I should remind that in a similarly cheerful mood FB dumped support of Jest and a bunch of other libraries. They have a long history of killing successful projects.
Worse, Vercel is involved, and I literally don't remember anything good about that company.
I'd recommend to be very cautious with such news, and use older versions of React for the next couple of years.
wallawe 1 hours ago [-]
> Vercel is involved, and I literally don't remember anything good about that company.
They ship constantly, their UX is impeccable and they have made our lives as a startup infinitely easier, albeit at a higher cost which we're happy to pay.
zanellato19 47 seconds ago [-]
"Monopolies aren't so bad, the company is treating me quite well" is not a good counter argument.
gettingoverit 1 hours ago [-]
Until they dump your startup for no reason, and you'll have to migrate off their undocumented proprietary infrastructure. Please read stories on HN. You're risking your business if you work with them.
throw-10-8 52 minutes ago [-]
Oh sweet summer child, you have no idea what is coming.
The second "happy to pay" becomes "we could hire a team of devs for what we pay vercel" you will realize you made a giant mistake.
Hopefully you will be suffering from success and have the runway to migrate away or just eat the costs, but many many startup die due to impossible unit economics driven by ridiculous hosting costs that platforms like vercel lock you into.
wallawe 5 minutes ago [-]
I've been using Vercel for > 5 years. Suppose it's possible but that's true for any platform.
brazukadev 35 minutes ago [-]
> "we could hire a team of devs for what we pay vercel"
It will be evenn worse when they see they need one, two, three more engineers to deal with the Next.js mess they created.
wallawe 45 seconds ago [-]
I've been using Next.js since 2017. The new app router kinda sucks so we're staying with pages. No complaints thus far with a team of 6 engineers.
apwell23 39 minutes ago [-]
this has got to be a shill
daveidol 30 minutes ago [-]
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.
mexicocitinluez 1 hours ago [-]
lol this has got to be satire
wallawe 4 minutes ago [-]
no, we've built a company from 0 to $3M ARR in 15 months on top of Vercel. Happy to pay the $900 a month we're paying.
nonethewiser 14 minutes ago [-]
Jest is the most popular JS testing framework. It's wildly inaccurate to say it was killed.
iammrpayments 1 hours ago [-]
They made it possible for Rich Harris to get paid while working on Svelte. Not sure what will happen in the future though.
antonyh 25 minutes ago [-]
Governance by mega-corporations working in a cartel. Having read this recent article [https://lithub.com/how-american-tech-cartels-use-apps-to-bre...], I fail to see how this is a good thing. Gatekeepers with self-interests at the heart of the decision making process.
azemetre 10 minutes ago [-]
It's extremely worrying on how they had to use a private "foundation" rather than using existing, more democratic, organizations like OpenJS foundation.
Don't expect user input, don't expect changes that go against their wants over the community's needs, and don't expect things to get better.
kaoD 3 hours ago [-]
After seeing all the comments here I'm a bit relieved.
I don't care about the CEO's political stance, but Vercel's involvement with React has rubbed me the wrong way since the start of development of RSC. The development was basically behind half-closed doors, pretty much tied to Next.js (i.e. Vercel) and with zero specs except a high level description of what they were and their public API.
I don't care that they were WIP: the community should've been involved, not Vercel as a benevolent dictator guiding their design from start to almost finish. Such a huge paradigm shift shouldn't have been dictated by any particular entity... and IMO much less Next's team which I think are prone to overengineering and bad decisions.
IIRC there were points in time (maybe even currently?) where you had to use packages that were published to NPM but not even on any public repo.
I love the idea of RSC but that's where my love ends.
I thought I was alone on this.
synergy20 22 minutes ago [-]
i left for vue one year ago, life is much simpler and productive
k__ 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
password54321 1 hours ago [-]
Increasingly bloated and complicated frameworks with intangible benefits used for webpages that are now just training data for LLMs is much more important.
ToucanLoucan 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
johnmaguire 47 minutes ago [-]
Usually that's indicative of an ad blocker firing in my experience.
ToucanLoucan 36 minutes ago [-]
I mean if it was the ad-blocker, I don't see how a refresh would fix that? But I'm not terribly knowledgeable here so feel free to correct me.
johnmaguire 29 minutes ago [-]
Ah you hadn't mentioned a refresh fixed it. That sure sounds like some kind of race in the JS.
ToucanLoucan 25 minutes ago [-]
Very fair! I only came back to edit it because right after leaving that comment I went to see if Best Buy had something I needed locally, clicked into search, typed, hit enter, and it fucking broke. Seemingly entirely, even the search button didn't work, so cmd+a, cmd+c, cmd+r, click in again, paste, enter, and that worked.
I just fucking loathe how common this experience is now. Amazon seems to be the only one that doesn't do it, but I've experienced this exact issue on Best Buy, Target, Etsy, Mercari, ebay, and it just DRIVES ME UP THE WALL.
thrance 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
whizzter 1 hours ago [-]
If it's protecting something then yeah it stinks.
In this case people are critical of other things also and want to voice those things for selfish reasons without getting into mud slinging contests with fanatics who are protecting everything shitty just because it's their favourite hater that is on one side.
Perfect is the enemy of good and an ally of fanaticism.
staticelf 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
phgn 1 hours ago [-]
> Are you suggesting that vercels CEO is to be compared with Adolf Hitler
No, Netanyahu.
Who Vercel's CEO recently posted for a selfie with on X, wishing "greatness for Israel".
Without mentioning the genocide being committed by Netanyahu right now.
thrance 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
christophilus 58 minutes ago [-]
It’s much more likely (in my opinion) that Vercel’s CEO thinks those charges are a political hit and have no basis in in reality. I doubt he’d knowingly glad-hand with someone he thought was really guilty of such things.
lukan 41 minutes ago [-]
"No basis in reality"
Do you really believe, he believes starving in Gaza is not real?
With all the top tier access to information he has in his position?
thrance 38 minutes ago [-]
I think you're being way too charitable with Vercel's CEO. I don't doubt he came up with some way to justify to himself that what Israel is doing is completely necessary and reasonable. But I doubt you can get access to a press conference with Benyamin Netanyahu, then get close enough to shake his hand and take a selfie, then post the photo on social media with a tagline of the likes of "eternal glory to Israel" while having no idea of what is actually happening there. Either he's really that clueless about the world (in which case, how can he be CEO?), or he knows about the genocide and fully supports it.
subsupsubsup 26 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
uhgseyjnn 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
mexicocitinluez 1 hours ago [-]
> For me, Vercels CEO statements made me realize I am ditching Deno Deploy for Vercel. Finally some tech ceo with good values
Hands down one of the cringiest things I've ever read on this site. And it's why people don't take HN seriously. It's filled with a bunch of 13 year-old "edgy" narcissists who can't code.
mexicocitinluez 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
kaoD 1 hours ago [-]
To answer your first paragraph: neither.
I don't care because I'm just analyzing Vercel's stewardship of React, and Vercel's CEO political stance has zero impact on React's health.
This post is about React. Not about Gaza or politics, so I will give it exactly 0 seconds of thought when commenting on it.
Orygin 51 minutes ago [-]
> so I will give it exactly 0 seconds of thought when commenting on it.
You opened your post literally giving your thought about his political stance. Had you completely skipped this part, we'd be only discussing React and not Vercel's CEO stance.
Edit: Your quote can literally be understood as "His take doesn't bother me". If you didn't want to discuss this, you could (like someone else said) have worded it better to avoid confusion.
anthonylevine 46 minutes ago [-]
EXACTLY.
45 minutes ago [-]
mexicocitinluez 59 minutes ago [-]
> and Vercel's CEO political stance has zero impact on React's health
This might be one of the most naive statements I've ever read on this site.
Also, it's obviously not "just about React".
christophilus 54 minutes ago [-]
Why? Werner von Braun shouldn’t have been employed by the US, I think you’d agree. But also, his Nazi background didn’t preclude him from being a useful rocket scientist. Why does someone’s political ideas have any bearing on the merits of that person’s OSS technology (the thing this article is about).
20 minutes ago [-]
anthonylevine 48 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
johnmaguire 43 minutes ago [-]
You haven't explained how it impacts the health of React. As an aside, please give the site guidelines a read.
anthonylevine 39 minutes ago [-]
I literally did to the person who asked. lol.
>lol. The moment Guillermo posted that picture, the internet was awash with blogs and pieces about how to move away from Vercel (who everyone now sees as the stewards of React).
This is actually kinda hilarious to have to respond to and explain to.
>Just because you don't have principles, doesn't mean other people don't.
>Cmon. You can't possibly believe actions don't have consequences, do you?
johnmaguire 38 minutes ago [-]
That's not in the comment I replied to, but your quotes are a good example of why I'm asking you to give the guidelines a read through. This is an inappropriate way to express your disagreements.
anthonylevine 37 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
kaoD 59 minutes ago [-]
Care to elaborate?
anthonylevine 53 minutes ago [-]
lol. The moment Guillermo posted that picture, the internet was awash with blogs and pieces about how to move away from Vercel (who everyone now sees as the stewards of React).
This is actually kinda hilarious to have to respond to and explain to.
Just because you don't have principles, doesn't mean other people don't.
Cmon. You can't possibly believe actions don't have consequences, do you?
beanjuiceII 50 minutes ago [-]
thank you
seandoe 1 hours ago [-]
I think OP means "regardless of the CEO's political stance." And yes, your comment does sound self-righteous.
anthonylevine 44 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
davidmurdoch 37 minutes ago [-]
Commenters here are experts in react and have interests in technology, or are looking to understand more about these topics. No one reading here is an expert on geopolitical issues. You're just connecting on the wrong post, and probably the wrong website, if you want to talk about these things. There are places for that, but it's not here this comment section and if you keep trying to make it that you're just going to get down voted over and over.
anthonylevine 29 minutes ago [-]
If this was an article on linting, I'd agree.
But who has become the defacto steward of React over the last 5 years? Vercel.
Whose CEO has made a lot of news recently for their political views? Guillermo
What front-end framework library now needs to distance itself from Vercel as it's main steward? React.
IT'S ALL POLITICS. That's the entire point of the foundation. That's what this whole discussion is about.
Orygin 28 minutes ago [-]
> No one reading here is an expert on geopolitical issues. You're just connecting on the wrong post, and probably the wrong website, if you want to talk about these things
I don't know, I see a lot of posts and threads here of people discussing geo-political issues. Not just for the sake of it of course, but because politics is everywhere and affects everything, because technology is always going to have some form of politics attached, and because everyone is a political actor in their lives.
