Or better yet, use vanilla and web components and HTMX.
React is winning by default and slowing innovation
421–430 of 866 posts
Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation
#422The cycle repeats?
I’ve enjoyed the innovation of the progressive web from jQuery to Angular, but React burnt me out.
I learned the hard way that investing too much time and innovation into a JavaScript framework is a net loss.
And it was always painful when the next person rewrites it into the next “thing”.
Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation
#423The javascript people should stop innovating for a couple of years. To much innovation that lead nowhere. How many ways can one build a web javascript project? Browser people should pick up slack and start developing sane components for the web. How about a backend-supporting combobox, or a standardized date picker across browsers? Then we wouldn't need to constantly innovate how we manage the state of those fundamen…
Frankly it's incredible what any of these frameworks have been able to accomplish given the bonkers platform they have to work on. HTML, CSS, and JS made sense back when the web was primarily text with some simple forms. It's a dog shit foundation to build highly interactive apps on. The whole thing needs to be thrown out and rebuilt.
It is dogshit compared to what?
GTK or QT, Java toolkits?
There is no better cross platform way of implementing applications, especially if you want to do mobile in the same stack.
Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
Innovation is not really measured in terms of how well something "scales down".
See: multi MB downloads to display a few forms in a browser. Software that can’t work well with literal GBs of memory (some of it being a full browser runtime for some desktop forms). Games that run bad thanks to UE5 coming preloaded with footguns that ensure almost every developer will ship games that run poorly. Operating systems that run worse than a decade ago for even the parts that are functionally the same (e.…
React in itself isn't that heavy, and things like preact exists if you want an even lighter library, it's mostly other dependencies that are heavy, so the blame is mostly on the side of the devs, not react, for having heavy and clunky software.
Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
Webapps were a mistake :(
The frustrating part is that the idea is incredible. Everyone has this piece of software on their computer that lets them run anything as long as there is a server to talk to. I love it. I don't want to have to download a thousand apps, especially not for shopping or banking. Just using a web interface is awesome. Unfortunately we decided the correct way to provide the functionality was by layering bonkers ass abstra…
I think you are missing one thing. HTML, CSS and ekhm EcmaScript are open standards not owned by any single corporation.
Every other toolkit was not gaining adoption because it was shut down by one or the other corporation owning one or the other system. GTK is mostly irrelevant as it doesn’t do mobile.
Web stuff is best we could get away with circumventing corporate greed and ownership.
Even if we nag technically it could have less complexity - in reality not because all it was required to work around corporate bullshit.
Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation
#426Web components are the way out of this trap. Every single framework that isn't React should be wholeheartedly supporting web components to make sure that they have access to a viable ecosystem of components and utilities without having to bootstrap an entire competitor to React and it's ecosystem. While a lot of people view web components as competitors to frameworks, they don't really have to be. The just define an…
Not unless you can develop an equivalent to React Native. That's the rub here: browser tech is just way slower than what can be achieved with native code. React's primary value (now) is deduping GUI development across platforms.
This isn’t really true with React Native, Hermes as a JS engine is just drastically slower than JIT-enabled web view . Sure the “native” parts will theoretically be faster but your app code will be a lot slower. Just test how long a rerender takes in react native on a device than react on a browser for the same device.
Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
Innovation is not really measured in terms of how well something "scales down".
Yes. Innovation used to measured in gigaquacks. A decade ago. With the process improvements of 2025, if it doesn't take you an innovation pool of at least 16 petaquacks to display a webpage, are you even trying? Anyone else up downscaling their innovation?
I love boring stack. No nodejs and its dependence hell, no compilation, no frameworks that need reading encyclopedia to make a simple form :)
PHP or blazing fast PHP-fpm, MySQL/MariaDB or Postgres, json for config, jQuery… it is good enough for most cases.
For Netflix, Spotify, Facebook, Waze, and other heavily used sites with millions users… it is a different game.
Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation
#428> Hooks addressed class component pain but introduced new kinds of complexity: dependency arrays, stale closures, and misused effects. Even React’s own docs emphasize restraint: “You Might Not Need an Effect”. Server Components improve time-to-first-byte, but add architectural complexity and new failure modes. There are a lot of valid criticisms of React, but I don't think this is one of them. These problems are not…
Disagree. Hooks took one problem and reshaped it, they didn’t actually solve the problem.
With hooks you still need to think about lifecycle, side effects, and state, but the syntax changes.
The real solution is overall application design and thinking through architecture, but unfortunately that’s higher effort than “just use hooks bro”.
Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
React was innovative when it just appeared 12 years ago. But a few years after there were already many other frameworks doing similar things. And since then it has been good enough, but not the leading innovative frontend framework anymore. React has rather matured in dealing with it's own outdated Virtual DOM design, making it much more boiler platy than modern alternatives.
What metric would you use to define the leading frontend framework, and what is it? I'm familiar enough with Angular, React, Flutter, Vue, and Svelte as big names in the ecosystem, but have really only done scrappy development with React and not much with the others. Google trends seems to show React is still a leader [1], and React has more than double the amount of Github stars than any of the others I've mentioned…
This FE survey also has React leading by a wide margin:
https://2024.stateofjs.com/en-US/libraries/front-end-framewo...
Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation
#430React isn't winning by default. It's been so effective, so well designed that it's lived long enough to become the defacto standard... and the villian. Claiming React is slowing innovation is an absolutely bonkers take when React is essentially the only sane stable choice in a sea of "me too" frameworks and libraries with conflicting and confusing design choices.
Looks like you never used Vue.