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by NikolaeVarius 3349 days ago
I dislike being the guy who things that 'everything sucks' but the things I've seen come out of React have been horrifying. Very few websites even require anything that React provides nor do most webapps need to be webapps.

I've come across bugs where simple text boxes were crashing the browser. Fixing that bug took the front end three days because they simply had no idea how to fix it because everything was buried in the React abstraction layer.

1 comments

Sounds like a case of bad developers. Obviously, plenty of sites that use React do just fine.

That said, I've had those frustrations at work and wishing in my head that our SPA was a server-rendered app instead.

Sure, but the question that always lingered in my head was, how it even possible to mess up a text box? It was a simple input form that crashed the browser by taking up all its memory. I could literally see my browser GC spike during every single keystroke.

If it's possible screw up the most basic element of a website, I shudder to think what other simple elements are out there that are horribly written

Asana (ugh, not my choice) once prompted me for feedback. The whole thing's performance is always worst-in-class god-awful, but the feedback textarea lagged nearly a full second before registering each keystroke. A textarea. A textarea.

My feedback was... a little mean. Having read some of the stuff about their NIH-induced in-house framework I suspect they've got several things hanging around in it that belong on Accidentally Quadratic, assuming they're still using that thing. If they're not still using it then I don't know what they're doing wrong. Possibly most things.

Meanwhile I use Basic HTML gmail because full page reloads are way faster than Ajaxy-Gmail and (especially) Inbox. And those are from a company with "only" "A players". I hate the modern web so very much.

> I hate the modern web so very much

It's worse when making SPAs is my job :-(