Separating fully any technology news and political happenstance is impossible. Now of course it doesn't mean every topic should devolve into identity politics, but having discussion about how and why things are they way they are is inherently political.
anthonylevine 26 minutes ago [-]
> Separating fully any technology news and political happenstance is impossible.
AMEN!!!!
rglover 24 minutes ago [-]
If you just want tools that work/make it easy to build apps and websites with JS (and you want direct access to the guy building them), you may find what I built after leaving React/Next interesting [1]. I built this because the creeping complexity and confusion of React's APIs combined with the stress of building a SaaS w/ Next.js became a giant ball of stress and time waste.
Feel free to jump in the Discord [2] with any questions.
I find it immediately off-putting that a I'd choose a framework based on whether or not I'm building a SaaS. Maybe it streamlines certain things but the lock-in to the frameworks set of features and way of doing things feels like a bad decision.
jwr 4 hours ago [-]
Happy to see a clear path for React going forward. React is under-appreciated in some circles of the fast-moving JavaScript world, where people are somehow expected to rewrite all their code from scratch every couple of years or so, after somebody starts shouting "framework X is dead", and everybody starts focusing on the new hotness. I'm not sure how that is economically viable, I know I couldn't afford that kind of approach.
I have a Clojure/ClojureScript app using React that I've been maintaining for the last 10 years. I don't use all the features of React, in fact I could probably use a much smaller library — the biggest advantage is that it provides a "re-render the UI based on app state change" model that fits Clojure very well. But I'm very happy that React is there and that it's been maintained with relatively little code rewriting necessary over the years.
madeofpalk 2 hours ago [-]
> React is under-appreciated in some circles of the fast-moving JavaScript world, where people are somehow expected to rewrite all their code from scratch every couple of years or so, after somebody starts shouting "framework X is dead", and everybody starts focusing on the new hotness.
Has this ever really been the case in the past 10 years?
tobr 2 hours ago [-]
No, and not before that either. It’s a bizarre thing to say, honestly. React is used near universally, despite there being alternatives that are better in almost every way. That is the opposite of being under appreciated. Hype about a new technology, deserved or not, doesn’t mean that everyone is throwing their old code away, especially not their jobby job code.
fkyoureadthedoc 2 hours ago [-]
I think it's because around 2015 or so there was a lot happening with front end frameworks, and the sentiment comes from then and people have just not updated their priors since.
AngularJS was pretty popular at the time, Angular 2 migration was looming, backbone still existed, jQuery (standalone or paired with both) was going strong, Polymer hit 1.0 and it looked like Web Components might actually be something and useful, React was gaining a lot of popularity, Vue was gaining a small amount of popularity, svelte an even smaller amount, Meteor was somewhat popular and had its own front end library.
Of course in addition to all that, traditional server rendered sites were more popular then than now and there were even more options there.
However, React quickly became pretty much the default. Not that there's 0 churn there. The "right way" to do React has changed quite a bit in the last decade. And early on before all the libs people liked to glue together somewhat matured/settled it was common to have to replace stuff that just got abandoned.
More than once I had to pick up someone's old unmaintained project to do a bug fix only to find I couldn't even get the project to install/run because it was in the pre auto lock file era and nobody ever ran `npm shrinkwrap`
prhn 2 hours ago [-]
Let's not conflate the two things that were said.
It is absolutely true that companies were rushing to rewrite their code every few years when the new shiny JS library or framework came out. I was there for it. There was a quick transition from [nothing / mootools?] to jQuery to Backbone to React, with a short Angular detour about 13 years ago. If you had experience with the "new" framework you could pretty much get a front-end gig anywhere with little friction. I rewrote many codebases across multiple companies to Backbone during that time per the request of engineering management.
Now, is React underappreciated? In the past 10 years or so I've started to see a pattern of lack of appreciation for what it brings to the table and the problems it solved. It is used near universally because it was such a drastic improvement over previous options that it was instantly adopted. But as we know, adoption does not mean appreciation.
> React is used near universally, despite there being alternatives that are better in almost every way.
Good example of under-appreciation.
tobr 10 minutes ago [-]
No, I was also around when React was new, moving to it from tangles of jQuery and Backbone. I absolutely know React brought several lasting innovations, in particular the component model, and I do appreciate that step change in front-end development. But other frameworks have taken those ideas and iterated on them to make them more performant, less removed from the platform, and generally nicer to work with. That is where we are today.
I agree that there was a period where many organizations did rewrite their apps from scratch, many of them switching to React, but I think very few did it ”every couple of years”, and I think very few are doing it at all today (at least not because of hype - of course there might always be other reasons you do a big rewrite). We should not confuse excitement about new technologies for widespread adoption, especially not in replacing existing code in working codebases.
Having worked in both over the years the main technical thing React had going for it over Vue, in my humble opinion, was much better Typescript support. Otherwise they are both so similar it comes down to personal preference.
However 0 of the typescript projects (front and back end) I've worked one (unless I was there when they started) used strict mode so the Typescript support was effectively wasted.
madeofpalk 2 hours ago [-]
I read parent's comment as an assertion that the current "fast-moving JavaScript world" expects everyone to rewrite their app. Personally I've never seen this, but since React became popular ~13+ years ago, I struggle to believe this has actually been true for others in any meaningful way.
alsiola 2 hours ago [-]
> the opposite of being under appreciated
> despite there being alternatives that are better in almost every way.
This right here is the under appreciation. The new way to signal to others on forums that you are a really really great dev seems to be to bring up how much better some bizarro templating engine that abuses a niche JS language feature is.
Izkata 2 hours ago [-]
The "in some circles of the fast-moving Javascript world" is important - they're not saying everyone or even most, they're saying proponents of the "better" systems (who do rewrite regularly) dismiss React's stability as unimportant or indicating it's dead when it's not.
throw-10-8 50 minutes ago [-]
No and I say it's actually the exact opposite.
Its gotten so bad that when I read FE dev I interpret it as "React Dev".
azemetre 45 minutes ago [-]
Really feels like react has held back frontend development. The idea that everything on the web should be written in react is baffling but I'm sure people thought similar thoughts when jquery or angular were popular.
jitix 24 minutes ago [-]
This could be because of developer fatigue and the trend of forcing backend devs to do fullstack.
Its very hard to keep up with the frequent changes to programming models, new frameworks, CSS libraries (why the heck are they soo many?!) when you also have to design O(Log n) backends, IaC, Observability, LLMOps, etc.
I have come to a compromise and have started advocating for React/Redux/TS/NextJS as the default CRUD application stack so that I can focus on solving real CS problems in the backend that I’m passionate about.
azemetre 13 minutes ago [-]
But react is where developer fatigue is most endemic. Since it only does one thing, that typically means you have to import a dozen other libraries that are mostly "flavors of the month" captured in time. You can easily tell when a react project was started based solely on it's dependencies. This is bad because it typically means no two react projects will use the same dependencies.
These dependencies are the root of the issue.
FWIW, I've only ever professionally work with react on the frontend. For nearly 10 years too. My first job I was doing react.createElement() before classes were shortly introduced afterwards.
It's time that we move on to something better, and the react foundation being controlled by private entities while not being an actual democratic foundation is a good omen of what to expect.
threetonesun 19 minutes ago [-]
Forget the underlying language, the real shift was this idea that every website should be a single page application, which we are now moving away from again but seemingly everyone has forgotten how to do it, so it's being done "the React way".
throw-10-8 39 minutes ago [-]
Agreed, its become its own terrarium like ecosystem at this point.
afavour 2 hours ago [-]
It’s funny, personally I regard React as one of the frameworks requiring regular updates. So many teams that have spent so many hours shifting from class components to hooks based ones…
daveidol 24 minutes ago [-]
We are still talking about class components these days? I haven’t even seen one in many years
nonethewiser 11 minutes ago [-]
Class components are criminally misunderstood. Most people cannot articulate why you should or should not use them. I'm sure plenty of informed people can give a good reason here, but I'm talking about my experience in the wild. It mostly boils down to "Yuck" and "It's not the new thing."
As it turns out you shouldn't use them because they were essentially deprecated a long time ago. But in terms of comparing the merits in a more theoretical sense, there are simply tradeoffs between the two.
marcelr 2 hours ago [-]
its important to note that it wasn’t a breaking change, unlike many other frameworks
backwards compatibility is underrated
Izkata 2 hours ago [-]
Wasn't a breaking change, and that was introduced like 7 or 8 years ago, I think? Been kind of a long time in Javascript-land.
flowerlad 2 hours ago [-]
Did that turn out to be a good idea? Hooks are much reviled for a reason!
pimterry 4 hours ago [-]
It feels like React generally has an ongoing trajectory towards increasing complexity and features. For something that's effectively become the standard for frontend that's unfortunate. It would be great to have a simple reliable base, with extensions & addition complexity layered on top or included optionally. This announcement doesn't fill me with hope for that direction unfortunately, it mostly seems like Vercel getting more control, and they're driving a lot of that movement.
Being able to ignore parallel rendering, RSC, hooks, etc, and just write simple code for simple sites again would be fantastic.
Unfortunately all the major competition I've seen seems so significantly different that migrating any kind of non-trivial application would basically be a full rewrite. Is Preact or similar offering much promise here?
gaoshan 30 minutes ago [-]
Most companies don't really need the majority of React's power. There is room for a low to mid level complexity library/framework to fill the space that the majority of sites really need (like, that brochureware site should be statically generated and needs none of what React offers and the site that deals with dozens of requests per minute can be greatly simplified). What we need is a low complexity tool that has a fantastic DX. Of the many projects that deal with this none has taken hold in the way that React has.
daemonologist 11 minutes ago [-]
Svelte 4, optionally with the static output mode ("adapter") fills this role quite well.
(I'm not entirely sold on Svelte 5 for the same role - I think it gives up some DX - although maybe I just like the thing I'm used to.)
kobalsky 2 hours ago [-]
> Being able to ignore parallel rendering, RSC, hooks, etc, and just write simple code for simple sites again would be fantastic.
I don't understand this statement. You can use the basics without involving yourself with anything complex. You can even still use class components. You can build components that are framework agnostic.
dibujaron 1 hours ago [-]
When you're new it can be hard to tell what to ignore; it makes it tempting to pick a simpler framework that you can entirely grasp. Also any published examples, chatgpt etc won't be aware of the subset you've chosen to use when they're providing examples; they're gonna draw from the full set.
fleebee 38 minutes ago [-]
I feel like that's more of an issue with the examples and LLMs? Discounting a framework just because it has ever increasing, completely optional capabilities doesn't compute to me. I'm not convinced there's a real problem.
flowerlad 1 hours ago [-]
Also you may have to maintain code bases that don’t use your preferred subset.
