Next-Gen Frontends

The unique part of Qwik is not in what it does but in how it achieves its goals. Qwik's goal is to have instant-on applications, even on mobile devices. Qwik achieves this through two main strategies:

Delay execution and download of JavaScript for as long as possible.

Serialize the execution state of the application and the framework on the server... See more

Hydration is expensive for two reasons:

The frameworks have to download all of the component code associated with the current page.

The frameworks have to execute the templates associated with the components on the page to rebuild the listener location and the internal component tree.

htmx gives you access to AJAX, CSS Transitions, WebSockets and Server Sent Events directly in HTML, using attributes, so you can build modern user interfaces with the simplicity and power of hypertext

A good mental model is that Qwik applications at any point of their lifecycle can be serialized and moved to a different VM instance (server to browser). There, the application simply resumes where the serialization stopped. No hydration is required. This is why we say that Qwik applications don't hydrate; they resume.