Highfront

Highfront is a term used in web design to describe a philosophy and set of tools focused on achieving high front-end performance by optimizing the critical rendering path and startup time of web applications. In common usage, highfront encompasses both design principles and, in some cases, a specific front-end framework that implements these principles.

Origin and evolution: The phrase began appearing in performance-focused discussions in the early 2010s, with later adoption in developer tooling. A number of projects labeled under 'Highfront' propose to minimize JavaScript payloads, prefer streaming or incremental hydration, and provide compiler-assisted optimizations to produce lean runtime code.

Features and architecture: Core ideas include code-splitting with aggressive preloading, prioritization of critical assets, server-side rendering combined with partial hydration, and a minimal runtime. In the typical implementation, components are stateless by default, with a reactive layer that updates only when necessary. Tooling often includes a build step that analyzes usage patterns to prune unused code and a plugin system for performance budgets.

Adoption and reception: Highfront approaches have been particularly appealing to sites with strict performance budgets, such as e-commerce portals and news publishers. Critics argue that the approach can increase complexity and fragment ecosystems, making integration with established stacks more challenging.

See also: web performance, front-end framework, progressive web app, server-side rendering.