And you may have to work with developers who have a different preferred subset.
christophilus 2 hours ago [-]
Preact is great. It’s not 100% the same as React, but it’s close enough and good enough and has been excellent for my use cases (SPAs).
iamtheworstdev 2 hours ago [-]
> It feels like React generally has an ongoing trajectory towards increasing complexity and features. For something that's effectively become the standard for frontend that's unfortunate.
Is that not every software development effort, ever? Isn't that why "todo" apps, search engines, etc, constantly get "recreated". Live long enough to become the enemy and get replaced by a bare bones app that'll bloat itself into oblivion and repeat the cycle?
nurbl 1 hours ago [-]
I don't have experience from any larger application, but from my smaller usage Preact seems like a drop in replacement. It's been compatible with the react libraries I've tried. It also works great with ES modules. So for simple stuff, I think it's worth a try.
flowerlad 2 hours ago [-]
Absolutely agree. Leave well enough alone. If they keep adding features it is only going to get worse.
askonomm 4 hours ago [-]
That's one way to sell a open source project I guess. Not only did Vercel really fight to not have any mention on the React docs about using React _without_ Vercel, but downright to using wording to imply that if you do then you're using it wrong. All clearly states the direction that Vercel is taking React. Soon enough it'll be Vercel-only software.
tom1337 3 hours ago [-]
Yea Vercel being included in this also is a bummer to me - but honestly if history told us anything if they are making some stupid decisions, like completely vendor locking it, it wouldn't take long until a community maintained fork will be created. Same story as Valkey, OpenTofu, MariaDB, NextCloud and so on.
askonomm 2 hours ago [-]
Oh yeah, and there already is (preact, for example). I'm not worried about losing front-end SPA libraries. If anything, I'm just annoyed at the endless greed of VC funded firms.
theknarf 2 hours ago [-]
Hopefully the foundation will help balance that.
phplovesong 2 hours ago [-]
Its kind of amazing how big a single library (that does very little really) has become.
React is obviously the "new jquery", and something else will come one day. So many specially boot-camp devs are "react only" devs.
Scary stuff.
philipallstar 2 hours ago [-]
It's not scary. It's a pretty small API surface. Lots of time is spent on component styling and all that stuff, which isn't React-specific.
Web components tech such as Lit might be part of the future, replacing JSX, and then React purely becomes a middleware tool for DOM diffing and shuffling events up and data down.
joshkel 22 minutes ago [-]
Would you still say it's a small API surface? State, memos, callbacks (which are just memo functions), effects, effect events, reducers, context, external stores, special handling for any tags that go in the `<head>`, form actions, form status, action state, activities, refs, imperative handles, transitions, optimistic updates, deferred updates, suspense, server components, compiler, SSR?
Or maybe it's a small enough API but a lot of concepts. Or maybe I'm just grumpy that the days of "it's just a view layer" feel long ago.
afavour 2 hours ago [-]
IMO OP is correct that the bootcamp devs are scary, not React itself.
I’ve interviewed a number of engineers who have very little grasp of what the DOM is and how it works because React abstracts the whole thing away. Server components are another are where some niceties mean a bunch of developers aren’t really understanding what’s going on with underlying HTTP requests.
While React’s API surface is small the average app will come with a chunk of extra stuff: Redux, next.js, yadda yadda. People take entire courses that never leave that bubble.
kode95 2 hours ago [-]
> React is obviously the "new jquery", and something else will come one day.
"Something else" is already here and has been for a long time. Vue and Svelte are both excellent alternatives.
lunarboy 2 hours ago [-]
I come from mobile, and was surprised how nice svelte is. Felt so much more familiar patterns than react
gloosx 2 hours ago [-]
They are not. Extending JavaScript with an XML-like syntax that transpiles down to composable function calls feels far more natural. In contrast, extending HTML with a template syntax feels limiting and less intuitive in practice — thats why these frameworks are unlikely to ever reach the same level of traction as React.
Alex-C137 1 hours ago [-]
Hard disagree. React is only popular because large companies made it so. There are few things that React is inherently better than Vue and none of them are its bundle footprint, page load speeds, nor the average time to learn one or the other.
Subjectively I am extremely in opposition to the fact that XML anything with composable functions is more intuitive than HTML templates by any stretch of the imagination.
gloosx 1 hours ago [-]
I get your point, but to me it is about composition, not popularity. Writing UI as pure functions of state feels far more natural — recursion, higher-order patterns, dynamic layouts, all come easily because React is just JavaScript. In Vue or Svelte, recursion and logic feel bolted onto an HTML templating layer, which makes complex patterns less fluid.
kode95 1 hours ago [-]
What feels more "natural" is likely to be influenced by what you already know. I've always felt that JSX felt unnatural and Vue's and Svelte's way of doing it feels more natural.
gloosx 1 hours ago [-]
fair — what feels natural usually depends on what you are used to. But even aside from preference, JSX aligns directly with how JavaScript itself works. You are not learning a new templating DSL — you just compose functions. That conceptual unity is what makes React approach click for for so many.
monooso 2 hours ago [-]
I think the point is not that there aren't alternatives—there were plenty of jQuery alternatives—but that React is the dominant force, and this too shall pass.
schwartzworld 2 hours ago [-]
React won’t topple for a while, because of none of the alternatives are different enough. React solved a real problem many developers faced by giving them a state management system with a rendering engine, whereas you were likely to make surgical cuts before in response to state change, you can now just write your ui assuming the whole thing rerenders in response to changes to that state. The component system also allowed for an easy way of sharing code as dependencies. Vue, Svelte, Solid and the rest have their individual pros and cons when compared to react, but they are essentially different attempts to do the same thing.
You want to topple react, you need to solve a problem that’s as big as state management used to be in a way that react can’t also just copy/absorb, and you have to do it so well that developers will push to use it at work. You need to have a ux as clean as what React offers to its devs, and you probably need to come close enough in benchmarks to not get instantly shot down.
deliriumchn 2 hours ago [-]
while jquery had a gajillion of exotic apis to do pretty much everything, react is, frankly, pure js with handful of apis: jsx (html with pure js), useState/useEffect/useMemo (rarely you need more), and initial hydration function. Rest is utility libraries, bundler, and all the wondeful things that brings you endless headache and depression because without them fulfilling yet another business req would take 10x more time
romanovcode 2 hours ago [-]
> Scary stuff.
Why? When jQuery went away nothing happened. People just learned the new frameworks.
hu3 2 hours ago [-]
I don't think jQuery went away.
And it might never unless browsers implement better DOM apis.
The current DOM API implementation reminds me of that quote:
"look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power"
huflungdung 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
disillusioned 6 hours ago [-]
Is it me, or does $600,000 a year (presuming that $3M is over the 5 year period) seem a bit of a weak contribution from a company with a $1.8 trillion market cap that's regularly making $100M-$250M TC pay packages for AI scientists?
Like, I get that nothing is _owed_ here, but this feels like more of the same tragedy of the commons open source problem we see: tools that millions of apps depend on, barely propped up, and in this case, the child of a megacorporation that could easily create a proper evergreen endowment rather than a milquetoast token contribution to save face.
Or should we just be grateful?
mythz 5 hours ago [-]
I don't understand the entitlement here?
Somehow because Meta has released a popular OSS library and dedicated over 10 years of engineering resources to it (that has generated immense value for the wider ecosystem), that they should've shelled out more than the $3M they're contributing in order to give its ownership away to a non-profit.
Maybe it's just me but I think they've contributed more than enough. I'm grateful for what they've already contributed and anything else they choose to contribute in future.
1dom 2 hours ago [-]
You're right, $3million is a lot for an open source project, with no other context.
But in the context of who that $3million is coming from, how much they have available, how much responsibility they have for the state of it, and how much value it provides to everyone who isn't them, I think it's fair some people might have expected a little more.
lesuorac 50 minutes ago [-]
But why?
If this went the other way where say FaceBook let people freely create accounts and talk to everybody and then later on either charged 10$/month, plastered the site with ads, or started to selling user data people would be upset about a bait and switch.
If you release something for free as you shouldn't be expected compensation for it. People also shouldn't expect anything beyond the terms that you've released it underneath as well.
veidr 36 minutes ago [-]
I might have expected $1M/year, not $0.6M/year, just because it sounds cooler, but... OTOH, is there any analogous project that was better supported? Maybe, but I can't think of one...
wslh 2 hours ago [-]
I think once the React community engine is working you need less budget because of third-party contributions.
gampleman 5 hours ago [-]
They also have a team of full time react devs they are paying for. That seems to me more than sufficient.
$600,000/year just to run a governance board and organize a conference seems extraordinarily generous to me. In fact I think it's more likely the $3M is more likely to form an endowment for the foundation that will fund it's expenses running forward.
flowerlad 2 hours ago [-]
> They also have a team of full time react devs they are paying for.
For now. My guess is they will be included in the next round of layoffs. Money for $100 Million pay packages for AI researchers has to come from somewhere!
philipwhiuk 6 hours ago [-]
> dedicated engineering support
is probably worth more in practice. The $3m will basically just cover 'founding the foundation' I guess.
I do wonder whether this is a sign Facebook may no longer develop new stuff in React.
theknarf 2 hours ago [-]
The post said they would also still pay for their own internal team that would keep contributing code to React, so it feels more like their throwing in $600k in addition to what they already do. And they have brought inn other companies who hopefully also contribute money, seems like a lot more of an healthy situation than before.
rs186 4 hours ago [-]
Most open source projects receive $0 a year from companies that use them.
nothrowaways 1 hours ago [-]
Multiply this by the number of multi billion mc companies that are built with it
nothrowaways 1 hours ago [-]
Multiply this by the number of multi billion mc companies that are built on it
nicce 6 hours ago [-]
I guess Vercel does the most lifting in non-native React these days? Didn’t they hire the core developers?
fcanesin 5 hours ago [-]
this, Vercel is at ~10B valuation with a business built atop React - they should and will probably take more of Meta space as stewards for it.
BoorishBears 5 hours ago [-]
Please no. They don't have the best interests of React in mind.
They threw the resources behind RSC to make React, a framework for frontend reactivity, force opt-in for frontend reactivity. Meta is needed more than ever at this point, before React fully becomes a framework for burning compute on Vercel's infra.
karimf 5 hours ago [-]
I agree with this. I’d prefer to have Meta be the steward for React instead of Vercel because Meta does not have a conflict of interest.
brazukadev 5 hours ago [-]
That is exactly why I stopped using React 2 years ago
physicsguy 6 hours ago [-]
How do you value what they already put into it?
esperent 5 hours ago [-]
Let's round their yearly revenue at around $160 billion, then assume they've spent $3 million a year on React. That would put the cost at 0.002% of revenue, or to put it another way, if they dedicated just 1% of revenue to philanthropy, they could fund 500 React sized projects indefinitely.
flowerlad 2 hours ago [-]
Zuckerberg doesn’t have a good track record with philanthropy
React 16 was released in 2017, the same year transformer-based models was announced.
