Yesterday Twitter announced that it was moving away from client-side rendering back to server-side rendering in order to improve page load time. Today I found myself having to defend my position that server-side rendering will almost always be faster. I figured I’d blog about it.
I want to point out a couple things. First, I’m talking specifically about render performance and page speed. There might be other compelling advantages to thick-clients; I’m talking about performance. Secondly, I’m going to get on a high horse here and say that it worries me that developers think client-side rendering is faster. This is basic and fundamental knowledge about how the web and browsers work. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong. If I am, I’ll admit it. It’ll be embarrassing because it means that I don’t know the fundamentals. But I’ll be glad to have learned (which is why I blog).