Comment by xutopia
7 hours ago
I had landing pages using React on a 1.6M/m budget. The loading times on cell phones in mainland USA meant we had people cancelling the loading of pages. When we converted to straight up cached HTML we saw a huge increase in full page loads.
People weren't cancelling the page load and surfing back anymore. You cannot argue that React is extremely heavy and also adds a lot of time between first render. Test a normal HTMX page in Lighthouse and then convert it to React and you'll see how drastic things are.
People use React today out of habit rather than because it's the best tool for the job.
This just shows that despite the 1.6M/m budget, you did not have people who could do react correctly. React.hydrate have existed since React 0.4 (2013, that is over 13 years ago) and Gatsbyjs was released over a decade ago around 2015.
But while first render is of course important, now everything else is more expensive with htmx because you have to generate HTML on the server, on top of your usual fetch pipeline. Yes, for small traffic it makes little difference, but once you have >10k/s requests, things start to cost.
Yes but why bother with React, Hydrating pages at all if you can do something simpler? What advantages does React provide here?
HTMX tools are simpler while providing straightforward thinking around html fragment caching, whole page caching. React just gives a runaround way of doing everything. I'll remind you React was built so that people could continue watching a streamed video while they navigated on a page. Most pages aren't streaming anything.
Because "simple" is transient at best and a lie at worst.
But for more details, see the sibling comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49069477
What advantages does HTMX have? You end up with splintered spaghetti code, multiple languages/idioms, and unpredictable state.
> loading times
What does React have to do with loading times of a page? React does not contribute to that at all other than having to download the JS runtime, which with Preact is 3KB.
> You cannot argue that React is extremely heavy and also adds a lot of time between first render
Yes you can! In no world would React itself add enough render time to make people navigate back, even if running on a computer from the 90s!