[arohner]

> Following the emerging set of best practices (use a CDN, bundle/minify your code with a tool like browserify/webpack, don't block the critical render path) is enough to get your code to a point where it should run totally fine on mobile. The horrible state of mobile web performance more often results from:

Not really. While your points are all true, the two biggest factors that you can't really escape are 1) your SPA is still a 1 MB download 2) eval'ing 1 MB of JS before rendering is still slower than serving HTML.

SPAs are a better experience, but they're still slower than conventional pages, and I wouldn't recommend their use on high traffic areas of your site, like the landing page.

[Uehreka]

Sure, and to be fair there are people who needlessly use angular, scrolljacking, and other horrible magicks when building something that doesn't need it. But my experience of the debate has been that there are many many people who think that MVC frameworks are only suitable for "cool" projects like soundcloud, and that the other 90% of front-end developers don't have legitimate use cases for them. I don't think this is a fair or informed assessment of the field, but it can sound like one because it appears to offer a "simple" solution.

As for the 1MB download, angular is about 100KB minified (most of the space in angular is comments, which contain ALL of its documentation). Angular is also used in so many places that if you pull it from a CDN your users should never have to download it. In my experience, my SPAs themselves rarely outweigh 10-20KB. Worst case: I have to download 120KB of JavaScript and parse it. Still though, I find that AJAX requests to slow backends still take up most of the load time -- meaning that if my app was a conventional one, the page would take a while to appear at all, then load instantly. Of course, with Angular 2, I've heard server-side rendering comes into the picture, making the whole "where should I render my templates" discussion moot.

Sure there's a lot of back and forth and a lot of complexity. But in my experience, many clients and businesses want the kinds of modern touches that only a SPA can give them, and the tooling we have around our code exists to make the task easier, even if it may seem complex at first.