htmx

Raised as a usability problem by 36 people on Hacker News over 6 years (2021–2026), in 30 threads.

People raised many different problems with htmx, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 35 complaints

Anchor link jumps to top and snaps back on iPhone Safari2026-08-29
Developers spend more time debugging where hx-get and OOB swaps end up2026-08-01
Scrolling quickly fails to load more content; last row hidden behind footer2026-07-27
Interactive filter form became very laggy when sending full HTML responses2026-07-27
Scrolling jumps and stutters when search results update inline2025-12-19
Mobile user experience is horrible, and the demo does not work properly in Firefox2025-12-19
Simplicity explodes into complexity; constant page reloads hurt users2025-08-04
Code is hard to discover and navigate, slower to write, messier than React2025-01-22
Back button skips modal layers and opens the previous page fully2025-01-16
Clicking next waits on a server round trip, so the carousel lags and may freeze2025-01-07
Doc examples use ARIA without the keyboard support it implies, so they're inaccessible2025-01-06
Inherited hx-* attributes from distant templates cause hard-to-debug unexpected behavior2024-10-09
Hard to tell whether an attribute applies to the request or the response, causing mistakes2024-10-04
Hard to use for user-facing apps; team resists its constraints like no optimistic UI2024-09-08
Mobile browsers silently stall HTMX updates, leaving the page sluggish or unresponsive with no explanation2024-06-20
Extensions page is hard to find; site search just opens a scoped Google search2024-06-17
Triple-clicking increments the counter by only 2, dropping repeated clicks2024-06-04
Too many confusingly named attributes, must re-check docs each time2024-03-17
Docs are too minimal, making it hard to understand how to use HTMX2024-01-17
Author couldn't figure out how to make GraphQL requests with HTMX2024-01-08
Debugger call stacks are confusing, showing mystery framework calls instead of clear traces2023-12-12
Embedded X posts are unlabeled screenshots, so screen reader users cannot read them2023-12-12
Each interaction round-trips to the server, making it slow and laggy, bad for fast keyboard navigation2023-08-02
Clicking the picker button twice causes repeated loading and JavaScript errors2023-07-10
Validation errors appear only after submit, forcing duplicated server validation logic2023-05-06
Users must wait for a server round trip before a new item appears2023-05-05
Layout shifts while typing; validation message pushes the input field down2023-04-12
On phone, tags are added off screen so user can't tell it worked2023-04-12
Cannot show changes instantly; UI must wait for server responses before updating2023-03-14
Docs are sparse, so it's hard to tell what's happening2022-12-14
Swap and settled states are unintuitive, took a while to animate a sidebar2022-12-14
Requires too many tiny view fragments and micromanagement, slowing productivity2022-07-20
Easy to leave stray DOM nodes behind by misusing hx-swap2022-05-05
Back button restores page without user's already-entered form data2022-02-10
Demo ignores accessibility, so with JavaScript off the button does nothing2021-02-04