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It’s great that you have an opinion about the benefits of a SPA for slow connections and other people (lower comments on this thread) have opinions about how “e
by billyhoffman 8y ago
It’s great that you have an opinion about the benefits of a SPA for slow connections and other people (lower comments on this thread) have opinions about how “easy” it is to implement request retries and caching/service workers.
I have an opinion too. But my opinion and your opinion really are moot.
Because do you know whose opinion is probably backed by the most data and the most expertise? Google’s Gmail team.
And Google, with all its amazing developers, who are arguably at the forefront of javascript standards and general web app innovation, and who have literal billions of visits, they have made the decision to give you a link and tells you to use a basic, server-side rendered web app if you have a “slow connection.” And they do this while attempting to boot up all the PWA/SPA framing of the main app, just in case, I don’t know, all that stuff fails.
So I think I’m going to give Gmails opinion a lot of weight here
- onion2k 8y agoGmail's slow connection message is great, but it's there because Gmail is a multi-megabyte app that will take a long time to download if you're on dial up or something. That's a bandwidth issue rather than latency or line quality problem. None of the points I made say anything about bandwidth. I completely agree with the point you're making though; if a user is on a low bandwidth connection then sending as little data as possible is best, and that's likely to be plain HTML with very little rich content like images. That said, Gmail's slow connection UI is horrible to actually use. Very few people choose it over normal Gmail. Most people want the big fancy app, so we as developers should work out the best way to deliver that.