The users didn't demand this. They were perfectly happy when you delivered a website that performed a full-round trip in 50ms a decade ago containing more data than your average SPA can handle before choking on it.
The users want it to work. They want it to be fast. They want it to be pretty. That's about it.
I'm tired of hearing about why GMail succeeded. It's revisionist. GMail succeeded because they had the best spam filtering, in a simple design, and you were probably using Google search anyways. Plus Hotmail was always going down for hours (days?) at a time.
I've never experienced bugs in the web like I have with SPAs. I'm very thankful that even if my budgeting software is built in Ember, making it slow and buggy, my bank's site isn't. Making it predictable, and very fast to render. Time to Render is atrocious on many "modern" sites.
Gmail was also originally a traditional webapp - in the early versions Javascript added to the experience, but there were still page transitions when viewing emails and composing new emails.
Opinion time: I miss that version. There's so many bells and whistles on Gmail now that I prefer to use a local mail client to logging in and attempting to work through all the clutter to do basic things like viewing and replying to emails.
Great point. In the time before Dropbox, S3, etc Email was THE way to share your 50Mb zip file. And routinely having to clean your mailbox because you ran out of storage was a huge pain.
The users didn't demand this. They were perfectly happy when you delivered a website that performed a full-round trip in 50ms a decade ago containing more data than your average SPA can handle before choking on it.
The users want it to work. They want it to be fast. They want it to be pretty. That's about it.
I'm tired of hearing about why GMail succeeded. It's revisionist. GMail succeeded because they had the best spam filtering, in a simple design, and you were probably using Google search anyways. Plus Hotmail was always going down for hours (days?) at a time.
I've never experienced bugs in the web like I have with SPAs. I'm very thankful that even if my budgeting software is built in Ember, making it slow and buggy, my bank's site isn't. Making it predictable, and very fast to render. Time to Render is atrocious on many "modern" sites.