We can feel nostalgia but the world is moving.
It is hard to predict how everything will be in 5 years.
DoctorOW 3 hours ago [-]
Small tangent: I noticed the HN in the share menu is the only one in color. They're unable to change it unless they host a copy of the icon themselves (they're hotlinking https://news.ycombinator.com/y18.svg). Surprised they don't have their own CDN/icon font at Facebook scale.
jaapz 2 hours ago [-]
Weirdest part is they are hosting all the other icons themselves, just not the HN one
qgin 23 minutes ago [-]
I am always surprised to see the anti-Vercel stuff here. NextJS has repeatedly solved every thing I wanted React to do beyond its out-of-the-box fearures. You can pry NextJS from my cold, dead hands.
Vipsy 2 hours ago [-]
The new foundation could be a turning point for React, but whether it truly decentralizes decision-making depends on how governance works in practice, not just on the list of corporate sponsors. Open source foundations have helped some projects thrive by formalizing community input, but they can also be slow to adapt if board dynamics favor stability over innovation. The real question is whether small developer voices and radical ideas will shape React's future, or if practical influence stays with the largest sponsors. Compared to one company's oversight, a well-run foundation can make React less vulnerable to a single vendor's agenda—but only if its structures actively foster broad participation and accountability. We'll see if React's evolution speeds up or settles into consensus-driven conservatism.
SonOfLilit 2 hours ago [-]
Are you implicitly complaining that React is not moving fast enough? What the JS ecosystem needs is for some big players to CHILL a bit and take backwards compat more seriously.
agos 46 minutes ago [-]
when something is moving orthogonally to where you would like it to move, it might as well be not moving for you
dzogchen 25 minutes ago [-]
Does this mean there is a chance we will get an ESM browser-compatible build of React after 10 years?
weinzierl 52 minutes ago [-]
Is there more information somewhere than in this short article, for example a timeline or the planned legal form?
throw-10-8 5 hours ago [-]
Vercel being involved is a huge red flag.
NextJS is a pile of garbage, and their platform is absurdly expensive and leans heavily on vendor lock in.
azangru 5 hours ago [-]
Vercel employs maybe half [correction, maybe a quarter] of the React core team. For example, at the keynote at React Conf 2025, it was mentioned that Andrew Clark, who, if I am not mistaken, is employed by Vercel, worked on resolving the rendering issue of React that was blocking the release of React 19 after it was discovered in the release candidate.
Vercel and Next.js have been the main testing ground during the development of React server components as well.
How much has Vercel contributed to the development of react over the past years?
throw-10-8 4 hours ago [-]
Vercel is the primary driver of react SSR / server components, which has also led to an explosion of complexity in react and has made it less useful as a composable library imo.
The last truly useful react feature for me was error boundaries in React 16 (2017?) and I think hooks was react 16 too?
These days if I need ui components for an existing SSR app I just use web components or lightweight libs like mithril.
JSR_FDED 4 hours ago [-]
Mithril rocks. I’ve been blissfully ignoring the new hotness for years.
brazukadev 28 minutes ago [-]
> Vercel is the primary driver of react SSR / server components, which has also led to an explosion of complexity
It also alienated a huge part of the userbase that decided to move away from React.
weego 3 hours ago [-]
It's just a tool. Are the people that run Makita terrible? Who knows, I just use their tools to fix cars. I use tools to build apps for businesses that pay me. There is far too much ideology based decision making in tech. Just build stuff with it or not.
Far too many smart people are putting their energies into such discussions that add a lot of drag to the process of society and humanity moving forward for no net gain at all.
throw-10-8 3 hours ago [-]
I don't use nextjs because it's a steaming pile of unmaintainable black-box shit.
The CEO's politics are just icing on the cake.
hshdhdhehd 3 hours ago [-]
Oracle is just a tool. WordPress is just a tool. But you may care about their involvement in something you use.
kode95 3 hours ago [-]
As someone who isn't too familiar with Next and Vercel (having primarily used Nuxt, the Vue equivalent), it's helpful for me to know what's going on in the React world. Discussions like the above are actually helpful in terms of helping people choose between the various frameworks and hosts.
loliver666 30 minutes ago [-]
I often read that Next.js sucks. Meanwhile I and many other devs I've spoken to IRL find it does what we need it to do without any issues. Ya'll just some haters.
throw-10-8 18 minutes ago [-]
See the various other comments for concrete examples of why nextjs sucks and the team at vercel is incompetent when it comes to auth, middleware, caching, and just generally maintaining a usable framework without brutal migrations and api breakages.
They have made egregious mistakes that go far beyond "move fast and break things" and well into "we should have the lawyers join this call".
arcatech 8 minutes ago [-]
Just because you didn’t see the issues other people are encountering, everybody else’s experiences are invalid?
rk06 3 hours ago [-]
that is your opinion, and is irrelevant to the choice. practically, vercel is a company which is heavily invested in react and react's future, so, they need to be present.
moreover, this entire initiative looks like a way to reduce vercel's influence, so if you want to be mad, then be mad in 5 yrs, not now.
hshdhdhehd 3 hours ago [-]
Like Microsoft was invested in Web standards in the ie6 days... for their own interests. To own it.
peterspath 43 minutes ago [-]
Like chrome is doing nowadays
throw-10-8 3 hours ago [-]
It is also my opinion that 5 years from now Vercel will be out of business and their customers will have moved on the next hype driven VC cash laundry.
noodletheworld 2 hours ago [-]
> vercel is a company which is heavily invested in
…people paying for react.
Which is fair, but do we have bend knee and suggest they have the best interests of the react ecosystem at heart? They don’t.
They are invested in: people using next.js and hosting it on vercel.
If that’s not what you’re doing, their interests probably don’t align with yours.
iamsaitam 5 hours ago [-]
Why is NextJS a pile of garbage?
throw-10-8 5 hours ago [-]
- fragile under load and very difficult to debug SSR issues
- inconsistent behavior between hosted and self hosted versions of the same code
- horrible build times, like laughably bad multi-minute builds for trivial code bases
- crappy directory based routing system with lots of weird gotchas
- schizo identity JAMstack -> serverless -> ssr -> now its microvms + ai
- multiple hilariously long running GH issues where the dev team is thrashing around trying to debug their own black box framework
- "framework" that barely provides any of the primitives necessary to build web apps
- major breaking changes around core features like routing that require painful migrations
- general sloppiness, churn, and insecurity that comes from being part of the nodejs ecosystem
Thats not even getting into all of the shady patterns vercel uses to lock you into their overpriced hosting.
I've been a part of multiple teams that decided to build apps using NextJS, and while the FE is not my responsibility I typically got pulled in to help troubleshoot random issues. It was a complete waste of time in almost every case, and in one case resulted in the entire FE team being let go because they were unable to ship anything on time.
davedx 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah matches my experience. It’s just so much complexity just to get SSR. I’ve worked at places that used it for b2b SaaS apps with no public web part, so the SSR is just a big liability… whyyyyy
flowerlad 2 hours ago [-]
I use it for my web site where SSR is critical for SEO. For app development I don’t use Nextjs. I think it is designed for web sites (as opposed to web apps) and it is great for this purpose
beanjuiceII 43 minutes ago [-]
yep this is how i use it and it has worked out really great...sometimes i wonder what people try to do that they have all these issues
throw-10-8 4 hours ago [-]
Reminds me of VC backed framework Meteor that was attempting to do full stack JS and collapsed under its own tech debt.
fkyoureadthedoc 1 hours ago [-]
I'd honestly love to use something that delivered on Meteor's goals. Next.js ain't it though lol.
throw-10-8 1 hours ago [-]
I was pretty involved in their stack back in the day, it was a good alternative to Django at the time for simple plug and play admin apps, and to this day i think they had the simplest OAuth setup of any framework I've used.
The real issues were the super tight coupling with MongoDB and their decision to roll their own package ecosystem instead of just using npm from day one.
loliver666 28 minutes ago [-]
I've been building loads of stuff with it for years and never experienced any of this.
Sounds like a YOU problem.
dbbk 4 hours ago [-]
Not to mention their braindead decision to aggressively cache everything as much as possible, which they're now trying to undo, but still haven't shipped.
molszanski 4 hours ago [-]
Try Astro my friend. React SSR with none of that next bs
alsiola 2 hours ago [-]
Used Astro for a pro bono project. Found it fantastic, well documented, provides solutions for the hard parts, gets out of the way for the easy parts. Documentation is well written, but I find I don't need it much because mostly it works how I would expect.
throw-10-8 4 hours ago [-]
I've heard good things, what would you say is the killer reasons to justify being the nodejs ecosystem vs something more purpose built for ssr like php?
fuzzy_biscuit 3 hours ago [-]
Astro is not tied to React. You can choose your framework.
WA 3 hours ago [-]
You lost me at React SSR. That is part of the complexity bs. React is a lib for mapping state to the DOM. There's no DOM on the server. So React on the server is 95% useless for that purpose and hence, overengineered to create a bit of HTML and send it down the wire.
I like the simplicity of Hono and use their html helper to write good old HTML that is send to the client.
throw-10-8 3 hours ago [-]
This is the vercelization of react peeking through, that people even associate react with ssr is an anti-pattern.
deepriverfish 28 minutes ago [-]
how do you manage the application state with Hono? I saw their home page and it didn't mention anything about it.
tacker2000 5 hours ago [-]
It’s VC funded, overengineered crap, specifically designed to push people into using their overpriced hosting.
I hope this isnt the way that React as a whole will go in the end.
But fortunately there are enough alternatives about.
throwaway77385 4 hours ago [-]
If there is only one thing you take from my post, then look up "NextJS middleware auth bypass" or something along those lines. Have fun reading about that and then never touch NextJS or anything Vercel ever again.
