Maximum size of a element

Question

I'm working with a canvas element with a height of 600 to 1000 pixels and a width of several tens or hundreds of thousands of pixels. However, after a certain number of pixels (obviously unknown), the canvas no longer display shapes I draw with JS.

Does anyone know if there's a limit? Thanks.

Edit: tested both in Chrome 12 and Firefox 4.

Answer 1

The limitations for Safari (all platforms) are much lower.

Known iOS/Safari Limitations

For example, I had a 6400x6400px canvas buffer with data drawn onto it. By tracing/ exporting the content and by testing on other browsers, I was able to see that everything was fine. But on Safari, it would skip the drawing of this specific buffer onto my main context.

Answer 2

Update for 2018:

As time marches on, canvas limitations have changed. Sadly, what hasn't changed is the fact that browser's still do not provide information on canvas size limitations through the Canvas API.

For those looking to programmatically determine the browser's max canvas size or test support for custom canvas dimensions, check out canvas-size.

• GitHub: https://github.com/jhildenbiddle/canvas-size
• NPM: https://www.npmjs.com/package/canvas-size

From the docs:

The HTML canvas element is widely supported by modern and legacy browsers, but each browser and platform combination imposes unique size limitations that will render a canvas unusable when exceeded. Unfortunately, browsers do not provide a way to determine what their limitations are, nor do they provide any kind of feedback after an unusable canvas has been created. This makes working with large canvas elements a challenge, especially for applications that support a variety of browsers and platforms.

This micro-library provides the maximum area, height, and width of an HTML canvas element supported by the browser as well as the ability to test custom canvas dimensions. By collecting this information before a new canvas element is created, applications are able to reliably set canvas dimensions within the size limitations of each browser/platform.

A demo link and test results are available in the README, as well as a known issues section which touches on performance and virtual machine considerations.

Full disclosure, I am the author of the library. I created it back in 2015 and recently revisited the code for a new canvas-related project. I was surprised to find the same lack of available tools for detecting canvas size limitations in 2018 so I updated code, released it, and hope it helps others running into similar issues.

Answer 3

When you are using WebGL canvases, the browsers (including the desktop ones) will impose extra limits on the size of the underlying buffer. Even if your canvas is big, e.g. 16,000x16,000, most browsers will render a smaller (let's say 4096x4096) picture, and scale it up. That might cause ugly pixelating, etc.

I have written some code to determine that maximum size using exponential search, if anyone ever needs it. determineMaxCanvasSize() is the function you are interested in.

function makeGLCanvas()
{
    // Get A WebGL context
    var canvas = document.createElement('canvas');
    var contextNames = ["webgl", "experimental-webgl"];
    var gl = null;
    for (var i = 0; i < contextNames.length; ++i)
    {
        try
        {
            gl = canvas.getContext(contextNames[i], {
                // Used so that the buffer contains valid information, and bytes can
                // be retrieved from it. Otherwise, WebGL will switch to the back buffer
                preserveDrawingBuffer: true
            });
        }
        catch(e) {}
        if (gl != null)
        {
            break;
        }
    }
    if (gl == null)
    {
        alert("WebGL not supported.\nGlobus won't work\nTry using browsers such as Mozilla " +
            "Firefox, Google Chrome or Opera");
        // TODO: Expecting that the canvas will be collected. If that is not the case, it will
        // need to be destroyed somehow.
        return;
    }

    return [canvas, gl];
}

// From Wikipedia
function gcd(a,b) {
    a = Math.abs(a);
    b = Math.abs(b);
    if (b > a) {var temp = a; a = b; b = temp;}
    while (true) {
        if (b == 0) return a;
        a %= b;
        if (a == 0) return b;
        b %= a;
    }
}

function isGlContextFillingTheCanvas(gl) {
    return gl.canvas.width == gl.drawingBufferWidth && gl.canvas.height == gl.drawingBufferHeight;
}

// (See issue #2) All browsers reduce the size of the WebGL draw buffer for large canvases 
// (usually over 4096px in width or height). This function uses a varian of binary search to
// find the maximum size for a canvas given the provided x to y size ratio.
//
// To produce exact results, this function expects an integer ratio. The ratio will be equal to:
// xRatio/yRatio.
function determineMaxCanvasSize(xRatio, yRatio) {
    // This function works experimentally, by creating an actual canvas and finding the maximum
    // value, the browser allows.
    [canvas, gl] = makeGLCanvas();

