prerender VS rendertron

So then just to experiment, I set up https://github.com/prerender/prerender on my own VPS in like an hour... and done & dusted... no more effort needed to think about SSR issues anymore. Seems great, and I can't figure out why it's not more popular.

Spending like 1 hour setting up prerender on my server is much preferable to the ongoing issues that come with having to make all my code work with SSR frameworks. And there's the added bonus that my servers don't need to waste resources doing SSR for regular human users.

Here’s an alternative that I use: https://prerender.io and GH is https://github.com/prerender/prerender

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) HeadlessChrome/92.0.4512.0 Safari/537.36 Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) HeadlessChrome/91.0.4472.114 Safari/537.36 Prerender (+https://github.com/prerender/prerender) ...

Ah, I didn't realize this wasn't solved -- a quick search turns up:

- https://github.com/WICG/webcomponents/issues/788

- https://github.com/w3c/DOM-Parsing/issues/58

- https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/494

- https://web.dev/declarative-shadow-dom

In pre-render they seem to have started in this direction extremely recently:

https://github.com/prerender/prerender/pull/731/files

I don't use prerender so I can't definitively speak to it being solved and hiccup-free, but I think that limitation is going to go away in the future.

Using something like: https://github.com/prerender/prerender

Have you used prerender - https://github.com/prerender/prerender ? Seems to be doing the same thing.

Rendertron is deprecated

Please note that this project is deprecated. Dynamic rendering is not a recommended approach and there are better approaches to rendering on the web.

Rendertron will not be actively maintained at this point.

https://github.com/GoogleChrome/rendertron

GoogleChrome/Rendertron proxy https://github.com/GoogleChrome/rendertron.

Are you worried that rendertron isn't being maintained? (https://github.com/GoogleChrome/rendertron/issues/865 and https://github.com/GoogleChrome/rendertron/issues/801) Have you thought about using anything else or doing it yourself with Puppeteer or Playwright?

Rendertron, quite old now.

Googlebot: SSR a non-responsive mobile version only for the Googlebot User Agent, to get SEO. But do Client-Side Rendering (CSR) for users, to get full responsivity. Could be done with manual user-agent sniffing, or with a GoogleChrome/Rendertron proxy. Though Google may not like being fed something different than users (different initial markup, even though resulting markup after React’s first CSR should be the same). But it might be problematic long-term to SSR only for the Googlebot, since it’s effectively serving the Googlebot something else than what the users get.. Google might crack down on it, since it could be abused.

This might be another one: https://github.com/GoogleChrome/rendertron (not sure if it does everything that prerender does or not).

Still prefer CRA with Dynamic Rendering with rendertron over Next.js and Gatsby...

A demo Rendertron service is available at https://render-tron.appspot.com/. It is not designed to be used as a production endpoint. You can use it, but there are no uptime guarantees.