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Comment by ergo14 | Hacker News Reader

It is interesting how people are debating here, angular this, react that...

Yet there is Polymer that just works, has a great ecosystem, awesome material design support and is a breeze to work with (+ its fast too).

Right now there was 2.0 announcement and new version really supports easy migration path unlike Angular 2.x.

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Polymer also has a lot of negatives - it still only publishes on bower for example, and the whole vulcanizing situation is sort of bleh. It also uses HTML imports for its components, which is unnatural and sort of munges concerns with the whole ES module import system - this includes importing HTML files for more traditional things such as XHR.

To me, all these things put Polymer far behind the curve as something I'm interested in ever adopting.

Whats wrong with vulcanizing? The product is the same you would get with grunt/gulp and what people were doing for years building their js files.

Is bower less reliable than npm? (I do more python work than JS)

bower is pretty much abandoned in favor of npm - in the past 1 - 1 1/2 years, the frontend ecosystem has coalesced around npm as the dependency management tool of choice.

Polymer and Angular 2.0 seems to have a lot concepts in common and I don't fully understand why they are going to compete, given they come from the same source. But for me it seems that Polymer nowhere picked up as Angular.

When it comes to performance it is great in Chrome. In other browsers not so. I hope v2 will be much better once they can get rid of the compatibility layer for other ever-green browsers.

Have you actually benchmarked polymer in a non-chrome browser?

It is much faster than Angular - somewhere around React performance. Polymer is picked up by big companies already whereas "no one"(big) is using angular 2.x for now.

People here seem to project a weird bubble around Angular/React.

> In other browsers not so. I hope v2 will be much better once they can get rid of the compatibility layer for other ever-green browsers.

Browsers get rid of it on their own - when they implement the standards, shims load when specific functionality is found or not.

I'm not comparing against Angular (which in v1 is known not to be super fast) just between browsers. I was mainly looking at https://vaadin.github.io/gwt-polymer-elements/demo/#gwt/Java... . It uses a lot of widgets on one page. Take a look how on loads in Chrome, Firefox, Edge (refresh to minimize network effects). I didn't go really deep in it, but first look was that lots of time was used in registering custom elements. Sure, here it is wrapped in GWT (which would be my case), but it doesn't seem to add much, rather the fact it loads all widgets from Polymer.

But how can you be sure the problem is not in specific element implementation? DBMonster tests show that performance in rendering is ok. FWIW - I develop on firefox with shady DOM and then test in full shadow DOM in chromium - performance was very good for us in both firefox and IE (at least for the things we used).

A lot of big companies have been using Angular 2 for a while from what I understand. Canon was using it while it was in the alpha stages. Tesla went all in on Angular 2. Thomson Reuters had the largest Angular 1 app in the world, and they are moving to Angular 2.

The Angular team has made significant efforts to court them/cater to them, even employing a CSM, and two developer advocates. Those are just examples I've heard/interacted with in the wild, but I'm just a developer at a small company & not part of the Angular team.

Does anybody actually use Polymer? Frontend jobs are mostly either Angular or React related.

Ofcourse, tons of "enterprises", ING, Comcast, Salesforce, IBM, General Electric, Electronic Arts, (Slack?) and Google (obviously).

There are also tons of components to pick from, someone is obviously building them. We are rewriting parts of RhodeCode UI in polymer right now and everyone is very happy about how that goes.

There are plenty of job offerings on polymer job channel and in the wild.

It just seems that HN folks are ignoring anything that is not called Angular/React because its not hyped enough :)

Youtube Gaming, Google Play Music and IBM's Bluemix are probably the biggest projects built using Polymer. The main Youtube website itself also seemed to be playing around with Polymer.

http://thenextweb.com/google/2016/05/02/youtube-getting-goog...

You can see some projects at:

https://github.com/abdonrd/PolymerProjects

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