React is no longer just a library. It’s a full ecosystem that defines how frontend developers are allowed to think.
Browsers now ship View Transitions, Container Queries, and smarter scheduling primitives. The platform keeps evolving at a fair pace, but most teams won’t touch these capabilities until React officially wraps them in a hook or they show up in Next.js docs.
Innovation keeps happening right across the ecosystem, but for many it only becomes “real” once React validates the approach. Which is fine, assuming you enjoy waiting for permission to use the platform you’re already building on.
Zing!
The critique isn’t that React is bad, but that treating any single framework as infrastructure creates blind spots in how we think and build. When React becomes the lens through which we see the web, we stop noticing what the platform itself can already do, and we stop reaching for native solutions because we’re waiting for the framework-approved version to show up first.
If your team’s evolution depends on a single framework’s roadmap, you are not steering your product; you are waiting for permission to move.
Since the early days of the web, large corporations have seemingly always wanted more than the web platform or web standards could offer at any given moment. Whether they were aiming for cross-platform-compatibility, more advanced capabilities, or just to be the one runtime/framework/language to rule them all, there’s always been a company that believes they can “fix” it or “own” it.
Applets. ActiveX. Flash. Flex. Silverlight. Angular. React.
Here’s an excellent case study of an HTML web component. Jim starts by showing how you’d create the component in React; then he shows how you’d do it as a JavaScript web component; finally he shows the way to do it as an HTML web component:
The point is we’re starting with a baseline, core experience that will provide basic functionality and content to a wide array of user agents before any JavaScript is required.
Once you’ve done everything you can in vanilla HTML to provide core elements of your baseline experience, you can begin enhancing the existing markup with additional functionality.
This is where HTML web components shine.
A demonstration of how even reinventing a relatively simple wheel takes way more effort than it’s worth when you could just use what the brower gives you for free.
The radioactive properties of React.
We don’t give people a website any more: something that already works, just HTML and CSS and JavaScript ready to show them what they want. Instead, we give them the bits from which a website is made and then have them compile it.
Spot-on description of “modern” web development. When did this become tolerable, much less normal?
Web developers: maybe stop insisting that your users compile your apps for you? Or admit that you’ll put them through an experience that you certainly don’t tolerate on your own desktops, where you expect to download an app, not to be forced to compile it every time you run it?
There are many ways to style a cat.
How I switched to high-resolution maps on The Session without degrading performance.
Fear of a third-party planet.
Improving performance on The Session.
When it comes to web performance, there are technical issues and then there are human issues.