# Comments, revamped 

> Faster load times, virtualized sidebar, and a refreshed comment UI.

2026-03-05 · Caio Pizzol

Documents with hundreds of comments no longer slow down your app. The comment sidebar is faster, cleaner, and handles large documents without breaking a sweat.

## The problem

Documents with heavy review workflows — 500+ tracked changes, dozens of comment threads — were painful. The sidebar froze on load because every comment bubble mounted at once. Scrolling stuttered. Opening a large legal contract or compliance document meant waiting 5+ seconds before you could interact with anything.

## What changed

### Performance: 2x faster load times

Comment creation during document import used to dispatch a ProseMirror transaction for every single tracked change. For a document with 872 tracked changes, that meant ~824 dispatches and ~824 full document scans — an O(n²) operation.

Now tracked change comments are created in a single batch. A pre-computed lookup map replaces the repeated document scans, and one final dispatch refreshes decorations. Load time dropped from 5+ seconds to ~2.5 seconds on real-world documents.

### Virtualized comment sidebar

The floating comments sidebar used to mount every comment bubble at once. For a document with 588 tracked change comments, that meant 588 Vue components rendered simultaneously.

Now only the ~5 comments near the viewport are mounted. The rest are lightweight placeholder divs. An `IntersectionObserver` watches which placeholders enter the viewport and mounts or unmounts comment dialogs as you scroll. The sidebar also no longer flickers when you type — a reactivity bug that toggled the entire component on every keystroke has been fixed.

### Cross-page comment layout

Comment bubbles previously handled collision avoidance per page, which broke down when threads spanned page boundaries. The new layout uses a single continuous column. The active comment pins to its anchor position while other comments flow around it. Scrolling to a comment now only happens when the anchor is off-screen — no more jarring jumps when clicking between threads.

### Refreshed comment UI

The comment dialog got a visual refresh:

- **Faded highlights** — when a comment is active, other comment highlights dim to ~12% opacity instead of disappearing entirely. You always see where comments live in the document.
- **Tracked change styling** — focused insertions and deletions now show a solid border and tinted background, making it clearer which change a comment refers to.
- **Reply pill** — replying to a thread starts with a compact pill that expands into the full editor on click. Less visual noise when you're just reading.
- **Collapsible threads** — long threads collapse to keep the sidebar scannable.
- **Resolve badge** — resolved comments are visually distinct so you can tell at a glance what's been addressed.
- **Cleaner typography** — author names are now 14px semibold, body text is 14px, and spacing is more consistent with the rest of the UI.

## Get started

These improvements ship with the latest release. No configuration changes needed — your existing comments module works as before, just faster and cleaner.

[Read the comments docs](https://docs.superdoc.dev/modules/comments)