    // Reduce the ratio to minimum
    gcdOfRatios = gcd(xRatio, yRatio);
    [xRatio, yRatio] = [xRatio/gcdOfRatios, yRatio/gcdOfRatios];

    // if the browser cannot handle the minimum ratio, there is not much we can do
    canvas.width = xRatio;
    canvas.height = yRatio;

    if (!isGlContextFillingTheCanvas(gl)) {
        throw "The browser is unable to use WebGL canvases with the specified ratio: " + 
            xRatio + ":" + yRatio;
    }

    // First find an upper bound
    var ratioMultiple = 1;  // to maintain the exact ratio, we will keep the multiplyer that
                            // resulted in the upper bound for the canvas size
    while (isGlContextFillingTheCanvas(gl)) {
        canvas.width *= 2;
        canvas.height *= 2;
        ratioMultiple *= 2;
    }

    // Search with minVal inclusive, maxVal exclusive
    function binarySearch(minVal, maxVal) {
        if (minVal == maxVal) {
            return minVal;
        }

        middle = Math.floor((maxVal - minVal)/2) + minVal;

        canvas.width = middle * xRatio;
        canvas.height = middle * yRatio;

        if (isGlContextFillingTheCanvas(gl)) {
            return binarySearch(middle + 1, maxVal);
        } else {
            return binarySearch(minVal, middle);
        }
    }

    ratioMultiple = binarySearch(1, ratioMultiple);
    return [xRatio * ratioMultiple, yRatio * ratioMultiple];
}

Also in a jsfiddle https://jsfiddle.net/1sh47wfk/1/

Answer 4

To expand a bit on @FredericCharette answer: As per safari's content guide under section "Know iOS Resource Limits":

The maximum size for a canvas element is 3 megapixels for devices with less than 256 MB RAM and 5 megapixels for devices with greater or equal than 256 MB RAM

Therefore, any size variation of 5242880 (5 x 1024 x 1024) pixels will work on large memory devices, otherwise it's 3145728 pixels.

Example for 5 megapixel canvas (width x height):

Any total <= 5242880
--------------------
5 x 1048576 ~= 5MP   (1048576 = 1024 x 1024)
50 x 104857 ~= 5MP
500 x 10485 ~= 5MP

and so on..

The largest SQUARE canvases are ("MiB" = 1024x1024 Bytes):

device < 256 MiB   device >= 256 MiB   iPhone 6 [not confirmed]
-----------------  -----------------   ---------------------
<= 3145728 pixels  <= 5242880 pixels   <= 16 x 1024 x 1024 p
1773 x 1773        2289 x 2289         4096 x 4096

Answer 5

Updated 10/13/2014

All tested browsers have limits to the height/width of canvas elements, but many browsers also limit the total area of the canvas element. The limits are as follows for the browsers I'm able to test:

Chrome:

Maximum height/width: 32,767 pixels
Maximum area: 268,435,456 pixels (e.g., 16,384 x 16,384)

Firefox:

Maximum height/width: 32,767 pixels
Maximum area: 472,907,776 pixels (e.g., 22,528 x 20,992)

IE:

Maximum height/width: 8,192 pixels
Maximum area: N/A

IE Mobile:

Maximum height/width: 4,096 pixels
Maximum area: N/A

Other:

I'm not able to test other browsers at this time. Refer to the other answers on this page for additional limits.

---

Exceeding the maximum length/width/area on most browsers renders the canvas unusable. (It will ignore any draw commands, even in the usable area.) IE and IE Mobile will honor all draw commands within the usable space.

Answer 6

I've ran into out of memory errors on Firefox with canvas heights greater than 8000, chrome seems to handle much higher, at least to 32000.

EDIT: After running some more tests, I've found some very strange errors with Firefox 16.0.2.

First, I seem to get different behavior from in memory (created in javascript) canvas as opposed to html declared canvas.

Second, if you don't have the proper html tag and meta charset, the canvas might be restricted to 8196, otherwise you can go up to 32767.

Third, if you get the 2d context of the canvas and then change the canvas size, you might be restricted to 8196 as well. Simply setting the canvas size before grabbing the 2d context allows you to have up to 32767 without getting memory errors.

I haven't been able to consistently get the memory errors, sometimes it's only on the first page load, and then subsequent height changes work. This is the html file I was testing with http://pastebin.com/zK8nZxdE.