Does putting scripts on the bottom of a web page speed up page load?

Question

Yahoo best practices states that putting JavaScript files on bottom might make your pages load faster. What is the experience with this? What are the side effects, if any? <

Answer 1

It has a couple of advantages:

• Rendering begins sooner. The browser cannot layout elements it hasn't received yet. This avoids the "blank white screen" problem.

• Defers connection limits. Usually your browser won't try to make more than a couple of connections to the same server at a time. If you have a whole queue of scripts waiting to be downloaded from a slow server, it can really wreck the user experience as your page appears to grind to a halt.