That could be said for a lot of assumptions developers make. Everyone has 32GB of ram, everyone has an SSD, everyone has an i7...
It is an old problem, but like almost everything else in computing for some reason it seems to have become much worse since about 2010.
In 2000 a developer might have been developing on a Pentium 3 with 128 MB of RAM, but they could reasonably expect their audience to be using at least a 486 with 16 MB of RAM because that was the minimum spec for IE4.
Now you're stuck with trying to impress people with a Ryzen Threadripper and 64GB of DDR5, but your webapp still has to support everyone's iPhone 7 (with 2GB to share with iOS and everything else they have running) for as long as Apple does.
Apple supports (at least security wise) probably more devices than you think.
Maybe it's a process problem, not a developer problem. Like management prioritizes a dozen analytics trackers and ad partners without any tooling for performance testing on a range of devices.
On the developer end (as a developer myself) we definitely deserve some of the blame for embracing things like Electron with such zeal in my opinion. I don't care how much memory a developer's workstation has, there's still a lot of hardware in use that can't take the bloat. I'm not saying everything has to be a native app written in vi against an original print of The C Programming Language as Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie wrote it in 1978 or it's automatically shit, but something like React Native for the desktop would be far less horrible in terms of resource usage I reckon.
Or for free software, chances are it is add supported. So push as many ads and trackers until the churn rate gets too high or competitors take market share.
Or more generally, maybe the design just follows the money.
It's not the developers' job to assume anything about users. It's the project managers'.
You scroll and scroll, and scroll, and every time you reach some level "down", another section is loaded, then at one moment it stops. Something somewhere fails, no more new sections, no way to continue from that point, only a full refresh and a huge scroll down.
Not to mention that some SPA doesn't maintain state, and all the sudden one need to jump through the the process all over again. Personally SPA seems to try reimplement a lot of browser feature all over again in client side JS.
- Works terrible in bad networks.
- And the thing I hate the most is the shifting of images, links when the page is still loading. But this may be a implementation issue.
> Works terrible in bad networks
Yes, software traditionally works shitty under bad network conditions unless the developer actively tests under bad network conditions or has previous experience of handling bad network conditions. This is as much true for anything developed ever that touches a network.
> the shifting of images
This is simply developers missing to add width and height attributes to their <img/> elements. This has been happening since the dawn of the <img/> element and is unlikely to disappear. Also has nothing to do with SPAs, same happens with server-rendered HTML.
That's the whole thing. SPA = state. It requires a lot of dev time to properly handle everything. With stateless applications, you can simply refresh your browser.
The sluggishness is not only because of bad network conditions, but it's multiplied by the huge application that has to be sent over the network, application initialization, and the many subsequent network requests.
A "huge" application can be broken up with code splitting/dynamic imports. Initialisation can be seeded with serverside data or saved in browser storage between pages.
The only semi-unavoidable part is the "subsequent network requests", but even these can be sped up with caching, batching, etc.
> It requires a lot of dev time to properly handle everything.
But yeah, these things take effort
But if you take everything into account, you can also develop a really good native app.
This is not reality.
not everything is equally affected by bad network conditions, SPAs generally are very badly affected by bad network conditions, indeed what is a bad network condition for an SPA might be acceptable for a traditional static page.
A SPA's network dependency or robustness totally depends on the product's design. Some types of applications lend well to offline first (anything where the user owns their content/data, todo, notes, documents, pictures, etc). Others are much more dependent on fresh data. Which pretty much means anything big enough it's unreasonable to replicate it to the device.
I'm a fan of "offline first" design and have been a proponent at various companies. To the point where I can build the feature in at very little additional cost if it is considered and decided in the design phase. Bolt-ons patterns are messy.
However, the reality is that very few customers see this as a significant advantage. Which means that it doesn't really translate to market success. If budget is the #1 priority I can't in good conscience advocate for offline first unless it's going to offer a significant win for the company somewhere.
There is a Chrome-only local file system API.
Generally SPAs are limited to browser provided storage like IndexedDB.
This has been easy to implement for as long as I can remember, so not sure why'd you say it's terrible. What stopped you previous times?
Can't stand "<bla />" though with that pointless/clueless space. The only place where I've encountered these are older JSP, FreeMarker, or Thymeleaf/Spring MVC apps (ugh).
Thats just bad design.
Reactive libraries/frameworks don't explicitly make this worse or better, except their presence implies a high chance of dynamic loading and, therefore, more opportunity for bad design. In addition most component libraries fail to communicate /who/ needs to size a component and if it is ever dynamic. It really doesn't help that most 'official' examples fail to resolve these issues.
Switching off JS/fingerprinting doesn't really help either since it'll just disproportionally benefit Google's stronghold on web analytics even more.
The bigger issue, which seems to be what you are complaining about seems to be the gaping hole in privacy provided by 3rd party storage/resources. That is not a particular problem with SPAs, and can even be exploited without JavaScript.
I'm not sure where you're coming from regarding Google and web analytics. When 3rd party storage is gone (or partitioned) it sounds like everyone would be on the same page in terms of what data they can collect.
So much truth, not once I was trying to click on some image that had link underneath, and it suddenly moved to some other place and I ended clicking something different.
A flawless SPA backed by a flawless API that produces responses in tens of milliseconds is superior to the old ways.
But a trash SPA backed by an API that produces responses eventually if ever and requires me to open the browser's developer tools to find out what happened? You can keep it. Old-school frameset sites are better than that.
This isn't my experience at all, especially when network conditions are not great. The browsers has error handling and a progress bar. Single page web applications often have bad or no error handling and you have no idea if the request failed, the code errored or something else went wrong. You need to refresh the whole page if something goes wrong, which results in having to load a ton of JS every again, negating all possible savings in time and data usage.