Comment by nicoburns

It depends on the application though. Mapping apps (e.g google maps) without ajax are awful.

Even basic UIs like filtering can be bad if you want to change multiple filters, and you have to wait for a whole page load in between each change (page load times for pages with filters are often slow as they're performing complex queries).

It's a case of different things being appropriate for different use cases I think. There definitely are still times when plain HTML is best, but it's also not always faster.

I've built a React app that's under 300kb (cached with a service worker for subsequent page loads) that loads almost instantly and works offline. On the other hand, plenty of plain HTML sites include heavy CSS frameworks, or 5mb images, gifs, etc and load pretty slowly, especially on poor connections.