Why We Render Everything in the Browser

On Second Thought — Episode 07 Open any modern site. The utility provider's login, the restaurant booking, the parcel tracker. The laptop fan spins up to render text. The median page in 2025 ships 697 KB of JavaScript before a single character of content is visible. The browser, meanwhile, is asked to do the work that a server in 1996 already did, and to do it on a battery, on a metered connection, on a chassis warm enough to taste. This is the post about that. The Axiom The reflex is universal.