I ask because I keep reading about it, all programmers seem to use it, but I just don't come across websites that use it. Is it only used for backend dashboards? Or do all Vue/React sites fail to gain traction for some reason?
Airbnb uses React https://www.airbnb.com.au/rooms/432044
Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Netflix, Reddit Mobile, new Reddit Profile pages are all high profile sites using React that aren't just 'backend dashboards'.
I wonder if React causes/incentivises this or if it's design decisions by the coders/designers/managers.
In contrast, pages like Reddit Desktop, Google and Amazon work much better for me.
However, I would offer that the usage of React is not so much the cause of poor performance but rather a step taken to remedy scale lag. Large apps like the one you mention are big behemoths that take months to adopt new architectures and patterns, but those activities are required to ensure the scalability of the infrastructure and product development. During the time those apps are not fully transitioned to React (and Redux, and isomorphic rendering, and a fully-featured API, and webpack, and a litany of other tools), they might feel half-baked or sluggish, because you may have a page loaded with server-side template rendering, but half of your components on the page are upgraded to React, and take a second to initialize.
IMO, React is a tool that provides an appropriately rigorous rubric for component development and a structure for large-scale interplay of reusable/composable frontend components, which was required for it to have any viability for a large org like Facebook. A lot of web apps are on the long trek to avail that potential fully, but while they're in transition, the experience of those apps will be a little disjointed or degraded.
It's partly Conway's law and partly the result of having lots of users and features being easier to add than take away.
None of these things really have much to do with React. If your app was going to be slow anyway, React won't help you. However, like Angular, React makes it easier to break things down into components and work on them separately, so it's popular with the same big teams that make bulky and slow web pages, just like Angular was before it. Correlation, not causation.
Unlike Angular, React is also fantastic for small teams making lean pages that load blazing fast, which is why it's become so popular so quickly.
The new Reddit profile pages do not.
JS libraries (like React) are just tools developers have. They can make fast sites with them, and they can make slow sites with them. We use React because it makes it easier to optimise our site to make it load very fast.
For the rest: opening in tabs is obviously a design choice. So are "confusing interfaces"–whatever that may mean, because if those reddit and twitter mobile sites are confusing you, good luck with amazon. React build a DOM. You can make a table-based layout with a spinning e-mail icon if that's what you want.
As for load times: mobile.reddit.com comes in at just under 1MB, but that's compressed to 400kb which is basically irrelevant once you expand the first image posts. JS is just about 200kb compressed.
And once it's loaded, only the JSON-encoded data goes over the wire: on the first click anywhere, the data transfer is amortised because the hundreds of <div class="asdasda"> don't have to be transferred.
Both. React makes it easier to write complex JavaScript web apps. Complex JavaScript means you have a lot of rope with which to hang yourself.
Here is an example where a product demo was built with VueJS while the rest of the site is not. https://sightengine.com/demo
From what I understand, Vue is quite popular with the laravel community.
https://www.reddit.com/user/spez
Aren't those just static html pages rendered serverside?
Is there a blog post about them or something?
The old pages like below:
https://www.reddit.com/user/HeinieKaboobler
Are server side rendered.
It's not a popular change. Mostly because of people feeling it'd pull focus from subreddits to profiles, but also some complaints about the performance loss and lower density: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/60p3n1/tldr_...
I just know that my react-devtools extension and the redux state inspector both lit up when I went on that page.
From https://slack.engineering/rebuilding-slacks-emoji-picker-in-...
> Rebuilding the Emoji Picker in React resulted in faster rendering and simplified code that’s easier to maintain. We’re extending these gains to the rest of our codebase by transitioning fully to React
Can't wait to see Slack's app be just as slow.