svg viewbox resolution limits

Question

I was wondering if there are any hard limits to the viewbox of a svg element. I see weird clipping when I reach very low values ( say when vb width is around .002 ) or very larg

Answer 1

Firefox originally used a graphics library called cairo to do cross platform graphics rendering. Cairo only allows units to have 32 bits of fixed point binary precision so Firefox chose 24 bits before the binary point and 8 bits of binary fraction. So the maximum co-ordinates are then 2^24 and the smallest deltas 1/256.

Firefox has been replacing cairo with more direct platform rendering e.g. Direct2D on Windows which is used in preference to cairo now if you have a hardware acceleration capable graphics chip and have hardware acceleration enabled. The platform libraries don't have the cairo range limitation but do seem to have their own bugs with large co-ordinates.