Steve Souders:
Comparing the ASYNC and DEFER waterfalls, we see that using DEFER makes DOM Interactive fire sooner and allows rendering to proceed more quickly.
Even though <script async></script>
is more commonly seen in the wild, defer
is typically preferable as they can never block other syncronous scripts, as well as load in predictable source order.
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Prefer `defer` Over `async` is a post from CSS-Tricks