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React is winning by default and slowing innovation

lorenstew.art

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Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#51

Post by eric-p7 »

sabellito wrote: post #21
eric-p7 wrote: post #13

This seems like a good place to plug my library, Solarite. It's a minimal, compilation-free JavaScript library that adds reactivity to native web components, as well as scoped styles and a few other ease-of-life features. https://vorticode.github.io/solarite/

Reading through the example, it seems like it doesn't do reactivity, as the user code must call render() manually on state changes. Did I miss something?

No, that's correct. I did it that way deliberately as a design choice.

Is that not still considered reactivity? If so then I'll update the docs.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#53

Post by teaearlgraycold »

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.

If React is guilty of anything it’s being the first framework that was good enough to last a long time. Of course today we have hindsight and can make better alternatives. But replacing React at this point is harder because it’s been around for long enough that it’s become the standard.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#54

Post by nathan11 »

"React by Default is Killing Front End Innovation" is probably a better headline for the post. It looks towards the present and the future, not how we got here.

All in all, this story has played out many times before, and will again. I think you either have adoption or you have a modern solution without technical debt. React had constraints that don't exist anymore that shaped its architecture, and now it has an enormous community that cannot turn on a dime.

Svelte, Solid, and Qwik have the benefit of hindsight and browser advancements. In 10 to 15 years time we'll be talking about a new batch of frameworks that have the same advantages over Svelte/Solid/Qwik.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#55

Post by juancn »

It could be a good thing.

Front end engineering has been a perpetual chase for The Shiny Thing™, constantly changing, with good excuses, but way too often throwing everything away and starting from scratch, forcing a perpetual catch up and periodic rewrites of everything.

Some maturity and a slower pace of change could be a good thing.

I mean, innovation is still happening, but it's not compelling enough to drop React for most apparently (at least not yet).

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#56

Post by legitster »

I'm an old-school web guy. React is stupid easy, but by nature of things being easy it also encourages really bad habits.

Performance is one thing (the internet is getting slower! Impressively bad!), but also webapps are becoming so incredibly overdesigned, at the expense of the user experience.

Before we had the discrete fields of front-end engineering, design, UX, etc web design was inherently limited and we used standardized shorthands for everything across the industry. With React it's so easy to throw out best practices and try to redesign every single experience from scratch. Combine that with the Figma-fication of web design and teams can get lost making pixel perfect designs that are usability nightmares.

Let's be honest - what percentage of modern React websites actually provide a better user experience than Craigslist? It's fast, I'm not dealing with buttons that move around as a page loads, unusual text sizes at non-standard screen sizes, etc. (The famous McMaster-Carr website is another example).

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#57

Post by jmcgough »

0x457 wrote: post #47
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.

Well, that's just argument against angular 1.x

Yes, but when React launched, 1.x was its main competition. We started to incorporate React into parts of our app that needed better performance, and found ourselves using it for essentially all our new projects. It was quick to pick up, made apps easier to reason about, and had much more performant DOM updates. Angular's two-way binding made for flashy demos, but quickly became a leaky abstraction for complex pages with lots of updates.

That was in 2013. Angular 2 came out in 2016, and by that point React had won. Have had to dabble in other frameworks since then, and none of them seem to do anything significantly better than React. I spent my early career learning a new FE framework every year, at this point I'm happy to have something boring that does what I need and has a great ecosystem around it.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#58

Post by rimunroe »

skrebbel wrote: post #36
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 frame…

> pedantic docs

Are you referring to something in particular here? I've had my issues with the docs in the past, but I don't think I'd describe any of them being related to pedantry.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#59

Post by SebastianKra »

Why do these articles keep dismissing the innovations by React itself. The Svelte compiler is revolutionary, but the React compiler is not enough somehow. The React-Team has worked on server components, concurrent rendering, suspense & transitions. They all integrate with each other to allow for some really elegant patterns.

While the VDOM overhead does exist, it's not the performance bottleneck. More likely reasons are waterfall fetching (present in all frameworks and solvable by React Server Components) or excessive revalidation (solved by the compiler)

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#60

Post by RussianCow »

andy_ppp wrote: post #38
RussianCow wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

React was actually pretty simple in the early days. It's gotten significantly more complex because of hooks, suspense, SSR, and other features they've introduced more recently. But I would still take modern React over AngularJS 1 and I think it's far more explicit.
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