March 12, 2024 at 1:18:06 PM UTC

	Since	posts	replies	likes	reposts and quotes	views
Bluesky	May 2023	1,039	8,236	23,127	2,380
Mastodon	Nov 2022	2,399	29,156	55,396	16,820
GitHub	Jul 2010	179	5,777 3,520	33,866	3,317
npm	Jul 2014	139	1,546			75,991,720
YouTube	Dec 2015	30		1,203		32,713
Letterboxd	Mar 2026	55
Blog	Nov 2025	20
Hacker News	Jan 2011	59	575	802
All	Jul 2010	4,807	37,967	114,394	22,517	76,024,433

It’s absolutely wild that for *years* the React community has made the claim that interactions on Single Page Applications are faster!

I’m reminded of these: https://www.zachleat.com/twitter/1259834737390161922

But Interaction to Next Paint is showing the opposite to be true. If anything, to me it suggests that Virtual DOM is trading slower page interactions for marginal improvements to page navigations.

10 replies

Khalid ⚡ 4 min later

@zachleat A life lesson is continuously evaluating your belief system and why you believe it. It strengthens your belief or allows you to evolve. The same applies to the adoption of technologies *ahem* React.
1. nrk 17 min later
  
  @khalidabuhakmeh idk why people are attached to technologies at emotional level and decline to accept flaws in them😴😴😴
nrk 8 min later

@zachleat interaction between pages do "feel" faster in client side routing. But near similar result can be achieved with preloading the html as well.
1. Zach Leatherman 10 min later
  
  @nrk9819 yeah that’s kinda what I mean—page navigations might be a bit faster, but at the expense of all other interactions
2. nrk 14 min later
  
  @zachleat react and tailwind have some of the most toxic community I've seen in tech that almost feel like cults. The way react sold the notion that SPAs are faster than traditional client-server apps, tailwind also sold that utility-first css ship less styles than semantic css.
  Both the lies have been debunked, but the fanboys are too stubborn to accept the fact.
  1. Zach Leatherman 18 min later
    
    @nrk9819 lotta sunk cost here
Eric Heiken 26 min later

@zachleat
This is why. https://web.dev/articles/vitals-spa-faq
There is an implementation in Beta that you can try that would send CWV data on soft navigation. Worth a shot. I'm close to implementing it on a property and evaluating the results.
1. Zach Leatherman 37 min later
  
  @ericheiken that article is a little bit outdated (2021) but INP is mentioned there:
  “We have already delivered a new metric named Interaction to Next Paint (INP) that measures interaction latency throughout the entire page lifecycle”
  (but your point about initial load CWV metrics in SPA is well received)
  1. Eric Heiken 1 hr later
    
    @zachleat
    Yeah, I was in a little rush because I wanted to respond to this before I forgot and I had to leave my desk.
    The idea is that SPAs could be a faster experience but they aren't reflected well in the core web vitals. Here is the soft navigation beta.
    https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/soft-navigations-experiment
Private reply 11 hr later