alt Hacker NewsOK but thats simply doesn't perform.
You can't say "only rendering what is visible should be handled by the browser" and call that a solution unless you have a magic wand to make Chrome/other browsers do this.
The browser doesn't do this, and so you can either do what you say and have your browser freeze when you load up a million line diff, or you can fix things within your control which is what the author is doing.
I just tested it now and Chrome does not freeze when opening up a page with a million lines of code. I repeated a file from the Linux kernel 600 times to reach over 1.1 million lines and I put each line in a div so I could alternate red and green background colors.
>you can fix things within your control
Blink is open source. Improving the browser is fully within your control and since browser automatically updates these optimizations will make it to your end users in a relatively short amount of time.