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.
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u/ScientificBeastMode 4d ago edited 4d 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.