> 1) If clients spoof their UA, they just get what they asked for. Couldn't care less.
I thought you were specifically talking about testing the behavior of your website on different client by changing your browser's UA. The only legitimate use would be if you have a mobile-only stylesheet like older wordpress themes (because you said "I've never come across a better way to get a sneak peek into the (first) Initial Page Request of a customer to your web app")
> 2) With SSR you're actually making a case for sniffing the UA for the client's device class. Web apps might need to ship vastly different but overlapping code across different device classes. I'm not even talking about things that can be lazily loaded subsequently, I'm talking about the initial screen for given URL.
I'm not sure why this would be the case. For Teams, they can just load a purple top bar with the words "Microsoft Teams: Loading", right? That's a single responsive stylesheet.
> 3) I'm _not_ going to show the customer any loading spinner or just show a white page for 2s. We had that with Java Applets, remember?
What else are you going to show while the page loads? A fake UI with fake data? As soon as the JS starts executing and loading data, that data can start to populate the screen.
I thought you were specifically talking about testing the behavior of your website on different client by changing your browser's UA. The only legitimate use would be if you have a mobile-only stylesheet like older wordpress themes (because you said "I've never come across a better way to get a sneak peek into the (first) Initial Page Request of a customer to your web app")
> 2) With SSR you're actually making a case for sniffing the UA for the client's device class. Web apps might need to ship vastly different but overlapping code across different device classes. I'm not even talking about things that can be lazily loaded subsequently, I'm talking about the initial screen for given URL.
I'm not sure why this would be the case. For Teams, they can just load a purple top bar with the words "Microsoft Teams: Loading", right? That's a single responsive stylesheet.
> 3) I'm _not_ going to show the customer any loading spinner or just show a white page for 2s. We had that with Java Applets, remember?
What else are you going to show while the page loads? A fake UI with fake data? As soon as the JS starts executing and loading data, that data can start to populate the screen.