Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

React is winning by default and slowing innovation

lorenstew.art

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 866 posts

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#31

Post by kypro »

React's dominance is genuinely baffling to me, and even more so popularity of Next.js.

In my experience React is rarely the best solution and adds a huge amount of complexity which is often completely unnecessary because React is rarely needed.

In the early days my very controversial view was that frontend developers tend to be fairly mediocre developers, and this is why a lot of frontend frameworks suck and frontend developers just mindlessly adopt whatever the hot new technology is with seemingly no concern for performance, maintainability, security, etc.

But honestly I'm not sure this explains it anymore... There are a lot of really talented frontend development teams out there working for companies with plenty of cash to try something different. I don't really understand why there's no serious competitor frameworks in terms of market share out there.

As far as I'm aware there's no analogies to this in other areas of the web tech stack. There's plenty of backend frameworks to pick from depending on the product. There's also plenty of competitive DBMSs, cloud providers, package managers, code editors, etc, etc. I don't understand why frontend development is so static in comparison because it's certainly not that React is the perfect solution for everything.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#32

Post by duxup »

croes wrote: post #27
throwmeaway222 wrote: post #15

its kind of a blessing that SOMETHING won. We finally can just use a component. We don't have to worry about - oh I wish I could use that, but it's written in X framework.

Now you’re forced to use react even for simple pages that just need that one component.

Not optimal, but also easy peasy.

One thing I like about React is that if you want it can be very simple.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#33

Post by tracker1 »

Alex_L_Wood wrote: post #14

Good. I remember the times when there was a weekly new framework that would absolutely revolutionize the web frontend development. Mobile development forums were having all-out wars regarding MVP vs MVVM vs VIPER vs ... vs ... yadda yadda. Now I can just enjoy stable predictable tooling and I can benefit from tons of examples and documentation.

There's still a lot of new options that pop up... it's just that React is a "safe" choice for a lot of places/apps. I've pretty much stuck with React + Redux + MUI for close to a decade now. Currently working with Mantine instead of MUI, honestly similar enough that I don't mind.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#34

Post by vkou »

leptons wrote: post #8

Front-end has seen plenty of innovation, so much that it causes a lot of burnout. So many people seem to want to reinvent the wheel for various reasons - to get recognition, to do things their own way, etc., while the existing trending tech hardly sees the surface scratched and continues to work just fine for most workloads. >“But proven at scale!” jQuery was proven at scale too. Past success doesn’t guarantee future…

JQuery has plenty of good functionality, but you're going to have a really bad time building non-trivial applications as a team if that's all you are using.

Because it's just a library, not an opinionated framework, keeping everything consistent across a development team of varied tenure and experience levels will be a herculean effort.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#36

Post by skrebbel »

maelito wrote: post #11

Rewrite the first paragraph replacing "React" by "HTML". React is mostly HTML driven by data. "HTML killed front end innovation". Well that enabled standards to build real use cases on it with a common ground. Before React, the Web world was a mess. In 2025, you have lots of frameworks to explore. React did not kill front end innovation at all, it just became a standard that gives more common understanding to buildin…

> React is mostly HTML driven by data.

I wish! Mostly though, React is a terrible mess of hooks with weird rules, suspense, “use client”, pedantic docs, and millions of other idiosyncrasies that have no business being this mainstream.

I think most people agree that the core ideas are great. Eg composable components, props, unidirectional data flow etc. There’s a reason that all other reasonably popular frontend frameworks adopted these ideas. It’s great that React established them. It’s just a bit sad that React established them.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#37

Post by johnfn »

jmcgough wrote: post #6

> React didn’t win purely on technical merit A sentence written by someone who clearly hasn't worked on a large Angular 1.x project.

Yes, this is probably the wrongest statement. When React was launched, it was one in a pool of thousands of web frameworks. For any axis you want to claim that React won by "default", there was another framework that dominated React in that axis and lost anyways. Some frameworks had more resources and lost (Angular), some of which were more popular and lost (jQuery, Backbone), and some of which were even more hyped than React and lost (remember Meteor?).

React didn't win by default, it won because developers tried it and found it was better. It absolutely won on technical merit.

There's a bit of a question of whether React would still win on technical merit today, versus all the next-generation frameworks. I personally think it is still better than Svelte, Vue, etc, but I'm a bit of a React apologist.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#38

Post by andy_ppp »

RussianCow wrote: post #29
jmcgough wrote: post #6

> React didn’t win purely on technical merit A sentence written by someone who clearly hasn't worked on a large Angular 1.x project.

This. React was incredibly innovative at a time where the alternatives were some combination of: * Two-way data binding spaghetti * Boilerplate-heavy reactivity * Opaque, framework-specific magic * Manual state updates/transitions React didn't win "by default" (whatever that means), it won because it was better than most of the other options at the time. I agree that, on purely technical grounds, it isn't as strong o…

[flagged]

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#39

Post by notapenny »

Good. Innovation isn't the latest framework that barely improves the model and as much as front-end developers like to nit about bundle size, 100kb here and there isn't going to matter for most markets.

Honestly between React, Angular and Vue, there's enough jobs if you do want to specialise, but the mental model between the three isn't that different that a good engineer wouldn't be able to adapt.

React is boring old tech to me at this point and I'm happy with that. Like choosing Java, C# or Python for the back-end. I'd rather focus on innovating my clients products until something earth shattering comes along.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#40

Post by skrebbel »

mrits wrote: post #30
maelito wrote: post #11

Rewrite the first paragraph replacing "React" by "HTML". React is mostly HTML driven by data. "HTML killed front end innovation". Well that enabled standards to build real use cases on it with a common ground. Before React, the Web world was a mess. In 2025, you have lots of frameworks to explore. React did not kill front end innovation at all, it just became a standard that gives more common understanding to buildin…

[flagged]

HN has a button exactly for that!
Post reply on HN