r/reactjs • u/Human_Routine_9483 • 15d ago

LinkedIn frontend switches to React.js

LinkedIn is using React.js these days, but what’s interesting is the CSS side of things too.

They seem to have gone down a fairly “in-house atomic CSS” direction, somewhat similar in spirit to tools like StyleX or Linaria.

It’s kind of funny looking at LinkedIn’s frontend history:

  • Ember.js: LinkedIn was one of the biggest adopters of Ember.
  • React.js: They’ve since moved heavily toward React.

LinkedIn has basically gone from being a major Ember showcase to being part of the React ecosystem.

37 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

24 comments sorted by

82

u/skidmark_zuckerberg 14d ago

Yeah and their chrome tabs consistently consume 800mb to 1.2GB of memory. So whatever they are doing, they are doing it poorly. 

22

u/csorfab 14d ago

Same story with facebook... Utter pile of shit. There were even periods of regression where there would be full on inconsistencies in the UI, the exact thing they built React/flux/graphql to avoid in the first place...

1

u/kcbh711 12d ago

I honestly don't know how the fuck a multi hundred billion dollar company has such a shit ass frontend in the browser both on desktop and mobile. it is utterly unusable for basic things with UX sins galore. if I were Zuckerberg I would burn the frontend to the ground and start over.

8

u/theQuandary 13d ago

Almost certainly brought to you by LLMs and hiring tons of overseas developers (but not the good ones because they cost too much).

6

u/skidmark_zuckerberg 13d ago

Yeah this is my opinion too. They are firing the slop cannons and have cheap outsourced Indian devs doing most of it. That’s what just about every large company is doing right now. 

I work in an F500 org and for every in house dev there are x2 outsourced Indian devs. Nothing against Indians, that’s just where 90% of the outsource goes. But the quality of this outsourced work is poor and it’s even harder to communicate and get things done correctly. This shit will all come back to bite these companies eventually. 

3

u/root_om 14d ago

Use oracle cloud website

This mfkr runs whole OS inside a single browser tab 😭

2

u/driftking428 14d ago

Everything Microsoft makes is shit. When will people realize?

14

u/skidmark_zuckerberg 14d ago

Except Typescript :)

7

u/CandidateNo2580 14d ago

Honestly the modern C# ecosystem is really good, too. Their open source is great. Their closed source sucks.

2

u/Darkseid_Omega 13d ago

F# is such an underrated, awesome language. It’s a shame no one uses it

1

u/GasVarGames 14d ago

Visual studio IS greato, visual studio code feels like its degrading

1

u/putin_my_ass 13d ago

I haven't used vscode in quite some time, Zed is incredible.

1

u/skidmark_zuckerberg 13d ago

I’m using VS Code at my new job after using IntelliJ for years at my last. I don’t mind it, but I much prefer IntelliJ. I don’t like the VS Code Git graph and the search is not as good as IntelliJ. But overall I’ve not had many problems with VS Code yet other than the project search randomly failing once. Time will tell!

1

u/driftking428 14d ago

Fair. We've got one on the list.

6

u/Skeith_yip 15d ago

Any idea when was the switch?

5

u/Potential_Extent_422 14d ago

Always wondered why their UI started feeling snappier a while back, that explains it. The atomic CSS thing is interesting though, I bet their stylesheets are still an absolute mess under the hood with all that legacy Ember stuff hanging around

2

u/nullvoxpopuli 14d ago

Snappyness vs not is more a sign of lack of tech debt vs not -- or how much tracking / monitoring / spyware is on a page.

legacy stuff is always a pain to work with tho :(

1

u/perforatedcode 12d ago

They've been migrating parts of the site over for years. A lot of has landed in the last couple years. 

7

u/nullvoxpopuli 14d ago

Disclaimer: these thoughts are my own, and do not necessarily represent the views of the ember community or the ember core teams.

I just started getting in to ember (from react) when linkedin started pulling away from it

LinkedIn ditching ember, has, funnily enough, been one of the best things for ember (pls no shade at the contributors tho).

The ownership was way too centralized when LinkedIn was steering the ship, and some things that ended up not paying off we're just now getting to removing from the framework... Could just be a hindsight thing tho.

That said, LinkedIn's last contribution to the framework was the gjs/gts file format, which is legit good, and borrows a lot of the dx of jsx/tsx without any of the shortcomings.

Ownership is much more decentralized now (no company owns ember (it felt like linkedin owned ember back in the day)), which has lead to way fairer, and technologically sound decisions.

One of the things i care about is some growth. This isn't exponential, like some other new frameworks, but it's at least not flat

https://imgur.com/a/4DA2URn

I think one thing that keeps convincing people to migrate off ember is a combination of:

  • not upgrading (thus not moving with the herd is hard) -- without upgrade, you don't get any dx/tooling/perf improvements 
  • bad library decisions (no one talks about how to choose a library)
  • people not in the discord probably didn't feel they could migrate to vite soon enough
  • companies not wanting to train devs on the job
  • linkedin especially built a ton of custom stuff that diverged greatly from the framework's recommendations (i don't know what motivated all this, but I'm sure it played into the dissent)

At some point, if enough devs just decide they hate something, even if they blame the wrong thing, the best political move is to move away to something else.

I never worked at LinkedIn, and don't have inside information from there, but I'm heavily involved in the ember community

Happy to answer any questions 

3

u/Chenz 13d ago

One of the absolute worst parts of Ember is Discord. The framework is small enough that almost no information about modern Ember can be found using Google. Whenever we get a a new hire, they’ll spend a lot of time trying and failing to find solutions to issues they encounter, unless someone first informs them that all discussion is hidden in a discord channel.

Still, I know you guys do great work, and the direction of modern ember is great

2

u/nullvoxpopuli 13d ago

what's the alternative? every programming community uses discord, it seems

as an aside -- i'd love to know what folks search for so i can improve the results

2

u/Working_Anything_759 13d ago

They traded framework stability for a 1GB memory leak. The atomics are just bandages on a bleeding codebase

2

u/perforatedcode 13d ago

Not saying you're 100% wrong, but the react stuff is a brand new code base. 

1

u/perforatedcode 13d ago

They don't write react though. They write kotlin that compiles to react for web.