Ask HN: Why isn't Google's Polymer framework more popular?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10979352

by jondubois • 10 years ago

8 3 10 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

There is a lot of hype around React at the moment. It just seems like Google's Polymer framework is being completely ignored by the masses. I've tried many different frontend frameworks (including React, Angular, CanJS, Backbone and Knockout) but I personally like Polymer the best. Is there something fundamentally wrong with Polymer which makes it undeserving of any hype?

lukegb• 10 years ago

From what I remember, Polymer before 1.0 had some severe performance issues on browsers that didn't have native Web Components support, because it shipped with a polyfill that tried to emulate the shadow DOM properly.

I suspect (but have no evidence) that this caused lots of people to dismiss it because of that, and they might not have taken another look at it since 1.0 released.

spankalee• 10 years ago

I'm on the Polymer team, and we're seeing significant uptake recently. The number of public sites using Polymer is going up very fast, and Google has launched some very big projects on Polymer like YouTube Gaming and Play Music. The success of those projects is driving even more to move to Polymer soon.

I think Polymer isn't as discussed as much as many of the rest is exactly because we don't try to take over the entire browser and abstract away the DOM. By working with the DOM, and being entirely based on web components, Polymer is a more incremental evolution (though a revolutionary evolution!) of the browser. That's not as exciting to some people as something entirely new and pure.

We believe that Polymer will have a very big impact though as we focus on interoperability and easy incremental adoption. Polymer's ultimate goal is to play nice with all other component libraries via the web components standards. As that cooper-etition plays out we are going to see a huge varetiy of web components, and styles and methods of implementing them. People will eventually realize that they can use their preferred programming paradigms even within web components, and still interop with other web components.

Basically, our goals and strategy are so different, it's not surprising to me that what we're doing hasn't fully caught on yet with everyone :)

jondubois• 10 years ago

It's good to hear that it's picking up. I'm building a single page app with it now and it's been amazing :)

A lot of React proponents say that the defining feature of React is the cheer amount of community modules and components available for it.

After having used Polymer, I have not been able to bring myself to use React. React is more complex but it ultimately does the same thing. In these situations, I always pick the simpler solution.

Ask HN: Why isn't Google's Polymer framework more popular?

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