Vercel, the popular front-end development platform, allows you to comment directly upon preview deployments using a highly visual commenting method similar to Figma’s. This feature has been in beta testing since September and is now available to all users.
Guillermo Rauch, Vercel’s co-founder and CEO, explained that the idea was to make collaboration easier on top of existing company development infrastructure while expanding the pool of people who could participate in the process.
He stated that the main vision was replicating Figma and Google Docs’ front-end development for multiplayer collaboration.
Vercel was innovative in the early days. Vercel would provide a URL to show the current state and status of the front-end applications whenever there was a pull ask.
The new commenting system adds a new UI element (see preview) to this new system that allows you to view existing comments and make new ones.
These previews are directly from Vercel so the company can integrate them natively without a browser extension. However, there is a Chrome extension that will allow you to add screenshots of your comments.
The new commenting system is largely straightforward. The new commenting system includes emoji reactions and all the features you would expect from a 2022 commenting system, such as an inbox that aggregates recent comments.
Vercel CTO Malte Ubl said the company once allowed users to draw on a page. It didn’t make the final product, but it might make it into a future version. Ubl pointed out that beta testers of the tool tended to use it in short bursts.
You only sometimes have something you want to review every day. He said that this is different from how developers work. There might be some changes that need to be more graphical.
This means you don’t need the product, and your pull request review will be fine. Then companies launch more quickly, and we see our statistics go from one comment thread to 100 per day. All Vercel users will soon be able to use the new commenting feature.
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