I won't repeat what the sibling poster said, but I can tell you, I've been using NextJS from v12-v15 and in that time we've had:
- The catastrophic (and, at the time, UNDOCUMENTED) "aggressive, opt-out caching of all fetch calls", which confused the living daylights out of everyone who suddenly couldn't retrieve updated data from their servers. Like, don't override a native JS function that's supposed to work in an expected way, with black-box magic that adds caching behaviour that then needs to be overriden _per route_ with directives on each route. Cache headers can be added to fetch calls and are easy to configure globally via axios if needed. If you're going to do black magic, call it "nextfetch" or something
- The app router / page router transition was shockingly badly handled, with so much missing documentation around dynamic routes
- I don't know how many different ways of fetching / setting metadata / <head>-related techniques I've had to learn by now. It seems to change all the time. BUT, that isn't the worst part....the worst part was / is:
- You couldn't, for the longest time, fetch metadata for a page without duplicating fetch requests. I think this is where their fetch-deduping thing came from. But again, black-box magic on a native JS function with very inconsistent behaviour, so for a while, all pages in our app just had to make two fetch calls per page that needed specific metadata added to the <head>
- Vercel as a platform not allowing to set billing limits (have fun with your DDoS that they don't recognise as such)
- Middleware is one file. That's what you get. No chaining, nothing. One god-function for everything. Just think about the anti-pattern that is
- I don't know whether it's clever or terrible, but if you want to add a sitemap, you do so by defining a route by creating a folder called sitemap.xml (yes, a directory), where you then put your route.ts which is in keeping with the way the new router should work. But somehow it just doesn't sit right with me. Folders with file extensions. But it also adds a lot of ability to make the sitemap highly customisable and dynamic, so maybe it's ok
- You suddenly needed to start awaiting url params, cookies, etc. which is sort of fine, but was a huge change causing warnings all over the compiler for months and months
Anyway, those are just a few things off the top off my head. I already find React to be quite counter-intuitive and non-deterministic, but NextJS just adds a layer of pain on top with very, very few advantages.
I am dying to get my hands on an alternative, but also don't want to rebuild all of the apps I built when I was still optimistic about NextJS.
throw-10-8 4 hours ago [-]
Oh man I forget about their "middleware".
Whoever implemented that has no idea how middleware is supposed to work.
paweladamczuk 2 hours ago [-]
As a mostly-backend dev I stumbled across the "metadata in <head>" issue in my first hour of using NextJS for a toy project.
I kept wondering if there's something wrong with me or if a framework recommended in so many places can really be this shitty, until I read your comment.
dbbk 4 hours ago [-]
I'd just ask an AI model to move everything over to TanStack Start and see if it works
throw-10-8 4 hours ago [-]
And what do you do next when it doesn't?
fragmede 2 hours ago [-]
Do it by hand like the olden days of yester-last-week before Sonnet 4.5?
throw-10-8 2 hours ago [-]
By hand? Ok Grandpa.
I only vibe code in my Metaverse open office by thinking with my Beta NeuralLink.
fragmede 2 hours ago [-]
I tried that once. Had to downgrade my brain firmware to get syntax highlighting back.
SilverSlash 2 hours ago [-]
What's a red flag is that there are 3 new accounts commenting on this reply and all are in agreement supporting your view.
Edit: apparently there's some confusion about my comment. I neither use, like, or support Next. I just found it suspicious that a bunch of new accounts showed up making generic comments in support of OP, which to me was a red flag.
cryptonym 2 hours ago [-]
Old account. Not with the same words but I share concerns on Vercel's involvement, even if it's not a new thing.
baby 1 hours ago [-]
Old account here too, sharing my concerns about Vercel's involvement too
normie3000 2 hours ago [-]
Old account here, in support of the GP's view.
brazukadev 26 minutes ago [-]
I could definitely have written that but my account is not that old too.
alsiola 2 hours ago [-]
Been here seven years. Next is hot garbage and you couldn't pay me enough to work with it.
whizzter 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe people are afraid to speak up? I've gotten a fair bit of backlash on my negative complaints about NextJS on Reddit, someone even necro-posting on a months old reply then continuing "debating".
I think a somewhat neutral summary (of someone still annoyed by Vercel/Next) would be like this (Notice the distinctions between Site and App, not always clear cut but a dividing line imho):
- React was created by FB to solve real technical issues as their frontend became larger and more complex.
- Site creators liked it as it was one of the solutions of a real issue of reconcilliation of state and view (that often wasn't so bad in the big picture) but React was often a bit heavyweight, App creators really loved it as state reconcilliation took away that entire class of bugs that just became so much worse quickly as Apps grew (and React allowed for more people to create larger apps).
(Angular and Vue has always done this also, they are parallel developments)
- Pressure from those doing sites has always pushed development of React to be "simpler", often good for most parties (even if I think that Redux was mostly thrown overboard prematurely).
- Part of simplifications was bootstrapping, create-react-app became one of the recommended ways to start projects (and was also incorporated into other toolchains such as .NET templates)
- Heavy builds, disabled JavaScript and SEO issues was teetering issues (especially for public site builders), not entirely sure of the inspirations but Next did solve that (perhaps not always entirely elegantly initially)
- React internals start to change to better support these scenarios, nobody really has objections since changes in React has seldomly been for the worse (functional components, hooks, etc). Vercel gains traction as a "do-good" choice.
- After all troubles of OpenSSL, Node finally adopts OpenSSL 3.0 thus breaking create-react-app that had been "deprecated" by the React team (it's easily shimmable but it sent people looking).
- People looking for options find that the only "official" way to use React according to the site is to use Next, so many start adopting it out of fear of being left behind again.
- The Next model however is quite different and tailored to "site" builders and/or people running the full stack in JS
- React however is quite popular outside of the JS only world for enterprise SPA and/or mobile apps where trying to shoehorn in a Next "frontend-backend" becomes overkill and extra complexity. (We used it for one or two projects but have now abandoned it for our regular work).
- The React site is updated slightly, Vite and similar are now mentioned but the perception damage is there and hasn't let go (and last I checked using f.ex. Vite was not "recommended" as being an inferior option to Next for React usage)
- A very popular option for CSS-in-JS (styled) becomes deprecated due to React internals changing for Next and requiring significant rework that the original author had no interest in (no really clear successor with support across the board for Next, SPA and React-Native scenarios hadn't appeared last we checked).
Now this is my perception of events and I'm pretty sure that I'm not alone in this, the Next/React authors felt like it was the way forward due previous feedback for those that hurt (site builders) but probably misjudged or didn't appreciate how much React was used in other workloads(apps) that got disturbed while they were improving their thing.
That Vercel has managed to alienate people in other ways like billing (or politics?) certainly doesn't seem to have helped either.
throw-10-8 1 hours ago [-]
My experience is that a lot of people on this forum are afraid to voice negative opinions on tools they use at work.
Seen a lot of people in my professional circles shit on Next/Vercel over beers, but then go to work every day and bang out Next because it's what their manager chose 5 years ago.
Vercel can only ride that wave until the people who hate their product are the decision makers.
throw-10-8 2 hours ago [-]
i make throwaways on this site regularly and use them until i say something to piss dang off and get shadowbanned.
your comment would be a lot more interesting if you attempted to pose a counterpoint besides "BOT!".
crummy 5 hours ago [-]
I know Vercel has their fingers in a bunch of pies, but is there any significant vendor locking? I worked at a place where we just put nextJS in a docker container and hosted it ourselves, but maybe we would have got more on Vercel?
cryptonym 4 hours ago [-]
Try to scale Next.js globally.
Try to keep up to date with new versions, changes in paradigms and the way the output is rendered.
It's designed to be deployed on Vercel. Production-ready hosting part of the Framework is not Open Source nor well documented.
running nextjs in docker is notoriously bug prone, there are multiple GH issues about this with no real resolution
the official recommendation we got was to just run it on vercel
I would go as far to say that nextjs is not self-hostable in its current state if you expect high traffic and low latency.
nicce 4 hours ago [-]
They have neglected many issues which would help on self-hosting until the public cry was big enough.
maelito 4 hours ago [-]
I migrated https://cartes.app from Vercel to Dokploy, everything is good and simpler.
mohsen1 4 hours ago [-]
Also their CEO's picture with Bibi is showing their values
tipiirai 4 hours ago [-]
Whoah. Wasn't aware that Guillermo Rauch openly embraces Benjamin Netanyahu
igleria 3 hours ago [-]
The people with money don't care, as the very next day Vercel got a series F. That is funny tho because I remember him being pretty anti-israel back in our High school on the long defunct semi-official foropelle.com.ar he owned and managed.
He is a programming prodigy, and that's it. Not a nice person.
Nevertheless, my anecdote should only be taken with a grain of salt... After all, the only person that probably has backups of foropelle is Rauch himself. And who cares what a teenager had to say back in 2006?
Oh, I see. So this critique of Vercels' tech is at least somewhat influenced by politics, rather than tech.
throw-10-8 2 hours ago [-]
Not at all, they are two different critiques.
1. Vercel / Next are complete technical trash wrapped in egregious vendor lock-in. This directly influences their desire to steer the react foundation in a direction that aligns with their roadmap for Vercel/Next.
2. Their CEO thought it would be a good idea to have a photo op with perhaps the most controversial figure in world politics. This just means he's not nearly as smart as he thinks he is and likely needs a handler.
baobabKoodaa 2 hours ago [-]
Just from your comments in this thread I'm going to venture a guess that you support Palestine and oppose Israel. Correct, yes?
And also, you want me to believe that your throwaway account's "purely technical critique" of Vercel is unmotivated by politics? Just a complete coincidence that the CEO is politically opposed to your faction.
throw-10-8 1 hours ago [-]
I hated vercel and next long before Israel decided it was their turn at genocide.
So yes, it is a complete coincidence that vercel/next is garbage and that their CEO is cozy with fascists.
There are plenty of technical critiques of next in this thread.
I would start by googling "NextJs auth middleware bypass" if you would like concrete examples of their incompetency.
danielxt 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
throw-10-8 3 hours ago [-]
It's a discussion about Vercel and he's the CEO.
If he didn't want political commentary being brought into discussions about the company he leads he should have used his big CEO brain to determine that a photo op with a highly polarizing fascist world leader is not a good look.
Iridescent_ 3 hours ago [-]
No politics? On HN? You must be a new user.
And for the record, I'm glad to be aware that the developers of a high-profile technology that I could end up using is actually supporting a genocide (that is a fact, not politics, I should note).
nicman23 3 hours ago [-]
the very definition of genocide is international law. that is a political definition. that is a fact.
i do not care about what those 2 idiot nations do.
Squarex 5 hours ago [-]
Does this make React more or less dependend on Vercel?
throw-10-8 5 hours ago [-]
More, they are part of the foundation.
azangru 4 hours ago [-]
According to the React team page [0], five members of the team work at Vercel. This has been the case for several years. Vercel has been a major contributor in the development of React. How does the creation of the foundation make React more dependent on Vercel?
