The case for vanilla front-end development
<i>&gt; When on a 1Mbit&#x2F;s WiFi connection in Greece, my vanilla app loaded in 4 seconds and started rendering after ~2 seconds, while the React&#x2F;Redux app took 50 seconds to first render!</i><p>This is the thing that baffles me about the SPA&#x2F;framework trend, regardless of connection speed. The whole pitch for React&#x2F;Vue&#x2F;etc. is that they&#x27;re supposed to make for more responsive interfaces. And yet, whenever I actually <i>use</i> an app written in React&#x2F;Vue&#x2F;etc., I find myself marveling at how <i>slow</i> it feels. Even on a desktop PC with a fast connection, I spend so much time staring at progress bars and loading spinners as all the various bits and bobs of the interface get pulled down and rendered. I don&#x27;t know whether pages that are rendered server-side are empirically faster, but they sure <i>feel</i> faster, because after a brief (usually &lt; 1s) wait the whole page just, you know, <i>appears</i>, fully rendered and ready to go.<p>As another developer who&#x27;s old enough to remember the CENTER tag, I&#x27;m open to the idea that this is just incipient old-fogeydom on my part. But whenever I hear people start talking about how much more responsive SPAs are, it sounds a lot like the old gag: &quot;who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?&quot;