Methods, systems, and computer program products are provided for prefetching and caching portal information in a client application in a logically separated client/server computing environment. Before a user requests a specific portlet view to be displayed at the user's web browser, portlet information from a server is prefetched. The portlet information may include content data to be displayed in a portlet view, meta data describing how the content data will be displayed, and combinations of both content data and meta data. The prefetching step is performed on the client of the logically separated client/server computing environment. The client stores the prefetched portlet. Once the prefetched portlet information has been stored, upon a user request such as clicking on a link in a portlet view, the method retrieves the stored portlet information and displays the portlet information in a corresponding portlet view. From the user's perspective, the portlet view may display new content information, previously viewed content information in a different format, or a combination of new content information and old content information presented in a different format.