A canvas shows a fixed frame. A browser shows a fluid one. Designing web pages in the medium they'll be viewed in removes a category of surprise that canvas tools cannot.
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Canvas design tools are excellent and they model a fixed rectangle. The web is not a fixed rectangle, and the differences show up predictably at the same points in every project.
Fluid width, not three breakpoints
A canvas design specifies the widths someone chose to draw. A browser has to handle every width in between, plus a few nobody anticipated.
Designs that look resolved at 1440 and 375 often fall apart at 900 — the tablet-ish middle where columns are too narrow for their content but not yet ready to stack. That's invisible on a canvas and obvious in a browser.
Real text, real fonts, real overflow
In the browser, text renders with the actual font, at the actual size, and wraps according to actual content. Headings that fitted on one line in the design take three when the real product name goes in.
Designing against real rendering means these are caught while the layout is still being decided rather than during implementation, when changing it is expensive.
The output is the artefact
Designing in the browser means the thing you're looking at is already a web page. There's no export-and-rebuild step and no fidelity loss between approval and implementation.
That's the structural advantage, and it compounds: every revision goes straight into the real thing rather than into a representation of it.
Common questions
Can I design freely, or only edit generated pages?
You start from a generated page or from the section library and edit from there. It isn't a blank canvas, which is a real difference from Figma.
How do I check responsive behaviour?
Resize the browser. Because you're working with real markup, the behaviour you see is the behaviour that ships.
Can I collaborate with a designer who uses Figma?
Yes — take their design as a reference and build against it, or hand them the generated page to refine.
Is this suitable for complex design work?
For marketing sites and landing pages, generally yes. For design system work or interaction prototyping, a dedicated design tool is still the better fit.
Design one page in the browser and see how much you catch that a canvas would have hidden.