Comment by ko27
4 hours ago
> the average device and connection is insanely faster than 10-15 years ago
Using the same reasoning, I’d come to the opposite conclusion. Devices are much faster than they were 10-15 years ago, but network latency is still roughly the same because physics limits how much it can improve. So reducing network round trips matters more than ever, which favors SPAs over MPAs.
I’m not sure I follow.
SPA’s tend to require more network round trips, sometimes significantly more based on the architecture.
But a lot of the time they can happen in the background where the user doesn't see them, or on a part of the page the user isn't currently interacting with, preventing it from being a stop-the-world interruption.
It’s in the name: an MPA requires a page roundtrip for every navigation, while SPA requires a single page roundtrip. Any subsequent requests are part of the application itself and can be handled without disrupting UX.
An MPA can make as many queries/service requests as it needs to to render the result. Most— the vast majority of SPAs I’ve ever written, maintained, or used— do that from the client, making many requests to render the new route.
The UX for an SPA can indeed be excellent, but the average SPA is worse than the average MPA, in my opinion. It’s just much easier to break things in many subtle ways in an SPA.
An SPA still requires roundtrips, just not to load the DOM root. Most of them do more than one roundtrip per navigation, making them worse than MPA. They also break loading screens.
1 reply →