One of the reasons behind the popularity around webapps was that they would no longer need to make 'a server call' on each interaction.
> And in many cases it's what SPAs do as well.
I feel you're grossly misrepresenting what SPAs do. SPAs do calls to send and receive data, not to fetch server-side rendered content.
Ironically, many modern SPAs are significantly slower than the traditional apps they replaced. Try using Twitter's webapp on a non-premium phone, for example.
Sometimes it's regrettable that the webdev truck has no rear-view mirror.
Rerendering and recomputing too much (ever encountered these chains of map() and filter() in render()?), many API calls, huge icon sets, huge custom fonts, CSS frameworks and JS frameworks, huge dependency trees with many instance of the same lib running sometime in several versions, big bundles... This heaviness in the name of convenience and branding is not free, it forces people to ditch perfectly fine hardware, which has a high environmental cost... not directly paid by people funding the code).
One of my pet peeves is managed text inputs, where render() is called each time you type a character, for a whole component tree if you are not careful and you happen to pass the content to some parent for some reason. Typing a message in Mattermost on the PinePhone is painful for this reason, there's just no reason typing should be slow even on slow hardware but managed component is considered good practice.
Making people buy newer / powerful and making people wait and using too much energy should be considered bad practice.
Bullshit. All you need to track a user is data you send as part of a HTTP request. Pushing metrics is a fire-and-forget HTTP request away.
The internet feels slower because we're using way more of it, not only in the increased complexity of webapps to improve user experience and implement features but also in the volume of data we're transferring around.
> running A/B tests
A/B tests just means settings/feature flags and metrics. Feature flags is used in way more things than behavioral studies.
> include recording user sessions
User sessions are recorded since ever with zero performance penalty. The very same HackerNews page you're now browsing is tracking your user session whenever you login. That's not it.
> Back "before SPAs" we just weren't doing as much crap in the browser.
Right, and life sucked back then. Why do you think Flash was so popular?
It's trendy to shit on the status quo but it also is low-effort and lacks any insightfulness.
All software becoming slower is a already a meme. This isn't exactly a SPA issue.
> Sometimes it's regrettable that the webdev truck has no rear-view mirror.
The "software is getting slower" meme was the Hallmark of Java in the server when it was released in the 90s. This is nothing new, or specific to web dev.
Also, I feel you're grossly misrepresenting the problem. Reddit's mobile page is considerably slower than the old reddit page, but it's perceived performance is quite good. All posts are cached and instead of full page reloads it just switches content virtually instantly.
It might be fancy to shit on everyone else's work, but this only happens if you lack objectiveness and sincerity.
