Why would users not care about the stop button working?
If something in the browser is not loading, I want to hit stop so I can wait a while before trying again.
Ah, but see, the stop button, back and forward, scrolling down, etc. are how the web worked. And best practice has always been, "don't break the web". Now... people break things. We went from having a consistent UI experience in the browser to everyone just making stuff up. Not good.
I believe that some things shouldn't be SPAs (but, unfortunately are). Some of our clients[1] use SPAs for regular websites (which just makes me eyeroll).
A good example for a SPA would be something like a webmail client, a word processor, or a chat.
A bad example of it would be a blog, or a product website; these are much more suited for MPW
I'm conflicted wheteher these would benefit from a SPA or not: discussion boards, web shops and the like. I can see them benefiting from SPA, but I can also see some disadvantages. I guess they'd be more suited for a "hybrid solution" (MPW with some AJAX and/or WebSockets).
[1]: I work for a hosting company, so our clients are usually web developers (or sometimes they hire web developers).
If browsers had hooks for "the page has now finished loading" (to display a loading indicator while the page loads with XHR etc) and "callback for stop button click" I'm sure lots of SPAs would put them to good use :)
If we can agree that SPAs are useful for some type of apps, it's definitely the browsers lack of APIs fault that the SPA has no way of telling the browser about these sort of things, yeah.
Word also doesn't generally lock up when it can't access the network, and sit there spinning though. (Although I'm sure that feature is on the road-map).
I feel like a lot of the people making SPAs just haven't used a dodgy internet connection in five years or more.
IT would probably be like the time when everyone used Flash to create web apps and reproduced the browser functionality like back and stop, confusing users and breaking the web.
