Around 2014-15, I wanted to show that the web was an amazingly capable platform that was able to host experiences that were comparable to those of native platforms.

An app that was touted as being impossible to do on the web was a QR code reader because it needed access to a camera and it needed to do it performantly and the only experiences on the web at the time were site that took the image via an <input type=file> element and uploaded it on the server. I didn’t want that, I wanted to do it in real-time and be able to do it offline and thus client side.

I built QRSnapper as the sample experience that proves that you can build these performant, installable and always available experiences on the web.

I didn’t write the QR code scanning library, that was jsqrcode. The library works well, but it’s not fast, in fact it can take many 10’s to 100’s of milliseconds to to analyse and image and I needed to offer a UI that was always responsive and didn’t lock whilst it was detecting QR codes.

To keep the UI responsive and snappy I had to make the library work inside a Web Worker. It was pretty simple in the end, I take the video stream and push a frame on to a <canvas> element, I then take the raw image data from the Canvas and transport it over to the Web Worker for processing. The Web Worker will only process one frame at a time, but now that it’s not on the main thread detection feels instant.

This application also became the testing ground for a number of Media related API’s on the web, specifically the Full frame Camera API and also the BarCode detection API. These native APIs have unfortunately not fully landed on the web platforms.