Big flash of unstyled content (FOUC) during HMR

Describe the bug

Problem

When my styles change, the page flashes without any styling for a second or so, it’s verry jarring I thought it was actually reloading.

Cause

After some debugging I found out the cause:

When a css stylesheet is loaded through <link> (i.e. in the main HTML page), the HMR logic is simply to update its href but that can cause issues, here’s what happens in my project:

• Multiple css are HMR at the same time, some are imported by JS, the main one is <link> in index.html.
• At HMR time, Vite fetches the imported ones, to later replace <style> nodes.
• At the same time it fetches the updated style sources, Vite simply updates the href of <link>. This triggers a network request by the browser and on my project, it takes ~700ms to complete.
• Before that completes, Vite receives some responses and starts updating <style> tags. This triggers a CSS repaint by the browser.
• Because the <link href> was changed but has not completed fetch yet, the browser just ignores it. Old CSS rules are not applied anymore.
• And this is why there is a lot of unstyled content on my page…
• Until the <link> fetch completes, and browser repaints again with all CSS rules back in place.

Fix ideas

To avoid FOUC, one should not change href or remove <link> tags before the new styles are loaded. Maybe Vite could add a new <link> tag with the new href just after the old one, and remove the old one when the new one finishes loading.

Reproduction

Sorry, no repro on this one. The setup is just to have link and imported style and trigger a reload of all, which is automatic if you use tailwind 😉 To make the effect clearly visible, you need to have larger styles in <link> (so it takes longer to reload than the styles), or use something to breakpoint the network request, e.g. Fiddler. Just let the style request go through and block (for a while) the <link> request.

You’ll see that once the <style> request completes, the page repaints without styles, and it’s fixed when the <link> request completes.

System Info

Vite 2.9.2

Used Package Manager

npm

Logs

No response

Validations

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• The provided reproduction is a minimal reproducible example of the bug.

[jods4]

@sapphi-red I’ll try when it’s merged into a published release, I don’t have the time to make my own builds right now.

[sapphi-red]

@jods4 I confirmed #8495 fixes for me on firefox. Would you check if it fixes for you, too?