[mden]

Why not? Newspapers are fairly complex websites too and React is amazing at reducing code complexity, especially when compared to using vanilla js. There are other libraries that would also work great, but then it's comparing pros and cons and there is little reason React can't win in such a comparison.

[TekMol]

    Why not?

My expectation is that the site does the templating on the client then. And my experience with websites that do that is that they load slow, behave sludgy and suffer from all kinds of display errors.

This might be a worthwile tradeoff to quickly build a highly interactive realtime interface. But for a newspaper? As a user I would be very much turned off to endure all that just to read an article.

[davnicwil]

One of the really powerful features of React is that server rendering of the views is trivial. This makes it very compelling even for content sites, where as you rightly say, time to first meaningful render of said content really matters after you hit the URL in your browser.

You could even write an entirely server-rendered web application, or a static website, in React should you be so inclined. In fact, I do the latter for my (very simple) personal site at https://davnicwil.com!

Nothing about React obliges you to do client rendering, a SPA app, or anything complex at all. It's, at the end of the day, just a view rendering library.

[stephenboyd]

Endure it? Try visiting the NY Times. It doesn't load slow, behave sludgy, or suffer from display errors. And SPAs are a faster experience when you know the user is going to be looking at multiple pages, like how people typically read newspapers.

If the user is on any hardware from the past 7 years, a React developer would have to do some distinctly bad programming to make it behave sludgy. Any poor performance is likely to be from the same things that make a classic static page slow: large media files and tracking scripts.

[TekMol]

You mean www.nytimes.com ? Is that already the new react powered version?

As a sidenode, it does feel sludgy:

- Scroll is not smooth.

- It does not adapt well to different browser sizes

- After a few seconds the page "jumps down"

But the reason might simply be the overkill of JS,animations, overlapping elements (like the static header), ads, dynamically loaded stuff and other crap. When I turn off JS, some of the problems go away.

[scottmf]

They're not using React right now. If you read the article it says they'll be introducing the new version over the next several months.

A lot of this "JS is slow, what happened to good old HTML and CSS, get off my lawn" stuff is simply confirmation bias.

[stephenboyd]

I didn't look close enough in the developer tools to see the limited extent. From what I can see, just the email list sign-up forms on www.nytimes.com are using React, but all of the new front page of mobile.nytimes.com is in React. They are testing the new version of the mobile site in a partial roll-out, so if you open a new browser session there's a good chance the new one will get served to you (It will have a message saying "You’re seeing a test of a new version of the New York Times home page.").