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Comment by robin_reala | Hacker News Reader

React “won” because Facebook spent three years flying devrel to every web conference on earth to persuade other people that Facebook’s problem space was applicable to small agencies.

Back in reality, React is slow and massively overbuilt for the majority of stuff that most people are building.

If you played around with Web Components a long time ago then you probably played with the v0 spec, which was somewhat different to the current version.

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> React “won” because Facebook spent three years flying devrel to every web conference

You do know that Google sponsored and ran things like Polymer conf? That it builds lit? That Google's devs have literally overrun and overruled most web specs committees? That Google has spend hundreds of millions of dollars promoting Web Components?

And yet here we are.

Polymer was incredibly even slower that React and even more overbuilt, and it had the added negative that it tried to enforce a visual style as well, which was too much for most people. Google couldn’t spend its way out of that hole.

As for Web Component specs, we got v1 because of Apple and Mozilla: Google would happily have stayed with v0.

I'm glad to have read this today. I'm going to look into how I could use web components in my next side project. I'd really like something that worked easily with SSR and client-side, maybe using htmx.

In retrospect, I think I avoided web components because of Google and their aggressive dev relations pushing Polymer. It felt so one-sided that it didn't seem like a web standard. It felt more like a Google "standard" like NaCL. Having to ship Polymer to support non-Google browsers felt even more heavy weight than React.

> I'd really like something that worked easily with SSR and client-side

Then you should skip Web Components :)

For sure. SSR is one thing that React has done well, and that Web Components don’t have a great story for.

I'm pretty sure that just shipping the HTML works. The nice thing if I use web components is that I can just have my backend create HTML that uses those components. I can create elements whatever way I want on the backend or the front-end so long as it is HTML.

Yes, if you stick to custom elements. If you want shadow dom encapsulation then you’ll need to wait for declarative shadow dom to turn up in all browsers.

React "won" I think because it trojan horsed itself as being "just the view" but then morphed into a hand-rolled kitchen-sink solution, and inertia kept people around.

Accurate quote. Source: I was there.

!!!

If React won, it was precisely because it was not "overbuilt."

It was simpler (deliberately) than Backbone, Angular, Vue, Svelte, etc.

You can implement a React clone in a few hundred lines, a la Preact.

I would not say that React won over svelte because of simplicity. Hate what you will about implicit behaviors in svelte, but the syntax is simple and intuitive.

React won by being early and different. Svelte came out three years after React and got (unfortunately) steamrolled.

There two notions of "simplicity."

One is that the implementation is very simple/transparent, e.g. C.

The second is that it allows users to have very simple code, e.g. Python.

React is mostly the first with a bit of the second. Svelte is the reverse.

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