Let's Cut the Cord: Bringing LiveView to the Client with Popcorn

Phoenix LiveView revolutionized web development by moving state to the server, allowing developers to build rich, interactive experiences without the overhead of complex JavaScript frameworks. But this power comes with a physical constraint: the round-trip time to the server. For high-interactivity features or users on high-latency connections, it can still be a barrier to a truly “instant” feel.

In this talk, we explore a new frontier for the Elixir ecosystem: running LiveView natively in the browser. Local LiveView preserves the programming model we love — functional components, stateful processes, and HEEx templates — but executes them on the client side. By removing the requirement to reach the server for every event, we can achieve sub-millisecond latency and offline capabilities while staying within the Elixir paradigm.