-heavy toPng at scale 2 (compress on)	1.40× faster
vs snapDOM 1.9.9	~2.6× faster on complex captures

In the image-gallery raster scenario, snapDOM on dev is now the fastest option overall in our suite — ahead of html-to-image (1.26×) and roughly 2× html2canvas.

Measured on a MacBook Air (M5). Your mileage may vary — that's exactly why we want your numbers too. 😄

Bonus: new toys to try

• reconcile: true — measures the clone in-document and pins only diverging boxes (measurement over heuristics for
  layout fidelity).
• snapdom.session(el) — repeated captures of the same element: instant when nothing changed, warm caches when it
  did. Great for frame loops and live previews.
• resolveNode plugin hook — per-node replace/skip from a plugin (redaction, custom widgets). See PLUGIN_SPEC.md.

How to test

git clone https://github.com/zumerlab/snapdom.git
cd snapdom
git checkout dev
npm install
npm run compile   # ⚠️ important: builds dist/ 

Then point your app at the freshly built dist/snapdom.mjs (or npm link the folder). If you want to reproduce the
benchmarks yourself: npx playwright install.

What we're looking for

• Captures of your real, complex UIs — dashavy pages
• Any visual difference vs 2.16.0 (there should be none!)
• Your before/after timings + hardware

Drop your results below — good, bad or weird. Thanks for helping make snapDOM faster for everyone! 💛