[t8sr]

The problem with React apologetics is that you need to only take a cursory look at literally every production app written in React to see it's terrible and must be abandoned in the long-term.

To see how fast a properly engineered app can be if it avoids using shitty js frameworks just look at fastmail. The comparison with gmail is almost comical: every UI element responds immediately, where gmail renders at 5 fps.

[procaryote]

> [most used web framework, powering innumerable successful businesses]

> [literally unusable]

> [one of the most successful web apps]

> [look at how bad it is]

Your standards might be uncalibrated with reality

I use gmail every day and it's fine, apart from when they push AI features I don't want, but I can't blame that on the framework

[array_key_first]

Well yeah, most software is bad. In fact it's so bad that's its almost unbelievable.

We're all used to it and that's fine. But it's still bad. We're still wasting, like, 10,000x more resources than we should to do basic things, and stuff still only works, like, 50% of the time.

[ASalazarMX]

GMail is becoming the Lotus Notes of the 21st century. It uses half a gigabyte of RAM, for evey tab. God forbid you need to handle several accounts, i.e., for monitoring DMARC reports across domains.

And IT IS SLOW, despite your experience, which is highly dependant on how much hardware can you throw at it.

[KronisLV]

> [most used web framework, powering innumerable successful businesses]

> [literally unusable]

It's gotten a lot of critique over the complexity it has over the years, the same way how Next.js also has. I've also seen a frickload of render loops and in some cases think Vue just does hooks better (Composition API) and also state management better (Pinia, closer to MobX than Redux), meanwhile their SFC compiler doesn't seem to support TypeScript types properly so if you try to do extends and need to create wrapper components around non-trivial libraries (e.g. PrimeVue) then you're in for a bunch of pain.

I don't think any mainstream options are literally unusable, but they all kinda suck in subtly different ways. Then again, so did jQuery for anything non-trivial. And also most back end options also kind of suck, just in different ways (e.g. Spring Boot version upgrades across major versions and how verbose the configuration is, the performance of Python and the dependency management at least before uv), same could be said for DBs (PostgreSQL is pretty decent, MariaDB/MySQL has its hard edges) and pretty much everything else.

Doesn't mean that you can't critique what's bad in hopes of things maybe improving a bit (that Spring Boot config is still better than Spring XML config). GMail is mostly okay as is, then again the standards for GUI software are so low they're on the floor - also extends to Electron apps.

[SomeUserName432]

> I use gmail every day and it's fine

The past couple of weeks I've been having loading times up to 1 minute to open gmail.

No idea what they are up to. Loading google workshop or something like that, takes eons.

[t8sr]

My friend, it renders at 15 fps on a literal supercomputer. It takes 30 seconds to load. The time between clicking a button and something happening is measured in seconds. It may be successful, but it is not good.

The problem is that you’ve (and we all have) learned to accept absolute garbage. It’s clearly possible to do better, because smaller companies have managed to build well functioning software that exceeds the performance of Google’s slop by a factor of 50.

I’m not saying RETVRN to plain JS, but clearly the horrid performance of modern web apps has /something/ to do with the 2 frameworks they’re all built on.

[Shikadi]

Enshitification, I've been using Gmail for decades and it was significantly faster and more responsive in the past. It still works fine tbh, but it did work better. Whether or not something is successful has little to do with its quality or performance these days.

There was also a time where once a website or application loaded, scrolling never lagged. Now when something scrolls smoothly it's unusual, and I appreciate it. Discord has done a really good job improving their laggy scroll, but it's still unbelievably laggy for literal text and images, and they use animation tricks to cover up some of the lag.

[eyeris]

When did gmail migrate to react?