Kokorobot — leanerweb

The Main Thread Is Not Yours — Den Odell

Every millisecond you spend executing JavaScript is a millisecond the browser can’t spend responding to a click, updating a scroll position, or acknowledging that the user did just try to type something. When your code runs long, you’re not causing “jank” in some abstract technical sense; you’re ignoring someone who’s trying to talk to you.

This is a great way to think about client-side JavaScript!

Also:

Before your application code runs a single line, your framework has already spent some of the user’s main thread budget on initialization, hydration, and virtual DOM reconciliation.

CSS-in-JS: The Great Betrayal of Frontend Sanity - The New Stack

This is a spot-on analysis of how CSS-in-JS failed to deliver on any of its promises:

CSS-in-JS was born out of good intentions — modularity, predictability and componentization. But what we got was complexity disguised as progress.

I Built the Same App 10 Times: Evaluating Frameworks for Mobile Performance | Loren Stewart

A very, very deep dive into like-for-like comparison of JavaScript frameworks. The takeaway:

Nuxt demonstrates that established “big three” frameworks can achieve next-gen performance when properly configured. Vue’s architecture allows competitive mobile web performance while maintaining a mature ecosystem. React and Angular show no path to similar results.

And the real takeaway:

Mobile is the web. These measurements matter because mobile web is the primary internet for billions of people. If your app is accessible via URL, people will use it on phones with cellular connections. Optimizing for desktop and hoping mobile is good enough is backwards. The web is mobile. Build for that reality.

Who’s Afraid of a Hard Page Load?

Why single-page apps are just not worth it:

Here’s the problem: your team almost certainly doesn’t have what it takes to out-engineer the browser. The browser will continuously improve the experience of plain HTML, at no cost to you, using a rendering engine that is orders of magnitude more efficient than JavaScript.

Meanwhile, the browser marches on, improving the UX of every website that uses basic HTML semantics. For instance: browsers often don’t repaint full pages anymore.

Moving on from React, a Year Later

Many interactions are not possible without JavaScript, but that doesn’t mean we should look to write more than we have to. The server doing something useful is a requirement for building an interesting business. The client doing something is often a nice-to-have.

There’s also this:

It’s really fast

One of the arguments for a SPA is that it provides a more reactive customer experience. I think that’s mostly debunked at this point, due to the performance creep and complexity that comes in with a more complicated client-server relationship.