No JavaScript? #3662
Description
Hi!
As I was preparing a presentation about Fresh I wanted to demonstrate the following claim on the Fresh homepage:
Fresh routes are dynamically server-rendered Preact components, so there's zero JavaScript shipped to the browser by default.
This claim is repeated in several places, including Fresh's README.md
Zero runtime overhead: no JS is shipped to the client by default.
And I ran into an issue...
Given the following code:
vite.config.ts
import { defineConfig } from "vite";
import { fresh } from "@fresh/plugin-vite";
export default defineConfig({
plugins: [fresh({
// https://github.com/denoland/fresh/issues/3476
serverEntry: "./main.tsx",
})],
});main.tsx
import { App, staticFiles } from "fresh";
export const app = new App();
app.use(staticFiles());
app.get("/", (ctx) => {
const time = new Date().toLocaleString();
return ctx.render(<p>Freshly server-rendered {time}</p>);
});Renders the following HTML (line breaks & indentation added for clarity):
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8"/>
</head>
<body>
<p>Freshly server-rendered 05/01/2026, 20:56:39</p>
<script type="module" nonce="944c3613b7b1427d9c781403e6154b9b">import { boot } from "/assets/client-entry-Cz-rWMt7.js";boot({},"[[]]");</script>
</body>
</html>
As you can see, it does load JavaScript! A whopping 35kb of it. Can't be Preact, that's only 3kb according to their website. 🤔
What JavaScript is Fresh loading, and why does it load any JavaScript for this extremely simple page?