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It does indeed appear to be so - and it works great if you disable JavaScript. In fact, if anything, it works better if you disable JavaScript, because it doesn't flicker and jump around as it renders. You might almost be forgiven for wondering why it wasn't just exclusively rendered server-side, really, except it'd probably be heretical to conceive of such an antiquated idea.

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They don't exclusively render server-side because it's tremendously CPU-heavy: https://twitter.com/kadirahq/status/620467416749838336

Over the years, Rails has evolved a lot of ways to do server-side rendering while sharing as much as possible between runs. React isn't there yet, but there's no reason that it can't do the same given enough time.

Until then, in many ways, as a user of a site with a modern JS-enabled browser, I'm providing my own CPU power to render dynamic content, thereby subsidizing the site's cost of supporting older/non-JS browsers with SSR at negligible cost to myself (though I suppose everyone's utility function handles occasional flickering differently). I, for one, don't see any problem with this arrangement.

Yep. We don't render all the pages. But most of the pages of https://kadira.io is public. So, we cache a lot.

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