Isn't the foundation a formal way for meta to step-out and let others take/share ownership?
azangru 4 hours ago [-]
To anyone excited by this news, could they explain, like I'm five, what is it that makes it exciting? Why would developers (or non-developers?) care?
simpaticoder 3 hours ago [-]
Marky (FB) and Vicky (Vercel) are rich kids and are spending their tooth fairy money to buy every kid at your kindergarten a cool toy. Some kids don't like the toy, but that's okay there are other toys.
Some other kids (and esp their parents) think this is terrible, that Marky is being cheap and Vicky only wants control of the playground. They don't like Marky and Vicky and try to hurt them every chance they get.
azangru 2 hours ago [-]
But every kid at my kindergarten already had the toy. Any time they said npm install react, the new shiny toy was brought to them. I thought that's exactly what mattered to the kids, the toy. What do they care what shop the toy comes from or what Marky and Vicky are up to?
cryptonym 2 hours ago [-]
Soon current version of the toy will be deemed unsafe and start catching fire. You'll have to get a new version of the toy, still available easily but it'll only run on crazy expensive batteries you can get from Vicky. Or you could try to build your own batteries but specifications for those are hazardous, undocumented and changes over time.
Also, for the new version of the toy you'll have to learn to play a new game as the old way to play with it'll become half-working.
At least that's what parents are afraid of.
fragmede 2 hours ago [-]
Because Markey called everyone dumbfucks back in 2004 and some people are still butthurt about it, so Mommy and daddy really don't like going to that particular store to buy things.
notyouraibot 2 hours ago [-]
I'm disappointed that Vercel is a part of this foundation. NextJS is on its way to its funeral, they have absolutely ruined it with things nobody asked for or cares about. I have been working on a large scale NextJS app which when I run locally consumes just over 8GB OF RAM on M4 Mac Mini. Brilliant. Slowly migrating the application to a Vite Based React SPA with a dedicated Hono backend and life is already looking already better.
a1371 5 hours ago [-]
This sound like positive news for the Dev community. I can imagine it took a lot of patience and intention to get Meta onboard with this.
stevev 1 hours ago [-]
It’s natural for Vercel to have a strong influence on the project. That’s what happens when a framework grows large and fragmented without a defined board, group, or leadership focused on both short- and long-term goals. At least now, with the foundation in place, there are additional voices to help guide the project rather than letting it move entirely in line with Vercel’s direction.
h1fra 4 hours ago [-]
That's good news for the project but having that many big corps in charge will for sure continue to bloat the software
matsemann 5 hours ago [-]
Oh man, having Vercel on the board is a bummer. Not only because they want to take React a way I disagree with, but it's clear that the CEO is on the wrong side of history in other matters as well (lots of recent drama).
veeti 3 hours ago [-]
Do you believe board members Meta, Amazon or Microsoft and their CEO's are on the right side?
throw-10-8 3 hours ago [-]
Their financial interest in react is less blatant.
Vercel wants to own React, its been obvious about it for years now.
azangru 5 hours ago [-]
I am baffled by this take that I've been seeing all over the internet recently. A CEO is a person. He is human. Can't a human be on the wrong side of history on various matters, and what does it matter if he is? Can't he still do a decent job (whatever it is that CEOs do)? Why do we expect random entrepreneurs, celebrities, engineers, and so on to also be moral authorities or role models?
matsemann 4 hours ago [-]
If you're baffled and you're seeing it all over the internet, could it be that you're the one with the wrong take? Food for thought.
000ooo000 4 hours ago [-]
Downright silly thing to say given how astroturfed the internet is in 2025
azangru 4 hours ago [-]
Sure :-) Being baffled doesn't make one right. Nor, for that matter, does sharing a common viewpoint.
3 hours ago [-]
shafyy 5 hours ago [-]
This is always the same age-old discussion: Can you separate the art from the arists? And unsurprisingly, different people have different views on it. Even if you disagree, you should be able to understand why people don't want to use a product if their usage of that product makes the owner and CEO more powerful (and they think them being more powerful is a bad thing for humanity).
Edit to add a simple example:
Musk's wealth is mostly tied up in Tesla -> You think Musk uses his wealth to wield political power, political power that makes the world a worse place -> You still think Teslas are good cars -> Even though you think that, you don't want to spend your money on buying a Tesla, because this will make Musk more wealthly -> Start at the beginning
larnon 3 hours ago [-]
It is irrelevant whether we can separate the art from the artist, especially in this matter, when both the art and the artist are bad.
nicce 4 hours ago [-]
> A CEO is a person. He is human. Can't a human be on the wrong side of history on various matters, and what does it matter if he is? Can't he still do a decent job (whatever it is that CEOs do)? Why do we expect random entrepreneurs, celebrities, engineers, and so on to also be moral authorities or role models?
Exactly, it is a human behind the company that does every decision. Company is just legal shield. Every decision is affected by what they really are or think.
azangru 4 hours ago [-]
> Every decision is affected by what they really are or think.
This is called micromanagement :-)
I am sure there are organizations where the actual work that people do day to day is unaffected by who the people at the top are or what they think on matters other than the business (people at the top are often rather unpleasant anyway). I can't say whether such organizations are common or whether Vercel is one; but I believe I worked at such.
nicce 3 hours ago [-]
Most people in the company do what they are told to, because they are there to get money for the living. That is just about shifting responsibility to the upper level in hierarchy. So they are definitely affected by the decisions of the upper management.
Whenever there is a decisions to be made about increasing profits, for example, someone needs to judge based on moral weight. Outsource to India? Do something gray and think legal matters later? Maybe there is no moral, and the company should operate based on the risk assessment of fines breaking the law and negative PR. In all cases, "what person is", highly influences the outcome of these decisions.
azangru 3 hours ago [-]
In a well-functioning organization, the upper management set the vision and the goals for the company and for the product(s); and then let the people who do the actual work use their best judgement to move towards those goals. The upper management, of course, may decide that it would be more profitable to lay off the employees and to outsource to India; and that, of course, would have a direct impact on the work of those at the lower rungs; but I don't think that is the kind of concern that people have when they complain about Vercel's CEO.
throw-10-8 3 hours ago [-]
I don't think it's out of line to refuse to support companies where the CEO buddy up to fascists.
azangru 3 hours ago [-]
It's just that if I were using Vercel or Next.js (which I don't), I would be viewing my relationship with Vercel on a solely transactional basis. If they were giving away for free something that I needed (React or Next), I would take it. If they were selling something that I needed (Vercel hosting, if I were reckless enough to tie myself to it), I would pay for the service. If they charged too much for the service, I would investigate alternatives. It wouldn't enter my mind that I were "supporting" them. I would rather imagine that they were "supporting" me. And I wouldn't give a monkey's who they have for a CEO.
tock 3 hours ago [-]
Do you think a person of Palestinian origin should also continue seeing their relationship with Vercel on a solely transactional basis? Given that their families are likely affected and Vercel's CEO publicly supports it? I'm just trying to point out why people might have a different view on this.
azangru 52 minutes ago [-]
I can't, of course, pretend to know what goes on in the mind of such a person; and of course I accept that people have different views; this is very plain to see. What I lament is that people with those views insist that everyone should cut ties with people with other views, rather than accepting that different people may have different views.
Let me give you a couple of different examples for comparison. Github blocked all users from Iran. Pnpm cut all traffic from Russian ips, whereas Linus Torvalds affirmed the removal of Russian maintainers of the Linux kernel. These are real adversarial actions, the like of which could impact my decisions about a company or a technology, if I were on the receiving end of those. Cowtowing to people in power and taking photos with hateful people is just an undignified behavior that is ultimately just noise.
tock 36 minutes ago [-]
> What I lament is that people with those views insist that everyone should cut ties with people with other views, rather than accepting that different people may have different views.
It's only natural to think that way because these particular decisions are based on ones moral framework. It isn't like choosing a favourite tea. People will be pissed at each other when moral frameworks don't match.
> Cowtowing to people in power and taking photos with hateful people is just repulsive noise.
It comes down to what you said before. People have different views. It's noise to you. It isn't noise to others.
throw-10-8 3 hours ago [-]
That is known as "ignorant bliss".
d--b 4 hours ago [-]
Is it just me or does this feel like peak React?
throw-10-8 3 hours ago [-]
Peak react was React 16 imo.
quink 3 hours ago [-]
Hooks were first introduced in 16.8. Make it 18 maybe?
halflife 3 hours ago [-]
I think that that was the point
flowerlad 2 hours ago [-]
Exactly!
6 hours ago [-]
Rendered at 14:10:35 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Worse, Vercel is involved, and I literally don't remember anything good about that company.
I'd recommend to be very cautious with such news, and use older versions of React for the next couple of years.
They ship constantly, their UX is impeccable and they have made our lives as a startup infinitely easier, albeit at a higher cost which we're happy to pay.
The second "happy to pay" becomes "we could hire a team of devs for what we pay vercel" you will realize you made a giant mistake.
Hopefully you will be suffering from success and have the runway to migrate away or just eat the costs, but many many startup die due to impossible unit economics driven by ridiculous hosting costs that platforms like vercel lock you into.
It will be evenn worse when they see they need one, two, three more engineers to deal with the Next.js mess they created.
Don't expect user input, don't expect changes that go against their wants over the community's needs, and don't expect things to get better.
I don't care about the CEO's political stance, but Vercel's involvement with React has rubbed me the wrong way since the start of development of RSC. The development was basically behind half-closed doors, pretty much tied to Next.js (i.e. Vercel) and with zero specs except a high level description of what they were and their public API.
I don't care that they were WIP: the community should've been involved, not Vercel as a benevolent dictator guiding their design from start to almost finish. Such a huge paradigm shift shouldn't have been dictated by any particular entity... and IMO much less Next's team which I think are prone to overengineering and bad decisions.
IIRC there were points in time (maybe even currently?) where you had to use packages that were published to NPM but not even on any public repo.
I love the idea of RSC but that's where my love ends.
I thought I was alone on this.
I just fucking loathe how common this experience is now. Amazon seems to be the only one that doesn't do it, but I've experienced this exact issue on Best Buy, Target, Etsy, Mercari, ebay, and it just DRIVES ME UP THE WALL.
In this case people are critical of other things also and want to voice those things for selfish reasons without getting into mud slinging contests with fanatics who are protecting everything shitty just because it's their favourite hater that is on one side.
Perfect is the enemy of good and an ally of fanaticism.
No, Netanyahu.
Who Vercel's CEO recently posted for a selfie with on X, wishing "greatness for Israel".
Without mentioning the genocide being committed by Netanyahu right now.
