I'm on a terrible high latency connection in Athens, Greece. The serverless SPA is one of the fastest sites I've ever visited. It's a ton faster than HN for me.
Yes the initial pageload takes time. But afterwards I can click around the site and get immediate feedback. Immediate as in native app speeds. Images and such obviously still take time to load and render but they do not block loading. There's no whitescreen while I wait for new pages to load.
So as someone with shitty internet who often browses documentation, give me hundreds of sites like this. This is significantly faster to browse around than, say, the Python or Django documentation, both of which make very little use of Javascript. I'm sorry you're not getting the same experience, I can't speak to that.
To reiterate: An SPA will bloody obviously not faster on the first pageload. The whole idea behind it is that you load more machinery upfront but you don't load it again afterwards. Depending on how good the app is, you make up for it very, very quickly. And if you have any significant JS usage on your site at all, you make up for that too.
My point, which everyone seems to have completely missed, is that well-built SPAs do exist. They don't have to feel slower to use than other apps.
Yes the initial pageload takes time. But afterwards I can click around the site and get immediate feedback. Immediate as in native app speeds. Images and such obviously still take time to load and render but they do not block loading. There's no whitescreen while I wait for new pages to load.
So as someone with shitty internet who often browses documentation, give me hundreds of sites like this. This is significantly faster to browse around than, say, the Python or Django documentation, both of which make very little use of Javascript. I'm sorry you're not getting the same experience, I can't speak to that.
To reiterate: An SPA will bloody obviously not faster on the first pageload. The whole idea behind it is that you load more machinery upfront but you don't load it again afterwards. Depending on how good the app is, you make up for it very, very quickly. And if you have any significant JS usage on your site at all, you make up for that too.
My point, which everyone seems to have completely missed, is that well-built SPAs do exist. They don't have to feel slower to use than other apps.