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When Figma sold itself to Adobe last year, in one sense it was a triumph for web standards. Figma was built on WebGL, JavaScript and (latterly) WebAssembly. It was another sign of the continued strength of web technologies, which in many cases are now just as powerful as native apps.
However, there are still several issues of concern to web standards watchers as we enter a new year. In this post, we check in on three of the most important: the JavaScript performance issues caused by over-reliance on React, the progress (or not) of Progressive Web Apps, and whether there’s any sign of Apple opening up its iOS platform to external browser engines.
React and Its Impact on the JavaScript Ecosystem
React continues to gain popularity in the JavaScript community, however, there is growing dissatisfaction with the large load it puts on browsers — which can mean performance issues for many users.
According to Alex Russell from the Microsoft Edge team, “sites continue to send more script than is reasonable for 80+% of the world’s users, widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots.”
Russell calls this “an ethical crisis for frontend” and puts the blame squarely on React and the frameworks that utilize it. He cites a California state government website, CA.gov, that was running slow due to “an official Twitter embed that, for some cursed reason, had been built using React, Next.js, and the full parade of modern horrors.”
I reached out to Russell and asked if he has any advice for developers, React fans or otherwise, as they contemplate their craft at the beginning of 2023.
“My advice for developers and PMs starts with getting representative devices to test on during development,” he replied. “There’s no substitute for really feeling it. Folks can progress from there by running something like webpagetest.org in their CI and/or adopt performance budgets.”
As for which frontend frameworks will be used in 2023, it seems unlikely…
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