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Comment by __MatrixMan__ | Hacker News Reader

React made quite a mess of the web just so we couldn't browse with JavaScript disabled, thereby allowing Facebook to track us through those like buttons that popped up everywhere.

Are there hidden barbs in llama and pytorch too? I'm not close enough to them to know.

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Not a fan of Facebook or React (though React Native is IMHO the one eyed among the blind for cross platform mobile development), but I think that's a bit far fetched. I do think Facebook has (or had?) genuinely an engineering culture that wants to give something back.

This is true. I've been to several conferences where FB sent engineers to talk about their open source projects or how they used a particular language or framework.

I remember the conflicted feeling of strongly disliking their products and leadership but liking their contributions. Same energy but more intense in both directions many years later.

So metaphorically speaking RN is an eye up over everything else?

From my personal experience, yes, but your mileage may vary. I tried to like Flutter multiple times, but can't. Capacitator etc feel fairly hacky. All the other options are comparatively obscure.

It helps that I like React alright. I don't think it's particularly well designed or enjoyable to use, and I hate debugging React code, but it's manageable with good development practices. Same goes for JS/TS. Not great, not terrible.

React is the defacto standard of web development for a reason. That's not the reason you can't browse the web with JS (it would be Angular if it wasn't React or others). And just because you use React, doesn't mean Meta can track you.

Their point was that (i) React becoming the defacto standard played into the hands of Meta, who are interested in tracking people. (ii) Tracking is made easier by running arbitrary JavaScript in the browser. And (iii) before SPAs were big (pre-React), more people used to completely disable JS in their browser.

Not saying I buy this theory. Just trying to explain what I think they were alluding to, as I had the impression you missed it and went in a different direction.

It was probably inevitable even without React. Easier to serve the same JSON to my web application and iPhone/android apps, Teams bot, etc.

React was released in like 2013. We were well on our way to the web being unusable with JavaScript disabled by then.

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