<story><title>JavaScript Bloat in 2024</title><url>https://tonsky.me/blog/js-bloat/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>devjab</author><text>I never really understood why SPAs became so popular on the web. It’s like we suddenly and collectively became afraid of the page reload on websites just because it’s not a wanted behaviour in actual web applications.&lt;p&gt;I have worked with enterprise applications for two decades, and with some that were build before I was born. And I think the React has been the absolute best frontend for these systems compared to everything that came before. You’re free to insert Angular&amp;#x2F;Vue&amp;#x2F;whatever by the way. But these are designed to replace all the various horrible client&amp;#x2F;server UIs that came before. For a web-page that’s hardly necessary unless you’re g-mail, Facebook or similar, where you need the interactive and live content updates because of how these products work. But for something like pornhub? Well PHP serves them just fine, and this is true for most web sites really. Just look at HN and how many people still vastly prefer the old.reddit.com site to their modern SPA. Hell, many people still would probably still prefer an old.Facebook to the newer much slower version.</text></item><item><author>wruza</author><text>&lt;i&gt;10MB, 12MB, …&lt;p&gt;Compare it to people who really care about performance — Pornhub, 1.4 MB&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Porn was always &lt;i&gt;actual&lt;/i&gt; web hi-tech with good engineering, not these joke-level “tech” giants. Can’t remember a single time they’d screw up basic ui&amp;#x2F;ux, content delivery or common sense.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>figmert</author><text>&amp;gt; It’s like we suddenly and collectively became afraid of the page reload on websites&lt;p&gt;I used to work at a place where page reloads was constantly an issue brought up as a negative. They couldn&amp;#x27;t be bothered to fix the slow page loads and instead avoided page changes.&lt;p&gt;I argued several times that we should improve performance instead of caring about page reloads, but never got through to anyone (in fairness, it was probably mostly cos of a senior dev there).&lt;p&gt;At some point a new feature was being developed, and instead of just adding it to our existing product, it was decided to use an iframe with the new feature as a separate product embedded.</text></comment>
<story><title>JavaScript Bloat in 2024</title><url>https://tonsky.me/blog/js-bloat/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>devjab</author><text>I never really understood why SPAs became so popular on the web. It’s like we suddenly and collectively became afraid of the page reload on websites just because it’s not a wanted behaviour in actual web applications.&lt;p&gt;I have worked with enterprise applications for two decades, and with some that were build before I was born. And I think the React has been the absolute best frontend for these systems compared to everything that came before. You’re free to insert Angular&amp;#x2F;Vue&amp;#x2F;whatever by the way. But these are designed to replace all the various horrible client&amp;#x2F;server UIs that came before. For a web-page that’s hardly necessary unless you’re g-mail, Facebook or similar, where you need the interactive and live content updates because of how these products work. But for something like pornhub? Well PHP serves them just fine, and this is true for most web sites really. Just look at HN and how many people still vastly prefer the old.reddit.com site to their modern SPA. Hell, many people still would probably still prefer an old.Facebook to the newer much slower version.</text></item><item><author>wruza</author><text>&lt;i&gt;10MB, 12MB, …&lt;p&gt;Compare it to people who really care about performance — Pornhub, 1.4 MB&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Porn was always &lt;i&gt;actual&lt;/i&gt; web hi-tech with good engineering, not these joke-level “tech” giants. Can’t remember a single time they’d screw up basic ui&amp;#x2F;ux, content delivery or common sense.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>diggan</author><text>&amp;gt; But for something like pornhub? Well PHP serves them just fine,&lt;p&gt;Kind of fun to make this argument for Pornhub when visiting their website with JavaScript disabled just seems to render a blank page :)&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; how many people still vastly prefer the old.reddit.com site to their modern SPA&lt;p&gt;Also a fun argument, the times I&amp;#x27;ve seen analytics on it, old.reddit.com seems to hover around&amp;#x2F;below 10% of the visitors to subs. But I bet this varies a lot by the subreddit.</text></comment>