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Rich Felker

@samir React literally turned Facebook's web app from the best ux ever to appear on a website, with actions reflected immediately and consistently, on 2006 hardware, into glitchy garbage that's unusably slow on 2020 hardware.

4 Mar 2023 at 22:46 | Wall-to-wall | Open on hachyderm.io
5 comments
LisPi

@dalias @samir Was it really that way? I never used it so I don't actually know.

5 Mar 2023 at 0:29 | Open on mastodon.top
Rich Felker

@lispi314 @samir Yes. It was ultra light ajax and basically the first major site to use it to have replies and other actions have immediate effect on the page rather than having to do a klunky reload.

5 Mar 2023 at 0:42 | Open on hachyderm.io
Rich Felker

@lispi314 @samir Then they rewrote it entirely as a client side web app where all the rendering, rather than changes by user action, were implemented in js with lots of round trips to server and a heavy client side data model outside the DOM. It's completely analogous to difference between how a shell with readline works vs how curses works.

5 Mar 2023 at 0:45 | Open on hachyderm.io
Rich Felker

@lispi314 @samir Google did a similar rewrite to Gmail around the same time with exactly the same effects. Went from fast on 2006 hardware to painfully slow on much later hardware, and worse UI.

5 Mar 2023 at 0:46 | Open on hachyderm.io
Rich Felker

@lispi314 @samir It's really a shame that this isn't well documented anywhere, only existing in the memories of folks who experienced it. I wonder if copies of the js they served back then ever got saved anywhere...

5 Mar 2023 at 0:48 | Open on hachyderm.io
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