Comment by rozumem
17 hours ago
For most users, link navigation for single page apps is far better than making round trips to servers which the 'traditional' browser would do.
17 hours ago
For most users, link navigation for single page apps is far better than making round trips to servers which the 'traditional' browser would do.
That depends entirely on how much needs to be downloaded for each round trip.
A lean website can work just fine on complete trash connections like GPRS or Comcast without incremental loading. Web developers are not incentivized to make lean websites.
SPAs add unnecessary complexity -> increasing page weight -> making finer grained incremental loading more important -> requiring even more code. It's a self-induced problem.
As a corollary, McMaster Carr is often used as an example of a website that didn't fall into the SPA trap, and customers greatly benefit from that [1]. The front page weighs about 14 MB with all of the images, but the loading experience is great even with network throttling simulating a poor connection. There is a good reason the site has this reputation.
Overengineering is the true root of all evil. Web developers cannot learn that fast enough.
[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=mcmaster+carr