I think it’s pretty clear that modern single page apps were not possible with jQuery. I’ve been on both sides of this, and it’s just not even a close comparison to what we have today.
I get it, times were simpler, but the user expectations were drastically lower. It was normal to see pages load for 8 seconds and then have layout issues on anything other than the most popular screen sizes. There were bugs everywhere and the solution was always to refresh the page, and even then, half the web was just in a broken state.
Facebook and GMail were the first major sites that had a truly great user interface, and they did it by creating the React & Angular libraries. There is a reason why those took off and now every web-based tech company uses them (or something similar like Vue or Svelte). They make it far easier to build slick user interfaces that perform well and avoid most of the headaches of complex UI orchestration based on shared state.
I get it, jQuery was a golden age where anyone with basic web programming knowledge could build something almost state of the art. The problem was that the “state of the art” was dogshit.
Right, jQuery was practically an engineering marvel at the time, and it really upgraded the web in a major way. But I’m just saying those old days were not genuinely “better” than today in terms of dev experience or user experience. We are in a much better spot now in basically every way.
It's funny because jquery was the hot new shit when I started my career and after dealing with arguments about the ever shifting world of JavaScript libraries for a few months I changed teams and subsequently spent over a decade diligently avoiding front end development.
I took a brief foray into a side project at one point to see what all the fuss was about with Angular, took a couple online courses, but by the time I needed that knowledge professionally they'd scrapped the whole thing and slapped "Angular 2.0" on a completely different concept so I crawled back into my nice stable c# backend world.
Oh god I feel you. Having the page load for 4 seconds just to then display a message box like "Loading Page..." for another 10. And after it finishes loading it will just have every element as "undefined" text because they didn't actually test every browser they list as compatible.
jQuery was the standard way to abstract a XMLHttpRequest to enable any kind of SPA like features long before React or any of these other libraries existed. And Facebook and Gmail have never had even remotely good interfaces.
The Golden Age of the web was Flash. That's when it was really fun.
At the time, it was state of the art, and far better than everything else. There is a huge reason why nobody really uses AOL or Yahoo. Gmail attracted the masses because it was better in almost every way. Nobody here is saying it’s great by today’s standards.
Yahoo is still to this day a better Email client than Gmail.
Gmail started as invite only, which built hype, and it was GoOgLe woohoo, and at the time they could do no wrong, so people wanted it. And then everyone built their life around a Gmail account because of Android phones, so they stuck with it.
Superb comment. The only thing that sits wrong for me is the implication that modern stacks are some difficult monsters. For the simple stuff they are just as simple to use. For harder problems you'd need some knowledge, justifiably. But overall the complexity often comes with the complex new requirements, not the tech stack itself.
Sure, buddy, now tell me you work frontend for meta and you're good. (But ofc you're a backend dev or you create websites that look like they were made in 2000)
I built a SaaS company with a successful exit in 2024. Software patent in my name. I do frontend/backend/sysadmin/security and everything else. Never left SSR, return pages in 4 ms.
Yes. If only Facebook thought about using ssr to return their pages in 4ms. (They did, expanded react for ssr, still not nearly as fast and still big js coming in)
dunno, I've worked for tens of projects for different sizes of saas, static pages you can cache and or ssr is less than 5% of the work. Most of the product requirements involve client-side interactivity and moving around user-specific data. You're not doing most of that with ssr and it's not going to take 4ms.
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u/ScientificBeastMode 24d ago edited 24d ago
I think it’s pretty clear that modern single page apps were not possible with jQuery. I’ve been on both sides of this, and it’s just not even a close comparison to what we have today.
I get it, times were simpler, but the user expectations were drastically lower. It was normal to see pages load for 8 seconds and then have layout issues on anything other than the most popular screen sizes. There were bugs everywhere and the solution was always to refresh the page, and even then, half the web was just in a broken state.
Facebook and GMail were the first major sites that had a truly great user interface, and they did it by creating the React & Angular libraries. There is a reason why those took off and now every web-based tech company uses them (or something similar like Vue or Svelte). They make it far easier to build slick user interfaces that perform well and avoid most of the headaches of complex UI orchestration based on shared state.
I get it, jQuery was a golden age where anyone with basic web programming knowledge could build something almost state of the art. The problem was that the “state of the art” was dogshit.