Mastodawn

Alex Russell Feb 5, 2023

Yet another team at work staring down months of remediation thanks to "modern frontend" has caused me to write down why I've been *intensely* frustrated with the clearly broken market for web technology over our long lost decade:

https://infrequently.org/2023/02/the-market-for-lemons/

Thanks to @brucelawson, @heydon, Taylor Hunt, @andy, and @phae for spotting errors in (even more splenetic) drafts.

The Market for Lemons

New web services are being built to a self-defeatingly low UX and performance standard, and existing experiences are now pervasively re-developed on unspeakably slow, JS-taxed stacks. At a business level, this is a disaster, raising the question: why are new teams buying into stacks that have failed so often before?

Alex Russell

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EthanRDoesMC Feb 5, 2023

I’m not a web dev, but I have for years suspected that something like this was going on. As apps got faster, the web got slower. So there it is: massive js backends.

Wanna see what the web could be? Go see how fast The Verge loads. Seriously. https://theverge.com/, go check it out.

Effectively these frameworks, from my limited understanding anyway, try to emulate what can/should only be pulled off at build time, in run time. And that has a horrific real-world performance impact.

The Verge

The Verge is about technology and how it makes us feel. Founded in 2011, we offer our audience everything from breaking news to reviews to award-winning features and investigations, on our site, in video, and in podcasts.

The Verge

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EthanRDoesMC

Usually the argument that gets thrown at me is “cross-platform”. Okay sure. Or you could have straightforward clients that are just as easy to make, run way faster, and take way less resources. And then you get all the advantages of being a native app.

The main benefit of web apps is immediacy. If your web app is so slow and has such bad UX that it makes me want to use a native app, your web app has failed.