There’s a feeling in the air. A zeitgeist. SPAs are no longer the cool kids they once were 10 years ago.
Hip new frameworks like Astro, Qwik, and Elder.js are touting their MPA capabilities with “0kB JavaScript by default.” Blog posts are making the rounds listing all the challenges with SPAs: history, focus management, scroll restoration, Cmd/Ctrl-click, memory leaks, etc. Gleeful potshots are being taken against SPAs.
I think what’s less discussed, though, is how the context has changed in recent years to give MPAs more of an upper hand against SPAs. In particular:
- Chrome implemented paint holding – no more “flash of white” when navigating between MPA pages. (Safari already did this.)
- Chrome implemented back-forward caching – now all major browsers have this optimization, which makes navigating back and forth in an MPA almost instant.
- Service Workers – once experimental, now effectively 100% available for those of us targeting modern browsers – allow for offline navigation without needing to implement a client-side router (and all the complexity therein).
- Shared Element Transitions, if accepted and implemented across browsers, would also give us a way to animate between MPA navigations – something previously only possible (although difficult) with SPAs.
This is not to say th
