Comment by superkuh
3 years ago
Yeah, supporting people who use older software and older computers doesn't make financial sense for Microsoft. Plus now it's a lot harder to index the pages so it's more lock-in. Web apps have so many advantages for for-profit corporations in filtering out the unprofitables.
> Plus now it's a lot harder to index the pages
Why does using react mean it is harder to index pages? You can certainly write something that's difficult to index in React, but using React does not mean it is inherently more difficult to index. This is especially true if you're using SSR + modern react features with a meta-framework like Next.js
> supporting people who use older software and older computers doesn't make financial sense for Microsoft
Pretty much the same point here. Fundamental misunderstanding of React.
You just said it: if your HTML delivers a react app that hasn’t taken the extra steps to be SSR, then the crawler has to run the JS in order to index the content instead of just parsing the HTML response.
Modern component libraries make it harder to write the site in a non-indexable way than to just make it easy to index.
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I just disabled JS in my browser and most stuff still works, although there's a few things that don't, like loading commit data and dropdown menus. I would guess they're doing server side rendering and progressive enhancement so that at least the core functionality still works okay.
Guillermo (Twitter OP) replied in the thread saying it will be server rendered. Other replies point out it’s not enabled for all users, so this (and presumably the UI changes it brings with it) isn’t final. I do see the changes, but I also opt into most if not all preview features and I wouldn’t mind if I’m part of an A/B test or whatever.
I wouldn’t be so paranoid to think this is some nefarious plot, it’s probably just incomplete. Whatever their “lock in” strategy, it’s more about building and extending a feature moat that users don’t want to leave than restrictive dark patterns. Harming searchability is more damaging to GitHub (which thrives on being highly ranked in Google/etc searches) than it could possibly be to would-be defectors who are almost certainly capable of using their API either directly or by using any number of tools to do that for them. If anything, shipping this widely as-is would probably drive users away not lock them in.
Judging by the timing of adoption of React/Next for their Blocks landing page (also mentioned in the Twitter replies), I wouldn’t be surprised if this is intended to be rolled out alongside further stabilization of React Server Components, or otherwise integrated with existing internal SSR implementation. (Leaning towards the former given it’s a Vercel person speaking confidently about GH’s plans for server rendering)