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Comment by gitaarik | Hacker News Reader

React was innovative when it just appeared 12 years ago. But a few years after there were already many other frameworks doing similar things. And since then it has been good enough, but not the leading innovative frontend framework anymore.

React has rather matured in dealing with it's own outdated Virtual DOM design, making it much more boiler platy than modern alternatives.

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What metric would you use to define the leading frontend framework, and what is it?

I'm familiar enough with Angular, React, Flutter, Vue, and Svelte as big names in the ecosystem, but have really only done scrappy development with React and not much with the others.

Google trends seems to show React is still a leader [1], and React has more than double the amount of Github stars than any of the others I've mentioned except Flutter, by which it still leads a healthy margin.

- [1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?cat=32&date=today%2...

They said "leading innovative framework", and innovative is the key word. The biggest player is almost never innovating, they are usually performing some kind of undeserved market capture.

Indeed, I meant leading in innovation.

React isn't innovating, it's just improving what it already does, but it doesn't do it in a new way.

That makes it stable, and a safe choice for devs. But yeah indeed like the article says, it kind of stagnates innovation in the ecosystem. But yeah I guess that is because React is usually "good enough" in most cases. Not enough reason to use something else.

This FE survey also has React leading by a wide margin:

https://2024.stateofjs.com/en-US/libraries/front-end-framewo...

why the sudden angular rise last month?

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