Sunday, 22nd May 2022
The balance has shifted away from SPAs (via) “There’s a feeling in the air. A zeitgeist. SPAs are no longer the cool kids they once were 10 years ago.” Nolan Lawson offers some opinions on why the pendulum seems to be swinging back in favour of server-side rendering over rendering every page entirely on the client. He argues that paint holding, back-forward caching and service workers have made the benefits of SPAs over MPAs much less apparent. I’m inclined to agree.
Paint Holding—reducing the flash of white on same-origin navigations. I missed this when it happened back in 2019: Chrome (and apparently Safari too—not sure about Firefox) implemented a feature where rather than showing a blank screen in between page navigations Chrome “waits briefly before starting to paint, especially if the page is fast enough”. As a result, fast loading multi-page applications become almost indistinguishable from SPAs (single-page apps). It’s a really neat feature, and now that I know how it works I realize that it explains why page navigations have felt a lot snappier to me over the past few years.