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Streaming the Web: Building Faster, Smarter Interfaces with Next.js App Router
Every developer chases speed. But speed is no longer just about milliseconds. It is about perception. The moment a page looks ready, the user expects it to be interactive. That is why the web is moving beyond hydration. Streaming is the next leap.
Progressive rendering is how modern frameworks like Next.js make your UI feel alive even before all data or scripts finish loading. It is not a trick. It is a mindset shift in how we think about building fast, responsive experiences.
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The Limits of Hydration
In the traditional React model, you rendered HTML on the server and sent it to the browser. Once there, React had to “hydrate” that HTML to make it interactive. Until that hydration finished, the UI was frozen. It looked ready but wasn’t usable.
This was fine for small apps, but large, complex UIs struggled. You could optimize network speed and server time, yet users still waited because the browser had to process massive JavaScript bundles before anything worked.
Hydration became the silent bottleneck of modern web apps.
