>It means things are faster, they work if your connection is flaky, they can do things like offline support. Those are good features.
Yet the reality seems to be the opposite. If my connection is flaky (which it often is) then SPA's seem to fail more often and it isn't obvious what is going wrong. They don't seem to be faster either, long pauses between pages is common.
Right. The typical SPA doesn't recover at all from network failures, and you end up poking random buttons hoping that it will reach some sort of consistent state. Then you find that doesn't help and you need to refresh anyway, which is a reboot for the whole 'app'. So much for saving page loads.
Yet the reality seems to be the opposite. If my connection is flaky (which it often is) then SPA's seem to fail more often and it isn't obvious what is going wrong. They don't seem to be faster either, long pauses between pages is common.