[vessel]

Single-page apps are forgivable for media oriented sites, so the video/music can keep playing as you navigate the site. in the past this was done with pop-up players and was generally messier, so I like SPAs for this.

Literally every other type of website on the planet should use traditional loading pages.

[yunohn]

SPAs can easily handle routing via the history API, the problem is that companies haven’t migrated correctly.

[eloisius]

It’s usually crappy though, like the URL and the history don’t accurate recreate the state of the app on refresh at all, or the history gets so clogged with every mutation of app state that the back button is effectively useless.

[KarlKemp]

Twitter does it rather well, and that’s a site where it’s difficult and matters.

[yunohn]

Again, that’s a development shortcoming, not a technical limitation. All of your concerns can show up in non-SPAs too.

[eloisius]

Yes, I know in some theoretical scenario where the developers do everything exactly right none of these problems would exist. My argument is not that it's intrinsic to the technology, my argument is that my _experience_ is that the vast majority of (needless) SPAs are like this. Whether it's because frontend developers get all hot to re-implement standard browser features themself using redux, because the tooling is bad, or what, I can't tell you.