The users didn't demand this. They were perfectly happy when you delivered a website that performed a full-round trip in 50ms a decade ago containing more data than your average SPA can handle before choking on it.
The users want it to work. They want it to be fast. They want it to be pretty. That's about it.
I'm tired of hearing about why GMail succeeded. It's revisionist. GMail succeeded because they had the best spam filtering, in a simple design, and you were probably using Google search anyways. Plus Hotmail was always going down for hours (days?) at a time.
I've never experienced bugs in the web like I have with SPAs. I'm very thankful that even if my budgeting software is built in Ember, making it slow and buggy, my bank's site isn't. Making it predictable, and very fast to render. Time to Render is atrocious on many "modern" sites.
Opinion time: I miss that version. There's so many bells and whistles on Gmail now that I prefer to use a local mail client to logging in and attempting to work through all the clutter to do basic things like viewing and replying to emails.
You have absolutely no evidence of that.
On the contrary, there is abundant evidence that SPAs increase engagement.
You're living in an echo chamber if you actually thing the average user would like to return to the web of the 90s. They love things like the infinite scroll on Facebook, Google instant search, Slack, Trello, etc.
If you think the huge companies implementing these things haven't done extensive user testing to show that people prefer these experiences, you're letting your political agenda cloud your judgement.
I don't know how you read that question (well, ok, I do), but it's not how I read it. Whiff of an insult duly noted.
We did it because users demand it. A SPA feels substantially faster and more reactive. Users notice.
Dude! Whoever said we were railing on SPAs? But since you bring up Gmail I'd just like to note that gmail has been a slow, bloated mess for many years now. It takes a half a minute for the page to stop janking on my dev box with 50mbps internet, so I think Gmail in its current state is a poor choice of example. Gmail of old, back before they tried to cram 80 million things into it, was a pretty good example.
I don't know how you read "provide search engines with indexable dynamic pages" as implementing your own search engine. It was pretty clearly referencing the well-known challenge of making your JavaScript-rendered pages indexable by Google/Bing/etc.
> Whoever said we were railing on SPAs?
You are. When you say we should just abandon all this JavaScript and instead render everything through Rails, you're arguing against building SPAs.
We did it because users demand it. A SPA feels substantially faster and more reactive. Users notice.
If Gmail used your approach, it never would have succeeded.
> How does a LAMP/RAILS app provide search engines with indexable dynamic pages? Uh, through clever use of jquery AJAX and postgres indices?
I have to assume you're just throwing out terms you've heard of but never understood. Database indexes have literally nothing to do with making your site indexable for search engines.