| I think the original point of the discussion is somewhat lost, which is not frameworks, it's shipping too much JS to the client which in particular hurts on Android. Whilst I strongly agree SPAs are overused, let's take a moment to consider this sorry state of affairs. It's 2023 and when you ship some 50-200KB of executable code, you're in the red. This is like 1/7th of a damn floppy disk, which I've lived through. Mobile apps are hundreds of MB in size, and we're supposed to compete with that using sticks and stones. Recently my Razor mouse had a driver update, it was 2GB in size. We learn about Unity on desktop, now able to render 17 trillion polygons per second yet we struggle to render some state and squares on the mobile web. That's the real issue. Big parts of the mobile web are severely underpowered yet we still want to ship the "rich application" paradigm to them. Worse, without web standards offering anything remotely useful for this model. That said, the idea that SPAs offer a superior experience that users are somehow demanding is bullshit when you consider how a typical SPA works. Consider a simple navigation action (route change) where the standard argument in favor of SPAs is that these are much faster compared to a traditional server-side page reload. First, the SPA might need to load a new bundle, as tree shaking is the best practice where you lazily load per route code. This client code needs to be downloaded, parsed and executed, before anything even starts to happen. Next, the route-specific components mount. Many will require remote data, so at this point the page change may feel fast, it's useless and will remain useless until all remote network calls are resolved. Compare this to a traditional, well-optimized MPA. You navigate to another route. The server will come back with ALL data/state resolved as well as all rendering (HTML) already done. And as this server response comes in, the browser is already working on the DOM layout/paint process, which is not true for a REST call. Plus, back/forward works reliably, scroll position works, memory leaks are no issue nor are stale tabs. It's really debatable whether the SPA has the better experience or that users demand it. The point is to deliver meaningful content and interactions, that's the true value of whatever you are building. As such, I think the new wave of SSR/hybrid frameworks are a step in the right direction. |
I think the issue here is that on an MPA you may get a white page for a while, or a page with missing pieces in unexpected ways, even if the overall loading is faster it looks more broken.