Hacker News Reader

Comment by hdlothia | Hacker News Reader

What confuses me the most about these articles is the idea what ppl jumped on these frameworks just to chase new shiny things. There is always rdd going on but did these frameworks really not improve anything about the web experience for users? My career started around the same time react and angular started to take off. Why did we move away from mpas if they were so much better?

View on HN

Did they improve things for users?

From a performance perspective it's a bit of a wash. You get slower first page load and lots of spinners in exchange for faster navigation

ok so how did they get so much market share? cargo culting from fbook? or was it the appeal of pushing computer to the client like ther other commenter said?

React & friends are fast to build apps in and are quick to onboard new engineers on. Developer experience has been prioritized over user experience.

Cause splitting backend and frontend lets you keep all the js code and client resources on CDN.

The shift to SPAs happened around the same time as mobile browsing was becoming the norm. Phones were alright, but data speeds were really slow.

So instead of having to download an entire HTML page and all the assets used every time you navigate, people built SPAs. Download everything up front, and then fetch data with small API requests. This way even though first load might take a while, everything is cached, and the client just needs to query the API for data.

The other side of it is that websites used to be pretty simple, and as browsers evolved past IE10, the kinds of things people build on the web also got more complex.

>So instead of having to download an entire HTML page and all the assets used every time you navigate, people built SPAs.

Don't browsers cache css, images, and JS and all that automatically for like 15 years now?

You can't cache the HTML though, and each page might use different assets (bundle splitting).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com