Do you really believe, he believes starving in Gaza is not real?
With all the top tier access to information he has in his position?
Hands down one of the cringiest things I've ever read on this site. And it's why people don't take HN seriously. It's filled with a bunch of 13 year-old "edgy" narcissists who can't code.
I don't care because I'm just analyzing Vercel's stewardship of React, and Vercel's CEO political stance has zero impact on React's health.
This post is about React. Not about Gaza or politics, so I will give it exactly 0 seconds of thought when commenting on it.
You opened your post literally giving your thought about his political stance. Had you completely skipped this part, we'd be only discussing React and not Vercel's CEO stance.
Edit: Your quote can literally be understood as "His take doesn't bother me". If you didn't want to discuss this, you could (like someone else said) have worded it better to avoid confusion.
This might be one of the most naive statements I've ever read on this site.
Also, it's obviously not "just about React".
>lol. The moment Guillermo posted that picture, the internet was awash with blogs and pieces about how to move away from Vercel (who everyone now sees as the stewards of React). This is actually kinda hilarious to have to respond to and explain to.
>Just because you don't have principles, doesn't mean other people don't.
>Cmon. You can't possibly believe actions don't have consequences, do you?
This is actually kinda hilarious to have to respond to and explain to.
Just because you don't have principles, doesn't mean other people don't.
Cmon. You can't possibly believe actions don't have consequences, do you?
But who has become the defacto steward of React over the last 5 years? Vercel. Whose CEO has made a lot of news recently for their political views? Guillermo What front-end framework library now needs to distance itself from Vercel as it's main steward? React.
IT'S ALL POLITICS. That's the entire point of the foundation. That's what this whole discussion is about.
I don't know, I see a lot of posts and threads here of people discussing geo-political issues. Not just for the sake of it of course, but because politics is everywhere and affects everything, because technology is always going to have some form of politics attached, and because everyone is a political actor in their lives.
Separating fully any technology news and political happenstance is impossible. Now of course it doesn't mean every topic should devolve into identity politics, but having discussion about how and why things are they way they are is inherently political.
AMEN!!!!
Feel free to jump in the Discord [2] with any questions.
[1] https://cheatcode.co/joystick
[2] http://discord.cheatcode.co
I have a Clojure/ClojureScript app using React that I've been maintaining for the last 10 years. I don't use all the features of React, in fact I could probably use a much smaller library — the biggest advantage is that it provides a "re-render the UI based on app state change" model that fits Clojure very well. But I'm very happy that React is there and that it's been maintained with relatively little code rewriting necessary over the years.
Has this ever really been the case in the past 10 years?
AngularJS was pretty popular at the time, Angular 2 migration was looming, backbone still existed, jQuery (standalone or paired with both) was going strong, Polymer hit 1.0 and it looked like Web Components might actually be something and useful, React was gaining a lot of popularity, Vue was gaining a small amount of popularity, svelte an even smaller amount, Meteor was somewhat popular and had its own front end library.
Of course in addition to all that, traditional server rendered sites were more popular then than now and there were even more options there.
However, React quickly became pretty much the default. Not that there's 0 churn there. The "right way" to do React has changed quite a bit in the last decade. And early on before all the libs people liked to glue together somewhat matured/settled it was common to have to replace stuff that just got abandoned.
More than once I had to pick up someone's old unmaintained project to do a bug fix only to find I couldn't even get the project to install/run because it was in the pre auto lock file era and nobody ever ran `npm shrinkwrap`
It is absolutely true that companies were rushing to rewrite their code every few years when the new shiny JS library or framework came out. I was there for it. There was a quick transition from [nothing / mootools?] to jQuery to Backbone to React, with a short Angular detour about 13 years ago. If you had experience with the "new" framework you could pretty much get a front-end gig anywhere with little friction. I rewrote many codebases across multiple companies to Backbone during that time per the request of engineering management.
Now, is React underappreciated? In the past 10 years or so I've started to see a pattern of lack of appreciation for what it brings to the table and the problems it solved. It is used near universally because it was such a drastic improvement over previous options that it was instantly adopted. But as we know, adoption does not mean appreciation.
> React is used near universally, despite there being alternatives that are better in almost every way.
Good example of under-appreciation.
I agree that there was a period where many organizations did rewrite their apps from scratch, many of them switching to React, but I think very few did it ”every couple of years”, and I think very few are doing it at all today (at least not because of hype - of course there might always be other reasons you do a big rewrite). We should not confuse excitement about new technologies for widespread adoption, especially not in replacing existing code in working codebases.
https://mootools.net/core
However 0 of the typescript projects (front and back end) I've worked one (unless I was there when they started) used strict mode so the Typescript support was effectively wasted.
> despite there being alternatives that are better in almost every way.
This right here is the under appreciation. The new way to signal to others on forums that you are a really really great dev seems to be to bring up how much better some bizarro templating engine that abuses a niche JS language feature is.
Its gotten so bad that when I read FE dev I interpret it as "React Dev".
Its very hard to keep up with the frequent changes to programming models, new frameworks, CSS libraries (why the heck are they soo many?!) when you also have to design O(Log n) backends, IaC, Observability, LLMOps, etc.
I have come to a compromise and have started advocating for React/Redux/TS/NextJS as the default CRUD application stack so that I can focus on solving real CS problems in the backend that I’m passionate about.
These dependencies are the root of the issue.
FWIW, I've only ever professionally work with react on the frontend. For nearly 10 years too. My first job I was doing react.createElement() before classes were shortly introduced afterwards.
It's time that we move on to something better, and the react foundation being controlled by private entities while not being an actual democratic foundation is a good omen of what to expect.
As it turns out you shouldn't use them because they were essentially deprecated a long time ago. But in terms of comparing the merits in a more theoretical sense, there are simply tradeoffs between the two.
backwards compatibility is underrated
Being able to ignore parallel rendering, RSC, hooks, etc, and just write simple code for simple sites again would be fantastic.
Unfortunately all the major competition I've seen seems so significantly different that migrating any kind of non-trivial application would basically be a full rewrite. Is Preact or similar offering much promise here?
(I'm not entirely sold on Svelte 5 for the same role - I think it gives up some DX - although maybe I just like the thing I'm used to.)
I don't understand this statement. You can use the basics without involving yourself with anything complex. You can even still use class components. You can build components that are framework agnostic.
And you may have to work with developers who have a different preferred subset.
Is that not every software development effort, ever? Isn't that why "todo" apps, search engines, etc, constantly get "recreated". Live long enough to become the enemy and get replaced by a bare bones app that'll bloat itself into oblivion and repeat the cycle?
React is obviously the "new jquery", and something else will come one day. So many specially boot-camp devs are "react only" devs.
Scary stuff.
Web components tech such as Lit might be part of the future, replacing JSX, and then React purely becomes a middleware tool for DOM diffing and shuffling events up and data down.
Or maybe it's a small enough API but a lot of concepts. Or maybe I'm just grumpy that the days of "it's just a view layer" feel long ago.
I’ve interviewed a number of engineers who have very little grasp of what the DOM is and how it works because React abstracts the whole thing away. Server components are another are where some niceties mean a bunch of developers aren’t really understanding what’s going on with underlying HTTP requests.
While React’s API surface is small the average app will come with a chunk of extra stuff: Redux, next.js, yadda yadda. People take entire courses that never leave that bubble.
"Something else" is already here and has been for a long time. Vue and Svelte are both excellent alternatives.
Subjectively I am extremely in opposition to the fact that XML anything with composable functions is more intuitive than HTML templates by any stretch of the imagination.
You want to topple react, you need to solve a problem that’s as big as state management used to be in a way that react can’t also just copy/absorb, and you have to do it so well that developers will push to use it at work. You need to have a ux as clean as what React offers to its devs, and you probably need to come close enough in benchmarks to not get instantly shot down.
Why? When jQuery went away nothing happened. People just learned the new frameworks.
And it might never unless browsers implement better DOM apis.
The current DOM API implementation reminds me of that quote:
"look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power"
Like, I get that nothing is _owed_ here, but this feels like more of the same tragedy of the commons open source problem we see: tools that millions of apps depend on, barely propped up, and in this case, the child of a megacorporation that could easily create a proper evergreen endowment rather than a milquetoast token contribution to save face.
Or should we just be grateful?
Somehow because Meta has released a popular OSS library and dedicated over 10 years of engineering resources to it (that has generated immense value for the wider ecosystem), that they should've shelled out more than the $3M they're contributing in order to give its ownership away to a non-profit.
Maybe it's just me but I think they've contributed more than enough. I'm grateful for what they've already contributed and anything else they choose to contribute in future.
But in the context of who that $3million is coming from, how much they have available, how much responsibility they have for the state of it, and how much value it provides to everyone who isn't them, I think it's fair some people might have expected a little more.
If this went the other way where say FaceBook let people freely create accounts and talk to everybody and then later on either charged 10$/month, plastered the site with ads, or started to selling user data people would be upset about a bait and switch.
If you release something for free as you shouldn't be expected compensation for it. People also shouldn't expect anything beyond the terms that you've released it underneath as well.
$600,000/year just to run a governance board and organize a conference seems extraordinarily generous to me. In fact I think it's more likely the $3M is more likely to form an endowment for the foundation that will fund it's expenses running forward.
For now. My guess is they will be included in the next round of layoffs. Money for $100 Million pay packages for AI researchers has to come from somewhere!
is probably worth more in practice. The $3m will basically just cover 'founding the foundation' I guess.
I do wonder whether this is a sign Facebook may no longer develop new stuff in React.
They threw the resources behind RSC to make React, a framework for frontend reactivity, force opt-in for frontend reactivity. Meta is needed more than ever at this point, before React fully becomes a framework for burning compute on Vercel's infra.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/25/tech/chan-zuckerberg-primary-...
We can feel nostalgia but the world is moving.
It is hard to predict how everything will be in 5 years.
NextJS is a pile of garbage, and their platform is absurdly expensive and leans heavily on vendor lock in.
Vercel and Next.js have been the main testing ground during the development of React server components as well.
How much has Vercel contributed to the development of react over the past years?
The last truly useful react feature for me was error boundaries in React 16 (2017?) and I think hooks was react 16 too?
These days if I need ui components for an existing SSR app I just use web components or lightweight libs like mithril.
It also alienated a huge part of the userbase that decided to move away from React.
Far too many smart people are putting their energies into such discussions that add a lot of drag to the process of society and humanity moving forward for no net gain at all.
The CEO's politics are just icing on the cake.
