Simon Willison’s Weblog

Someone asked me today if there was a case for using React in a new app that doesn’t need to support IE.

I could not come up with a single reason to prefer it over Preact or (better yet) any of the modern reactive Web Components systems (FAST, Lit, Stencil, etc.).

One of the constraints is that the team wanted to use an existing library of Web Components, but React made it hard. This is probably going to cause them to favour Preact for the bits of the team that want React-flavoured modern webdev.

It’s astonishing how antiquated React is.

— Alex Russell # 15th August 2023, 9:15 pm

TL;DR: To serve users at the 75th percentile (P75) of devices and networks, we can now afford ~150KiB of HTML/CSS/fonts and ~300-350KiB of JavaScript (gzipped). This is a slight improvement on last year’s budgets, thanks to device and network improvements. [... This is] what we should be aiming to send over the wire per page in 2023 to reach interactivity in less than 5 seconds on first load

— Alex Russell # 20th December 2022, 9:54 am

Y’all decided you could send 6x as much script because the high-end could take it...but the next billion users can’t. There might have been budget for 2x, but not 6x. Not by a long shot.

— Alex Russell # 9th August 2019, 6:53 am

Why, for a decade of experience, can we not seem to see the IE 8 zombie coming? It’s not like it’s going to be some big surprise that unless we do something different, we’ll still be supporting it in 2015. That’s right: in 2015, you’ll still be thinking about a browser that doesn’t support canvas or video and doesn’t even have a JITing JS engine.

— Alex Russell # 11th October 2010, 11:01 pm

If HTML is just another bytecode container and rendering runtime, we’ll have lost part of what made the web special, and I’m afraid HTML will lose to other formats by willingly giving up its differentiators and playing on their turf.

— Alex Russell # 17th March 2010, 10:37 pm

It’s interesting to me how much [Closure] feels like a more advanced version of Dojo in many ways. There’s a familiar package system, the widgets are significantly more mature, and Julie and Ojan’s Editor component rocks. The APIs will feel familiar (if verbose) to Dojo users, the class hierarchies seem natural, and Closure even uses Acme, the Dojo CSS selector engine.

— Alex Russell # 6th November 2009, 7:35 am

Years ago, Alex Russell told me that Django ought to be collecting CLAs. I said “yeah, whatever” and ignored him. And thus have spent more than a year gathering CLAs to get DSF’s paperwork in order. Sigh.

— Jacob Kaplan-Moss # 21st September 2009, 6:35 pm

JavaScript cannot save you. Even if it could, you should not let it, for the price of this short-term salvation is the end of what you like about the web.

— Alex Russell # 19th August 2009, 11:33 am

Making queries faster isn’t in the critical path for improving the real-world performance of any Dojo apps I know of, and I bet the same is true for JQuery users. Reducing the size of the libraries, on the other hand, is still important. Now that we’re all fast enough, it’s time that we stopped beating on this particular drum lest we lose the plot and the JavaScript community continue to subject itself to endless rounds of benchmarketing.

— Alex Russell # 22nd August 2008, 8:12 am

Boxing Day toy discovery: Mega Bloks not compatible with Duplo! See, Alex Russell? THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU INNOVATE AHEAD OF STANDARDS

— Yoz Grahame # 26th December 2007, 5:58 pm

To get a better future, not only do we need a return to “the browser wars”, we need to applaud and use the hell out of “non-standard” features until such time as there’s a standard to cover equivalent functionality. Non-standard features are the future, and suggesting that they are somehow “bad” is to work against your own self-interest.

— Alex Russell # 16th December 2007, 11:33 pm

If you are subject to an XSS, the same domain policy already ensures that you’re f’d. An XSS attack is the “root” or “ring 0” attack of the web.

— Alex Russell # 8th January 2007, 10:48 pm