<story><title>Modern JavaScript has made the web worse (2020)</title><url>https://www.chaseaucoin.com/posts/why-npm-has-made-the-web-worse/?=ver=8e60f8174786794b7efe72ef69ff9ac2</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>afavour</author><text>IMO the biggest problem is that the industry became all about developer experience and neglected user experience.&lt;p&gt;Doing an analysis of the JS bundled with many major sites is an utter horror show: React is big and bloated, alternatives like Preact exist but no-one cares. React provides The Best Developer Experience so that is what we shall use. GraphQL is the cool thing to use these days so we’ll throw in a giant client library along with all our query text. Sure, browsers handle REST out of the box but that’s not what works best for our developers. We’ll use CSS in JS despite the performance being worse, it’s what our team likes. We’ll bundle a giant CoreJS shim to all browsers even though the vast majority won’t need it. Running two builds is too annoying to set up in our workflow. The site loads fine on my MacBook Pro so why stress what Lighthouse says?&lt;p&gt;So on and so forth. For years I’ve heard that this isn’t a problem because all the extra developer productivity means they can move so much faster. It’s been long enough now that I’m comfortable dismissing that argument as nonsense. And many users are essentially trapped: for example, I bank with Chase and their web site is absolutely atrocious. I talk to friends and they say the same. But the UX of online banking is very rarely a reason for anyone to change bank so the product folks aren’t going to push for performance. It’s something developers have to proactively care about and as an industry we just don’t.&lt;p&gt;I hope eventually we see the industry change but for now it really feels like no-one cares. We’re prioritising the speed of the shovelling while ignoring the quantity of shit.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Hermitian909</author><text>&amp;gt; all about developer experience and neglected user experience&lt;p&gt;I think this is a mix of good old cargo culting and how hot the dev market is. Small companies don&amp;#x27;t have the leverage to tell their engineers &amp;quot;no&amp;quot; when they do a bit of resume driven development.&lt;p&gt;React makes sense for many of sites at larger tech companies paying big salaries because many of them are delivering a richer &amp;quot;application&amp;quot; experience. Some engineers blindly follow what &amp;quot;better&amp;quot; (massive air quotes) companies are doing. Others who want to work at these companies want the skills that will make them more hireable and so choose React. Devs who are not in either of these other camps make a small enough group they don&amp;#x27;t generally get their way.</text></comment>
<story><title>Modern JavaScript has made the web worse (2020)</title><url>https://www.chaseaucoin.com/posts/why-npm-has-made-the-web-worse/?=ver=8e60f8174786794b7efe72ef69ff9ac2</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>afavour</author><text>IMO the biggest problem is that the industry became all about developer experience and neglected user experience.&lt;p&gt;Doing an analysis of the JS bundled with many major sites is an utter horror show: React is big and bloated, alternatives like Preact exist but no-one cares. React provides The Best Developer Experience so that is what we shall use. GraphQL is the cool thing to use these days so we’ll throw in a giant client library along with all our query text. Sure, browsers handle REST out of the box but that’s not what works best for our developers. We’ll use CSS in JS despite the performance being worse, it’s what our team likes. We’ll bundle a giant CoreJS shim to all browsers even though the vast majority won’t need it. Running two builds is too annoying to set up in our workflow. The site loads fine on my MacBook Pro so why stress what Lighthouse says?&lt;p&gt;So on and so forth. For years I’ve heard that this isn’t a problem because all the extra developer productivity means they can move so much faster. It’s been long enough now that I’m comfortable dismissing that argument as nonsense. And many users are essentially trapped: for example, I bank with Chase and their web site is absolutely atrocious. I talk to friends and they say the same. But the UX of online banking is very rarely a reason for anyone to change bank so the product folks aren’t going to push for performance. It’s something developers have to proactively care about and as an industry we just don’t.&lt;p&gt;I hope eventually we see the industry change but for now it really feels like no-one cares. We’re prioritising the speed of the shovelling while ignoring the quantity of shit.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>addicted</author><text>I’d agree with you except for the fact that it’s really hard to say that developer experience today is better than what it was before. Especially once you adjust for the fact that browsers are so much better and standardized.</text></comment>