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Comment by 0xblinq | Hacker News Reader

Yet another mess, once again.

All of this just so that they can brag that their framework has more stars/downloads than Next.js, because there's no other reason to do this than to "show" who's more popular.

And while it's true react-router has a shitload of downloads, most of those downloads are for really old versions, because people can't update due to all the constant rewrites and changes of APIs. I've seen this at 3 companies already, nobody is using the latest versions.

NPM should show download metrics by version (as packagist does for PHP packages). I'm convinced this will prove it.

But hey, this works. Now they have more downloads than Next so let's use this instead.

(BTW, Remix was still a better option than Next in my opinion, but that's a super low bar)

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npm does show last 7 days download metrics by version!

https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-router-dom?activeTab=ver...

As it happens, I was curious about the same thing last year and wrote a script you can run in the browser console to add them up, and it does prove something:

  react-router-dom

  v6 5820458 
  v5 3274886 
  v4 275081

  react-router

  v6 5993187
  v5 3366625
  v4 302549
  v3 156121
  v2 25726 
  v1 8448
  v0 2447

Code here:

  versionsHeader = Array.from(document.querySelectorAll("h3")).find(
    (h3) => h3.textContent === "Version History",
  );
  // requires a second .nextElementSibling for react-router
  // because of the deprecated versions checkbox
  versions = versionsHeader ? versionsHeader.nextElementSibling : null;

  nums = Array.from(versions.children)
    .slice(1)
    .map((el) => [
      el.children[0].textContent,
      parseInt(el.children[2].textContent.replace(/,/g, ""), 10),
    ]);

  for (const v of [6, 5, 4]) {
    const sum = nums
      .filter((c) => c[0].startsWith(`${v}.`))
      .map((c) => c[1])
      .reduce((a, b) => a + b, 0);
    console.log(`v${v}`, sum);
  }

I would say it’s a bad sign that 40-50% of the user base is already one version behind as you’re releasing v7.

This comparison ignores reach router, which was the other replacement for react router by that same team before they abandoned it for remix. That still has 600k downloads so now you’re nearly at 50:50.

There’s a reason why many front end devs have stayed away react router and the associated libraries since 2016/2017 because this team has lost a lot of good will for the number of times they’ve done major overhauls of their projects.

Why is it bad sign? It means the old versions are pretty good and people are still using them. It's very hard for me to imagine a library used at this absolutely massive, mind-boggling scale that doesn't have a long tail of legacy support.

On top of that people are very much still moving to v6. When I checked last August it was about 50-50 v6 vs the rest, now it's 60-40, and in absolute terms that delta is far more than the total number of Reach downloads.

> It means the old versions are pretty good and people are still using them

That's a very optimistic view of the situation.

It’s really frustrating how the remix/react router maintainers refuse to examine how their major version changes have caused pain for tons of developers out there.

There’s a reason why this feedback keeps coming up again and again.

I think the fact that the team chose the React Router name tells me they don’t understand how tainted the name is for a lot of experienced front end devs.

And moving forward it’s going to be even harder to search for issues when you stumble on a problem because the names of Remix/React Router have been polluted over the years.

Hey! But those sweet download stats! Now it’s bigger than next and that’s the only thing that matters.

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