The Curious Case of the Shallow Session SPAs

4 months ago

Alex Russell's background includes significant contributions to web technologies like Progressive Web Apps, Service Workers, and Web Components.
Data suggests Single-Page Applications (SPAs) average only one soft navigation per hard page load, questioning their efficiency.
The core mission of web performance is to reduce latency and variance, improving accessibility and reliability.
SPAs trade increased initial JavaScript load for faster follow-on interactions, but real-world data may not support this trade-off.
The complexity and cost of SPAs have led to widespread issues, with many teams struggling to manage performance.
Browser limitations and lack of native components have pushed developers toward JavaScript-heavy solutions, despite their drawbacks.
The web performance community faces mysteries around session depth, interaction modeling, and the true value of SPA architectures.
Urgent questions remain about how to guide teams toward more efficient architectures based on real-world data.

Hasty Briefsbeta