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Comment by franciscop | Hacker News Reader

Which web components, the ones that were deprecated and no browser implements anymore? Ah wait no, you mean the new ones that virtually no one uses, right? While the point of view that ESM and DOM APIs live long-term is pretty good, the specific example is maybe the most infamous for how not true this has been and many call web components Dead On Arrival.

Newer technology on the web does break more often than old JS (maybe, Flash?), for example I have a project that for security reasons doesn't work anymore, Cookies famously also had a big change for security like that, fetch() defaults changed, and AFAIK even performance.now() was capped for Spectre.

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Bing Chat is built entirely with Web Components.

(I work at Microsoft on it. You can verify with F12.)

AFAIK - also the browser version of Photoshop.

And Chrome OS, Firefox, Reddit, Internet Archive, YouTube, and a long list of others...

I checked a couple of those quickly;

Reddit doesn't seem to use web components at all? https://imgur.com/a/kzLoGnV

Youtube seems to use 1 web component for every 10 normal components, which is fair: https://imgur.com/a/YIBhLh8

Reddit has a whole other site if you go there without being logged in. That one is built with web components.

The "normal components" you're referring to are just elements. I don't see the need to track a ratio there. All of YouTube desktop's components are web components.

Reddit doesn't use web component on all pages yet. They have them on certain types of comment pages now and are incrementally porting the rest of their site from React to web components with Lit. They've also built this year's r/place with Lit, and are building other things like embeds on web components.

GitHub also uses web components.

I tried to try Bing Chat (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/features/bing-chat here, right?) and ironically it asks me to download the whole Edge, AND from the screenshots it seems like it's a browser part? extension? No, thanks.

http://www.bing.com/chat

> Ah wait no, you mean the new ones that virtually no one uses, right?

This is exactly the point. Virtually no-one is using them (well, except for Microsoft, and Google, and Adobe, and Github, and Reddit, and NordHealth, and a bunch of others), whereas they are far more future-proof than any of the much more popular frameworks.

It will all change with time, of course. Just like there is no reason now to depend on jQuery. If only I could restart our app again, I would never have chosen React for it. And it worries me when I think how we are going to migrate off of it.

Most of those use Lit right? I’d be afraid to choose a library created by Google

> I’d be afraid to choose a library created by Google

I wouldn't :-) Lit is just a tiny wrapper over native web components to add reactivity to their behaviour; but what is more important, Lit positions itself as a gradually disappearing library, intended to be replaced with native browser apis as they are introduced into the platform (e.g. DOM parts to help with templating, etc.). Compare this ethos to any other library out there.

"the ones that were deprecated and no browser implements anymore?"

Which spec is that?

HTML imports is a good one.

https://www.w3.org/TR/html-imports/

The v0 spec is also vastly different than how it was implemented, though I don't think it ever shipped out from behind a flag:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130608123733/http://www.w3.org...

I mean v0, I learned and experimented a lot with it and suddenly everything changed and was dropped and it was a mess. IIRC in Firefox or Chrome it shipped? At least part of them? Or I might have turned on a flag back in the day, I don't remember too much, I just know "web components are the future" and for 2-4 years they were the biggest mess I've seen with the web.

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