Blog
Engineering notes, comparisons, and design decisions from building Big JSON Viewer.
Why JSON Viewers Stall on Rendering, Not Parsing
Most JSON viewers freeze at 50 MB because they render millions of DOM nodes. Parse capacity is a browser-imposed ceiling we can’t fix, but the rendering bottleneck is fixable — and that’s where Big JSON Viewer wins.
Local-Only by Design: Why a JSON Viewer Should Never See Your Data
The privacy story behind Big JSON Viewer is also the architecture: no server, no upload, no logs, no telemetry on your file contents. Here is what that looks like in practice.
Big JSON Viewer vs jq, JSON Crack, and Chrome DevTools
A practical comparison of four very different JSON tools, with use cases where each one is actually the right choice — and the cases where each one breaks down.
Sharing 500 MB of JSON in the Browser: Resumable Uploads and Gzip Streaming
How we share 500 MB JSON files via the user’s own Google Drive, with chunked resumable uploads, client-side gzip, abortable progress, and transparent decompression on the recipient side.
Migrating from Vite to Next.js for SEO: What Actually Moved the Needle
We moved Big JSON Viewer from a Vite SPA to Next.js to fix indexability. Here is what helped, what we expected to help but didn’t, and what was the framework just doing the work for us.