I don't know, I think the most painful aspect of having to do a full reload is how I efficient the site is. The actual data is a few KB, but the page itself has to download 100 MB and the web browser is burning through a GB of RAM.
Like I don't find Hacker News to be egregious to navigate, and nearly every nav is a reload. It runs fine on my 2008 laptop with 4 GB of RAM.
But I go to DoorDash on the same device, and it takes 30s to load up a list of 50 items. They give you a countdown for a double dash, and I genuinely don't think it's possible to order some curry and get a 6 pack of soda in less than 3 minutes. And 2.5 minutes is waiting for it to render enough to give me the interface. Almost none of it is a full reload.
An SPA can be lean and fast. React is the prevailing Web framework today? Preact is like 5 KiB of code.
What makes SPAs unwieldy is not the technology but the lack of desire to optimize. It loads fine on yesteryear's Macbook Air? Enough, push it.
I very well remember heavy, slow-loading websites of, say, year 2000, without any SPA stuff, even though lightweight, quick-loading pages existed even then, in the epoch of dial-up internet. It's not the technology, it's the desire to cram in more, and to ship faster, with least thinking involved.
> I very well remember heavy, slow-loading websites of, say, year 2000, without any SPA stuff, even though lightweight, quick-loading pages existed even then, in the epoch of dial-up internet.
Sure, lightweight, quick-loading pages existed, but sometimes you want to see a picture.
Google appeared in 1998. It was very noticeable how fast it loaded compared to competitors like AltaVista and Yahoo. None of them featured large photos.
This was visible not only on a 33600 phone connection at home, but also on a megabit connection at work, because, shockingly, how fast your backend is also plays a major role.
Speaking of speed, don't forget when gmail and google maps first came out: With the data copied locally they could separate the UI from server requests for a lot of interactions so a lot of the UI was actually instant and you could keep doing things while the requests were handled in the background. This seems to have been missed by a lot of modern stuff that doesn't bother figuring out if this is even possible and opts to show a loading spinner instead.
Yeah, the enemy isn’t the need to reload, it’s reloading taking a long time due to too much garbage that’s not the content the user is interested in having to come down off the wire and render. A site that requires an occasional split second reload is always going to be preferred to a behemoth that doesn’t need reloading but has me staring at blank screens and loading spinners half the time I’m using it.
> But I go to DoorDash on the same device, and it takes 30s to load up a list of 50 items.
> And 2.5 minutes is waiting for it to render enough to give me the interface.
I have a very old MacBook Air (one of the painfully slow ones) that I use for development reference for what a slow machine looks like.
I just tried clicking around DoorDash and didn’t see anything nearly this bad. Not even close.
Every time there’s a Hacker News thread about how slow websites are, there are dozens of comments like this claiming extremely large latency numbers. I can’t tell how much of it is exaggeration for effect, or if some people have configurations with weird quirks that make them abnormally slow.
I suspect it’s a lot of this:
> on my 2008 laptop with 4 GB of RAM.
Sorry, but I don’t think it makes sense for companies to optimize their websites for computers that are nearly two decades old and don’t even have enough RAM to run a modern operating system.
The intersection between people who spend money on a expensive luxury service like food delivery to their door and people who won’t spend the cost of a couple DoorDash deliveries to upgrade from a 2008 laptop to a 2018 laptop in 2025 is negligibly small.
Hmm, I would say comparing Hacker News to DoorDash is not exactly apples to apples. There may also be ulterior motives to make a website slow(or at least not optimized) if the company wants to funnel people towards an app on the phone.
Navigating to a thread isn't much different than navigating to a store.
Upvoting isn't much different than adding to the cart.
Payment isn't much different than adding a comment.
I think the interaction levels are incredibly similar. The primary difference is the amount of images displayed, but that really isn't a significant aspect of web design or Internet traffic in 2025.
Document-centric, form-driven websites aren’t traditionally called apps. The Wikipedia website isn’t an app. Web forums aren’t apps. “App” implies that essential parts of the interaction logic are driven by client-side code (JS, not HTML) that couldn’t similarly be implemented by HTML forms.
Sure Wikipedia is an app, long as you think of static websites as a subset of web apps. One might say that makes the term meaningless, I say it's a deliberately vague term because people don't want or need to get cornered by fine distinctions. Otherwise it's endless quibbling over whether things like search do or do not count toward a site being a "real" app.
Like I don't find Hacker News to be egregious to navigate, and nearly every nav is a reload. It runs fine on my 2008 laptop with 4 GB of RAM.
But I go to DoorDash on the same device, and it takes 30s to load up a list of 50 items. They give you a countdown for a double dash, and I genuinely don't think it's possible to order some curry and get a 6 pack of soda in less than 3 minutes. And 2.5 minutes is waiting for it to render enough to give me the interface. Almost none of it is a full reload.