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Comment by kylehotchkiss | Hacker News Reader

I hear you on frontend-only react. But hopefully the newer React Server Components are helping? They just send HTML over the wire (right?)

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The problem isn't in what is being sent over the wire - it's in the request lifecycle.

When it comes to static HTML, the browser will just slowly grind along, showing the user what it is doing. It'll incrementally render the response as it comes in. Can't download CSS or images? No big deal, you can still read text. Timeouts? Not a thing.

Even if your Javascript framework is rendering HTML chunks on the server, it's still essentially hijacking the entire request. You'll have some button in your app, which fires off a request when clicked. But it's now up to the individual developer to properly implement things like progress bars/spinners, timouts, retries, and all the rest the browser normally handles for you.

They never get this right. Often you're stuck with an app which will give absolutely zero feedback on user action, only updating the UI when the response has been received. Request failed? Sorry, gotta F5 that app because you're now stuck in an invalid state!

Yep. I’m a JS dev who gets offended when people complain about JS-sites being slower because there’s zero technical reason why interactions should be slower. I honestly suspect a large part of it is that people don’t expect clicking a button to take 300ms and so they feel like the website must be poorly programmed. Whereas if they click a link and it takes 300ms to load a new version of the page they have no ill-will towards the developer because they’re used to 300ms page loads. Both interactions take 300ms but one uses the browser’s native loading UI and the other uses the webpage’s custom loading UI, making the webpage feel slow.

This isn’t to exonerate SPAs, but I don’t think it helps to talk about it as a “JavaScript” problem because it’s really a user experience problem.

Yes, server-rendering definitely helps, though I have suspicions about its compiled outputs still being very heavy. There's also a lot of CSS frameworks that have an inline-first paradigm meaning there's no saving for the browser in downloading a single stylesheet. But I'm not sure about that.

Yes, though server side rendering is everything but a new thing in the react world. NextJS, Remix, Astro and many other frameworks and approaches exist (and have done so for at least five years) to make sure pages are small and efficient to load.

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