[strife25]

Labor wasn't the issue, it was UX.

Users wanted responsive UIs and Gmail showed the power of AJAX in the browser. In the mid-2000s, server power, network latency, and maintaining state were the challenges. The UX was more powerful when the client tracked state, only requested the data it needed, etc.

Things have flipped. SPAs became bloated as abstractions were introduced. Network latency and server power is not an issue anymore. Rendering a bunch of HTML is as quick as rendering JSON.

As a vet of the IE7 days, I love this trend. Leveraging the best of server compute and browsers is going to simplify web app development a LOT.

[pjmlp]

Ajax was created by Microsoft to show Outlook on the browser....

[diroussel]

Not quite what I remember. XMLHttpRequest was invented by Microsoft and used in a outlook webaccess. This was only possible in IE6.

But Ajax is merely a pattern that was enabled by the ‘dynamic html’ that was made possible by having a DOM and JavaScript. It was possible in Netscape years before IE6. I did a production app with Ajax in 1999, using IE4. Before the term Ajax had been coined.

[t8sr]

AJAX in early Gmail was a massive improvement. It was mostly hand-coded javascript in a relatively thin page and it was the sweep spot. Today's version of gmail is the most bloated pile of spaghetti framework code imaginable and is far less responsive and usable than the plain HTML version.