The trend in my work is to add more and more JS to get the render time below 11ms per frame (11ms for my code, plus 5ms for the browser to paint and update, for a solid 60fps). To do that takes a lot of data structure design, memoization, cache management, plus a decent understanding of how browsers put things in the DOM and on the screen. Admittedly I work on something that's a bit unusual (a diagram tool for lawyers.. kind of like Visio-in-a-browser), but I can assure you that if you want robust, fast rendering it takes a lot of code to do it well. It is not bloat.

Why would you ever build that kind of application using web technologies?

Simple: every machine has already installed the gateway to your program: a web browser. No need to deal with issues like antivirus going bonkers, weird MSVCRT versions installed leading to support requests, you save a ton of money when you need to support OS X or god forbid Linux, and last but not least, an SaaS business model has recurring revenues while it doesn't have to deal with rampant piracy at the same time.

There's a weird subset of HN that think people should still be building desktop apps. It's like they haven't paid any attention to the software market for the last 10 years.

I for one would love the return of the good old days, where I could pay once for $software, have it on a physical medium and could work with it as long as I managed to have a computer/VM that runs it.

So much culture, especially in gaming, will be inevitably lost with the SaaS and streaming trend. For media like video, music and books at least many national library laws require the deposit of two or more copies at the national archives, but interactive media? Games that require online activation? That's all gonna be lost forever.

A browser gives you robust networking, caching, rendering, and security out of the box. SaaS means updates and versioning aren't issues. Online means I don't have to consider network installs behind law firm's firewalls. I'd prefer not to have to touch any of those myself even if it means I have to deal with JS and SVG rendering performance (which is actually really interesting).

This is a minor inconvenience for things like reddit, but the trend has also arrived at the webportal for my bank ("upgraded" to some sort of React thing, meaning it now takes 10x longer to load) and my cell provider (site no longer works in Firefox as of last month; error message: "check that you're connected to the internet!").

New reddit is painfully slow to login. So much javascript for a simple dialog to load it's absurd.

Are you aware of https://old.reddit.com (old desktop ui), or https://i.reddit.com (old mobile ui)? Also https://www.reddit.com/.compact

As long as old and compact reddit are still there, I'm fine with it. Twitter on other hand has no lightweight version, unfortunately.

Twitter's redesign is one of the most performant SPA's I've seen in a while. It's really smooth and nicely designed too. A lot better than their previous webapp.

When I open a Tweet I look at spinner animations for 10 seconds. Scrolling is also the opposite of smooth.

Scrolling is silky smooth for me and spinners go away quickly.

What hardware are you running?

For their infinite scrolling, they clean the DOM above and below the viewport and only keep a certain amount of tweets rendered. So once you start scrolling a little faster, the JavaScript can't keep pace and starts sputtering.

Do you know any others? Every time I’m redirected to twitter on mobile I’m in awe, it’s genuinely the only SPA I’ve ever experienced work “properly” on my phone comparable to a native app without any polish.

I think I recall someone mentioning there is one that you get if you send an empty User-Agent.

If JavaScript is disabled in your browser and you visit mobile.twitter.com, you get a link to proceed to "legacy Twitter", which is their pre-React mobile site.