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Comment by rhizome31 | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for pointing the real issue with SPAs: they deliver awful user experience. It's quite telling how this fact is missing from the article and from most of the discussion here. We're a bunch of self-referential techies who've lost connection with reality.

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I couldn't disagree more. For anyone on a slower connection (I use a satellite connection that's 1 Mbps on a good day) a SPA is almost always a greatly superior user experience. A server-side rendered application is a blank white screen for roughly 50% of the time I'm using it. Even if a SPA takes longer to initially load, it's much nicer to keep the application actually onscreen while it's loading new content. Even if the SPA takes longer to load content it will often feel as if it's faster because you're looking at the application while it loads rather than staring at a blank screen for 5-10 seconds with every click. When people talk about SSR applications being a better user experience I always assume they're operating on first-world 10+ Mbps broadband connections or cellphones in developed cities, because the difference is night and day for those of us on slower.

I also disagree with the idea that SPAs are pushed by developers who have lost touch. Clients frequently push for them and ask questions like "Twitter/Instagram/YouTube don't show these blank white pages after every click, why does my site? Can't you make it like YouTube?" Clients want to have them more than developers want to make them.

1 Mbps and each page is 5 seconds? It sounds like huge pages you are viewing

Well satellite has bad latency on top of that. Not especially large pages, I'd say. eBay, IMDb, Wikipedia.

1 Mbps * 5 = 5 Mb = 625 KB

That's not huge at all, you can barely fit a few pictures into that. The page we are on require 100 KB, the page it link require 300 KB, and both aren't big and have no image to show.

I try to keep my pages down under 50k, 30k or less 80% of the time. Perhaps it's me but I think anything over 999k is insane unless it's spa or a page full of graphing function. My expectation that others are doing the same might be incorrect.

Yep. Millions of SPAs out in the wild and none of them are good. This whole thread is such a joke. It's a bunch of posturing and no data whatsoever from actual SPAs in the wild.

> Thank you for pointing the real issue with SPAs: they deliver awful user experience.

I don't think I could disagree more with a statement, but the way I browse the internet might be different from the way you browse the internet. SPAs, when done correctly, create rich and interactive GUIs that absolutely bring browsing websites into a entirely new territory for UX. There's a reason why webapps have taken over, including desktop apps.

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