They have made egregious mistakes that go far beyond "move fast and break things" and well into "we should have the lawyers join this call".
moreover, this entire initiative looks like a way to reduce vercel's influence, so if you want to be mad, then be mad in 5 yrs, not now.
…people paying for react.
Which is fair, but do we have bend knee and suggest they have the best interests of the react ecosystem at heart? They don’t.
They are invested in: people using next.js and hosting it on vercel.
If that’s not what you’re doing, their interests probably don’t align with yours.
- inconsistent behavior between hosted and self hosted versions of the same code
- horrible build times, like laughably bad multi-minute builds for trivial code bases
- crappy directory based routing system with lots of weird gotchas
- schizo identity JAMstack -> serverless -> ssr -> now its microvms + ai
- multiple hilariously long running GH issues where the dev team is thrashing around trying to debug their own black box framework
- "framework" that barely provides any of the primitives necessary to build web apps
- major breaking changes around core features like routing that require painful migrations
- general sloppiness, churn, and insecurity that comes from being part of the nodejs ecosystem
Thats not even getting into all of the shady patterns vercel uses to lock you into their overpriced hosting.
I've been a part of multiple teams that decided to build apps using NextJS, and while the FE is not my responsibility I typically got pulled in to help troubleshoot random issues. It was a complete waste of time in almost every case, and in one case resulted in the entire FE team being let go because they were unable to ship anything on time.
The real issues were the super tight coupling with MongoDB and their decision to roll their own package ecosystem instead of just using npm from day one.
I like the simplicity of Hono and use their html helper to write good old HTML that is send to the client.
I hope this isnt the way that React as a whole will go in the end.
But fortunately there are enough alternatives about.
I won't repeat what the sibling poster said, but I can tell you, I've been using NextJS from v12-v15 and in that time we've had:
- The catastrophic (and, at the time, UNDOCUMENTED) "aggressive, opt-out caching of all fetch calls", which confused the living daylights out of everyone who suddenly couldn't retrieve updated data from their servers. Like, don't override a native JS function that's supposed to work in an expected way, with black-box magic that adds caching behaviour that then needs to be overriden _per route_ with directives on each route. Cache headers can be added to fetch calls and are easy to configure globally via axios if needed. If you're going to do black magic, call it "nextfetch" or something
- The app router / page router transition was shockingly badly handled, with so much missing documentation around dynamic routes
- I don't know how many different ways of fetching / setting metadata / <head>-related techniques I've had to learn by now. It seems to change all the time. BUT, that isn't the worst part....the worst part was / is:
- You couldn't, for the longest time, fetch metadata for a page without duplicating fetch requests. I think this is where their fetch-deduping thing came from. But again, black-box magic on a native JS function with very inconsistent behaviour, so for a while, all pages in our app just had to make two fetch calls per page that needed specific metadata added to the <head>
- Vercel as a platform not allowing to set billing limits (have fun with your DDoS that they don't recognise as such)
- Middleware is one file. That's what you get. No chaining, nothing. One god-function for everything. Just think about the anti-pattern that is
- I don't know whether it's clever or terrible, but if you want to add a sitemap, you do so by defining a route by creating a folder called sitemap.xml (yes, a directory), where you then put your route.ts which is in keeping with the way the new router should work. But somehow it just doesn't sit right with me. Folders with file extensions. But it also adds a lot of ability to make the sitemap highly customisable and dynamic, so maybe it's ok
- You suddenly needed to start awaiting url params, cookies, etc. which is sort of fine, but was a huge change causing warnings all over the compiler for months and months
Anyway, those are just a few things off the top off my head. I already find React to be quite counter-intuitive and non-deterministic, but NextJS just adds a layer of pain on top with very, very few advantages.
I am dying to get my hands on an alternative, but also don't want to rebuild all of the apps I built when I was still optimistic about NextJS.
Whoever implemented that has no idea how middleware is supposed to work.
I kept wondering if there's something wrong with me or if a framework recommended in so many places can really be this shitty, until I read your comment.
I only vibe code in my Metaverse open office by thinking with my Beta NeuralLink.
Edit: apparently there's some confusion about my comment. I neither use, like, or support Next. I just found it suspicious that a bunch of new accounts showed up making generic comments in support of OP, which to me was a red flag.
I think a somewhat neutral summary (of someone still annoyed by Vercel/Next) would be like this (Notice the distinctions between Site and App, not always clear cut but a dividing line imho):
- React was created by FB to solve real technical issues as their frontend became larger and more complex.
- Site creators liked it as it was one of the solutions of a real issue of reconcilliation of state and view (that often wasn't so bad in the big picture) but React was often a bit heavyweight, App creators really loved it as state reconcilliation took away that entire class of bugs that just became so much worse quickly as Apps grew (and React allowed for more people to create larger apps).
(Angular and Vue has always done this also, they are parallel developments)
- Pressure from those doing sites has always pushed development of React to be "simpler", often good for most parties (even if I think that Redux was mostly thrown overboard prematurely).
- Part of simplifications was bootstrapping, create-react-app became one of the recommended ways to start projects (and was also incorporated into other toolchains such as .NET templates)
- Heavy builds, disabled JavaScript and SEO issues was teetering issues (especially for public site builders), not entirely sure of the inspirations but Next did solve that (perhaps not always entirely elegantly initially)
- React internals start to change to better support these scenarios, nobody really has objections since changes in React has seldomly been for the worse (functional components, hooks, etc). Vercel gains traction as a "do-good" choice.
- After all troubles of OpenSSL, Node finally adopts OpenSSL 3.0 thus breaking create-react-app that had been "deprecated" by the React team (it's easily shimmable but it sent people looking).
- People looking for options find that the only "official" way to use React according to the site is to use Next, so many start adopting it out of fear of being left behind again.
- The Next model however is quite different and tailored to "site" builders and/or people running the full stack in JS
- React however is quite popular outside of the JS only world for enterprise SPA and/or mobile apps where trying to shoehorn in a Next "frontend-backend" becomes overkill and extra complexity. (We used it for one or two projects but have now abandoned it for our regular work).
- The React site is updated slightly, Vite and similar are now mentioned but the perception damage is there and hasn't let go (and last I checked using f.ex. Vite was not "recommended" as being an inferior option to Next for React usage)
- A very popular option for CSS-in-JS (styled) becomes deprecated due to React internals changing for Next and requiring significant rework that the original author had no interest in (no really clear successor with support across the board for Next, SPA and React-Native scenarios hadn't appeared last we checked).
Now this is my perception of events and I'm pretty sure that I'm not alone in this, the Next/React authors felt like it was the way forward due previous feedback for those that hurt (site builders) but probably misjudged or didn't appreciate how much React was used in other workloads(apps) that got disturbed while they were improving their thing.
That Vercel has managed to alienate people in other ways like billing (or politics?) certainly doesn't seem to have helped either.
Seen a lot of people in my professional circles shit on Next/Vercel over beers, but then go to work every day and bang out Next because it's what their manager chose 5 years ago.
Vercel can only ride that wave until the people who hate their product are the decision makers.
your comment would be a lot more interesting if you attempted to pose a counterpoint besides "BOT!".
It's designed to be deployed on Vercel. Production-ready hosting part of the Framework is not Open Source nor well documented.
https://github.com/vercel/next.js/discussions/59167 https://www.netlify.com/blog/how-we-run-nextjs/
the official recommendation we got was to just run it on vercel
I would go as far to say that nextjs is not self-hostable in its current state if you expect high traffic and low latency.
He is a programming prodigy, and that's it. Not a nice person.
Nevertheless, my anecdote should only be taken with a grain of salt... After all, the only person that probably has backups of foropelle is Rauch himself. And who cares what a teenager had to say back in 2006?
1. Vercel / Next are complete technical trash wrapped in egregious vendor lock-in. This directly influences their desire to steer the react foundation in a direction that aligns with their roadmap for Vercel/Next.
2. Their CEO thought it would be a good idea to have a photo op with perhaps the most controversial figure in world politics. This just means he's not nearly as smart as he thinks he is and likely needs a handler.
And also, you want me to believe that your throwaway account's "purely technical critique" of Vercel is unmotivated by politics? Just a complete coincidence that the CEO is politically opposed to your faction.
So yes, it is a complete coincidence that vercel/next is garbage and that their CEO is cozy with fascists.
There are plenty of technical critiques of next in this thread.
I would start by googling "NextJs auth middleware bypass" if you would like concrete examples of their incompetency.
If he didn't want political commentary being brought into discussions about the company he leads he should have used his big CEO brain to determine that a photo op with a highly polarizing fascist world leader is not a good look.
i do not care about what those 2 idiot nations do.
[0] - https://react.dev/community/team
Some other kids (and esp their parents) think this is terrible, that Marky is being cheap and Vicky only wants control of the playground. They don't like Marky and Vicky and try to hurt them every chance they get.
Also, for the new version of the toy you'll have to learn to play a new game as the old way to play with it'll become half-working.
At least that's what parents are afraid of.
Vercel wants to own React, its been obvious about it for years now.
Edit to add a simple example:
Musk's wealth is mostly tied up in Tesla -> You think Musk uses his wealth to wield political power, political power that makes the world a worse place -> You still think Teslas are good cars -> Even though you think that, you don't want to spend your money on buying a Tesla, because this will make Musk more wealthly -> Start at the beginning
Exactly, it is a human behind the company that does every decision. Company is just legal shield. Every decision is affected by what they really are or think.
This is called micromanagement :-)
I am sure there are organizations where the actual work that people do day to day is unaffected by who the people at the top are or what they think on matters other than the business (people at the top are often rather unpleasant anyway). I can't say whether such organizations are common or whether Vercel is one; but I believe I worked at such.
Whenever there is a decisions to be made about increasing profits, for example, someone needs to judge based on moral weight. Outsource to India? Do something gray and think legal matters later? Maybe there is no moral, and the company should operate based on the risk assessment of fines breaking the law and negative PR. In all cases, "what person is", highly influences the outcome of these decisions.
Let me give you a couple of different examples for comparison. Github blocked all users from Iran. Pnpm cut all traffic from Russian ips, whereas Linus Torvalds affirmed the removal of Russian maintainers of the Linux kernel. These are real adversarial actions, the like of which could impact my decisions about a company or a technology, if I were on the receiving end of those. Cowtowing to people in power and taking photos with hateful people is just an undignified behavior that is ultimately just noise.
It's only natural to think that way because these particular decisions are based on ones moral framework. It isn't like choosing a favourite tea. People will be pissed at each other when moral frameworks don't match.
> Cowtowing to people in power and taking photos with hateful people is just repulsive noise.
It comes down to what you said before. People have different views. It's noise to you. It isn't noise to others.