A bit out of date, but I like the point-of-view of "The single most important factor that differentiates front-end frameworks" : https://mjswensen.com/blog/the-single-most-important-factor-...

I was deep in Vue 5-6 years ago, so much that I offered internal training for it and had sessions with more than 20 people attending.

IMHO, React wins because you can just treat templates as variables. You don't need "slots" or other special stuff. It's simply more composable.

Vue doesn't solve problems better than React (and solves them worse if you have to learn all their proprietary files and DSLs instead of JSX), so there's not much of a reason to switch.

The real discussion would be between React's vdom and something like Solid's signals.

I definitely sympathize with the feelings about the Composition API. Though I’ve moved past it because looking at React’s visible complexity (useMemo, useEffect - which apparently have changed names again since I last looked) - Vue has clearly chosen a superior API design.

I'm using Vue and do not feel it's becoming react

same here thus I'm with vue

Give me Backbone + anything over React. Backbone was the last time I really felt close to the web page I was creating.

XML, XMLHttpRequest, and XSLT in IE 5 was peak web dev for me. Never been more productive.

Oh boy the ActiveXObject brings back some ~~ptsd~~ fond memories.

"React is actually a library, not a framework" is definitely a thing people have said here and there since its inception. It's a distinction that doesn't seem to buy anything in terms of explanatory power or clarity, so I tend to ignore it.

you can use React like a library, but I have never really seen it done.

Depends on the definition.

jQuery isn’t a “framework” either, at least not like Angular or Vue, though it can be extended with “plugins.”

Both jQuery and React are foundational technologies, so comparison is valid.

jQuery isn’t exactly a “framework” either, at least not like Angular or Vue, though it can be extended with “plugins.”

Both jQuery and React are foundational technologies, and comparison is valid.

Yep, react is indeed a library. Part of the confusion comes from a fact that react community was keen to hijack "react" name and slap it onto their own projects, for example there were react router, react query, react table, etc., so one could have get a feeling that react was like full-fledged framework, while most of these "react" projects were not affiliated with react the library in any way.

After the disaster of AngularJS that we are still paying external EOL support on, I will never trust another Google led framework.

Angular 2+ is equally horrible. Having spent 6 years on various versions of Angular, their migration story time and again has been an incredible pain.

These days I use web components for component writing and frameworks to handle routing, state management, bundling, and so on.

I tried Angular 2+ back in the day. I found it frustrating to learn as the API had changed between versions, and when searching for help you would come across a blog post/stackoverflow answer, start implementing it and realise it didn't work in the version of Angular your project was in. Frustrating.

Tried React afterwards, this frustration didn't really exist and it was much easier to pick up.

You might be interested in solid.js. To me, it's easier to work with than React. What I like about it is that the reactivity model is small enough that you can understand it, and even implement a basic version yourself.

It also uses JSX, but since there's no virtual DOM, you can also write 100% JS, but, unlike React, you can do it without any special wrapper. So you don't need to use or write a `react-dnd`, just use any vanilla drag and drop library.

> 100% pure JavaScript directly

How did the React community convince so many people of this falsehood? Do that many people just not know what javascript is? It baffles me that one could look at JSX and be like, “that right there is vanilla javascript”.

Could you expand on your experience compared to react?

>Sevelte

FYI: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/svelte

There are four culprits here and neither is due to JS.

First is the pursuit of polish. Each extra 1% in polish adds tons and tons of lines of code. If you want that level of polish on a non-SPA, you'll still have to add all that code then reload it one page at a time. I see a lot of these "bare HTML pages" and they are lacking important stuff like i18n/a11y/WCAG compliance. Try adding all that back in and you'll see your website bloat right up.

Second is bloated do-everything libraries. Ant, MUI, Mantine, or whatever else is aimed to be a superset of all possible website needs which means that the components you adopt have tons of features and bloat you don't need that slow down loading, parsing, and execution. Simply replacing that <Paper> component with a <div> and a few lines of CSS will get you the same thing you want, but will save you layers of unnecessary React components and sometimes a layer or two of unneeded DOM nodes as well that were added because the <Paper> component had weird interactions with some other component.

Third is manpower/experience. Many/most JS devs today (sad to say) don't actually know how to make that simple <Paper> component on their own. Those that do often skip it because they've got too much to do already. I've lost count of the number of teams I've seen where a bog-standard backend has 25 people working on stuff while the frontend team has 3x as many total lines of code (which are often times handling human-computer interaction issues the backend couldn't even imagin), but only 3-4 people to maintain it all.

Fourth is of course management. Designs on the backend change at a trickle while changes to the frontend arrive in a torrent. Understaffed frontend teams can't keep up with all the things shoved on their plate, so they usually can't optimize things even if they know how (eg, only a small percentage of SPA actually know/take the time to lazy load various parts of their apps to improve load time).

Fix these things and the SPA performance will improve drastically and almost certainly exceed BE templates with some jQuery spaghetti.

Sounds like your argument is with SPAs, not React in particular?

Exactly, for most websites out there classical webserver rendering does the job pretty well. Even fancy animations can be taken care by pure CSS.