They don't understand the original tradeoffs that led to client-side only applications.
Let them experience the pain of rebuilding that old wheel :)
Let them experience the pain of rebuilding that old wheel :)
Then there was the fact that state lived on both the client and the server and could (would...) easily get out of sync leading to a crappy user experience, or even lost data.
Oh and web apps of the era were slow. Like, dog slow. However bloated and crappy the reddit app is, the old Slashdot site was slower, even on broadband.
> They add a ton of tech debt and degrade the UX.
They remove a huge portion of the tech stack, no longer do you have a backend managing data, a back end generating HTML+JS, and a front end that is JS.
Does no one remember that JQuery was used IN ADDITION TO server side rendering?
And for what its worth, modern frameworks like React are not that large. A fully featured complex SPA with fancy effects, animations, and live DB connections with real time state updates can weigh in at under a megabyte.
Time to first paint is another concern, but that is a much more complicated issue.
If people want to complain about anything I'd say complain about ads. The SINGLE 500KB bundle being streamed down from the main page isn't taking 5 seconds to load. (And good sites will split the bundle up into parts and prioritize delivering the code that is needed for initial first use, so however long 100KB takes to transfer nowadays),
Which reddit app are you talking about, the redesign or old.reddit.com? I ask because the old version of reddit itself certainly wasn't slow on the user side, iirc reddit moved to the new SPA because their code on the server side was nigh unmaintanable and slow because of bad practices of the time.
> Time to first paint is another concern, but that is a much more complicated issue.
That's the thing though, with static sites where JQuery is used only on updates to your data, the initial rendering is fast. Browsers are really good at rendering static content, whereas predicting what JS is going to do is really hard..
Mobile sucks, I use RIF instead, or old.reddit.com if I am roaming internationally and want to read some text only subreddits.
> That's the thing though, with static sites where JQuery is used only on updates to your data, the initial rendering is fast. Browsers are really good at rendering static content, whereas predicting what JS is going to do is really hard..
Depends how static the content is. For a blog post? Sure, the content should be delivered statically and the comments loaded dynamically. Let's ignore how many implementations of that are absolutely horrible (disqus) and presume someone at least tries to do it correctly.
But we're all forgetting how slow server side rendering was. 10 years ago, before SPAs, sites took forever to load not because of slow connections (I had a 20mbps connection back in 1999, by 2010 I was up to maybe 40, not much has changed in the last 10 years) but because server side was slow.
If anything more content (ads, trackers..) is being delivered now in the same amount of time.
Reddit as a company obviously wants more users; a design that lets people scroll on through images ad nauseam is certainly better than a design that is more information dense, so if that's something you'd cite as an example of "better in certain use cases" then I agree, otherwise there's plenty of reasons to use old.reddit.com from an end user's perspective.
The concept of Eternal September applies.
Just those that attempted to realize every minuscule client side UI change by performing full page server side rendering. Which admittedly were quite a few, but by far all of them.
The better ones were those that struck a good balance between doing stuff on the server and on the client, and those were blazingly fast. This very site, HN, would probably qualify as one of those, albeit a functionally simple example.
SPAs are just a capitulation in the face of the task to strike this balance. That doesn't mean that it is necessarily the wrong path - if the ideal balance for a particular use case would be very client side heavy (think a web image editor application) then the availability of robust SPA frameworks is a godsend.
However, that does not mean it would be a good idea to apply the SPA approach to other cases in which the ideal balance would be to do much more on the server side - which in my opinion applies to most of the "classic" types of websites that we are used to since the early days, like bulletin boards, for example.
It still sucked. It just sucked differently. I'll admit it was better for the user's battery life, but even the article shows that it was not any faster.
GMail, the first real "client-side" app, was so far beyond Hotmail / Yahoo Mail in usability that it's hard to even phantom ever going back.
You could switch to the horrendous non-Ajax interface.
I never realized that before, always thought Gmail was the first Ajax webapp.