Is there a standalone way of preventing the white flash of a full page load when you navigate to another URL in an SSR app? Or are they all tied to pretty big backend frameworks like RoR?
I've just watched a momentary blank page flash up consistently when navigating forward right here on HN, for example from the front page to a comments link.
It's HN, so I think we can rule out JavaScript page generation.
Fwiw, I'm using Firefox 100.0 on a Mac, and my network is high latency.
Related issue that used to be known by more web devs: FOUC (Flash of unstyled content, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_of_unstyled_content). There have been various techniques over the years to deal with FOUC, and it's not that straightfoward, for example waiting for custom fonts if those take a long time to load.
Should you encounter white flashes, try preloading likely next clicks (e.g. next page, or first search result, or where the mouse cursor hovers 200 ms over a link) with `<link rel="prefetch" href="theurl">`[1]. Make sure your HTTP response headers contain caching instructions, otherwise prefetched pages are requested immediately again by some browsers.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Prefetch