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Comment by limelight | Hacker News Reader

> I think I still prefere the "feel" of classic websites.

Your hacker biases are showing.

The sites where 95% of people spend most of their time (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.) are all built as single page "applications." Users expect rich interactivity from websites these days and are usually not tolerant of UI refreshes.

The comparison is not to "desktop" applications but to mobile apps. Users expect a mobile app level of interaction. Plus, if you're building mobile apps then it's a lot easier to just reuse those same APIs for a web app.

That being said, if your site doesn't have any interactivity then it does make sense to just render it statically.

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One of the key advantages of a single-page application from the User Experience perspective is perceived response time. It takes well under a single frame refresh period (~16ms) to react to some event and either change the page using data you already have, or throw a loading indicator on the screen.

The app may have been slower to load the first time (hopefully not by much) but from then on, they get the perception of instant feedback even if they have to wait a round trip for the backing data sometimes.

SPA frameworks make this sort of interaction very easy to design and reason about as a developer.

Hyperlinks are a form of interactivity. That aside, there is no reason why one cannot have many individual pages which each have their own interactivity.

If you are going to argue that this is about "hacker bias" you will have to show user studies, not poll JS developers.

And the performance of all those is just garbage in Firefox on a 3 yr old laptop and isn't that much better on mobile.

They're fantastic for forcing people to buy new hardware just to look at information :|

Well it must not be a very good 3 yr old laptop then? And firefox isn't exactly the slimmest or lightest web browser. Sucks ram just as bad as chrome used to. My 3 year old laptop can handle all of the google services just fine.

8gb RAM, great CPU. I'm playing counterstrike global offensive and civ 5 with very few problems. Lower FPS sure because the video card isn't great but it shouldn't be this bad. It was fairly decent in Win7.

Isn't that more of problem with adds or 3rd party JS?

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