It would be great if they wrote an article about this switch to understand some of the challenges they were facing.
I would also be curious if they considered other approaches and stacks.
These JavaScript UIs feel clunky and slow IMO. Maybe it's the (sometimes) dozens of calls the UI make back to the server to get data whereas if it was all rendered in the backend the round trip time would be a lot faster since the server is closer to the data, but my browser needs to make a call across the internet to the server and then to the database or whatever.
Also for tools websites at companies I work at, as a backend dev, building those tools in react is huge overhead. Webpack and react and redux etc. It's a lot to deal with for some simple tool. I'm wondering how much internal tool websites built in react slow down the development process at corps.
Imagine you need to do the following calls to get the page rendered with the various information different parts of the page has:
1. Get user information
2. Get projects for user
3. Get the selected project
Now, if this was all server side rendered, it might take 1ms to go to the database and get the various bits of info, or 3ms for 3 sequential requests.
With a react app and say 250ms of latency to the database, you're looking at 750ms of overhead - 200x slower.
Of course you can architect all your APIs to always return everything the user needs so they don't have to do multiple requests, but that has its own drawbacks and honestly is very difficult to do and plan ahead for, especially at scale with multiple consumers of various APIs.
There will be exceptions of course, but I haven’t found them.
They don't feel slow, they are slow, even more so on mobile, but developers have stopped caring about mobile web performance a long time ago. So much for "flash is killing my battery", now it's Javascript.
Of course, performance will come down to how well the team builds the site and optimizes it. It is very easy to make a site slow in so many different ways. You always have to be looking at and optimizing it for improvements, both on the client and server. React isn’t immune to this, just as various server frameworks aren’t immune to it either.
As an example I just made a quick test from my Firefox mobile browser in desktop mode and the switch between PR tabs is not instant but close enough to not be bothered by it.
https://github.blog/2018-09-06-removing-jquery-from-github-f...
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/te...