It's Time for Modern CSS to Kill the SPA

“We’ve been adding mountains of JS to ‘feel’ fast, while making everything slower.”

Jono Alderson argues that the View Transitions API and Speculation Rules give browsers native solutions to the exact problems SPAs were invented to solve. Most websites ship 1-3MB JavaScript bundles to simulate smoothness that the browser can now do for free. The argument is straightforward and correct. Most websites are not apps, don’t need shared state, don’t need client-side routing, and would be better off built as plain HTML with native navigation. The SPA industrial complex will not go quietly though.