It's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA

This reads more like "ditch Next.js" for traditional SSR.

A good SPA has a lot of benefits. Because it can be interactive like a native app. It can only use those benefits, if it is interactive to some extent (like gmail or google docs). Smooth navigation is a very bad reason for picking a SPA.

I'm against bloat as anyone, but to see a wildly different perspective check out what people working on local-first have been doing.

You can pay some upfront cost and have wildly more performant apps.

I support a lot of this, especially for sites that don't need to be applications... but SPAs aren't just about flashy transitions and persistent elements. If you've got a bunch of live data you want to change on interaction an SPA is still hard to beat.

What do you mean by 'interactive like a native app'? The article is focusing on two main parts of making things feel like an app: page view transitions and speed/preloading. To me, those seem like a big part of what makes a site/app feel interactive. And letting the browser do the work and having real URLs has other huge benefits I appreciate.

But agree that for things like GMail, etc, a SPA approach definitely makes sense. I just think most SPA sites I come across aren't in that category.

SPA is not only about seamless transitions but also being able to encapsulate a lot of user journey on the client side, without the need of bothering server too much.

Let me give you an example - one of my biggest gripes about web ux is the fact that in 2025 most shops still requires you to fully reload (and refetch) content when you change filters or drill down a category.

A common use case is when you come to a shop, click on "books" (request), then on "fantasy" subsection (another request), realize the book you're looking for is actually a "sci-fi", so you go back (request, hopefully cached) and go to "sci-fi" (another request).

It's much better ux when a user downloads the whole catalogue and then apply filters on the client without having to touch the server until he wants to get to the checkout.

But it's a lot of data - you may say - maybe on Amazon, but you can efficiently pack sections of most shops in data that will enable that pattern in less kilobytes that takes one product photo.

I've been building web apps like that since ca. 2005 and I still can't understand why it's not more common on the web.