Vercel

Moving Away from Vercel and NextJS

Ethan Glover

Echoed Opinions

Why I Won't Use Next.js, Kent C. Dodds

Next.js, just why?, Pilcrow

I've been a Vercel and NextJS stan for years. Since version 7 when it was being compared to Jekyll and Hugo, I've been defending it as a professional grade tool for building modern web applications. And just as public opinion seems to be swaying in favor of NextJS, I'm very much done with it. And for the people finally getting on board with NextJS in the last year or so, the same people I've been trying to convince for the last 5 years, I'm sorry we couldn't meet in the middle.

I'm done with NextJS for the same reason a lot of people are hearing about for the first time and thinking, “this is actually pretty good.” React now recommends NextJS for new projects. At first, I was excited about this. Finally React is growing up. I gushed over the documentation changes inReact Development is About to Change.

If you're learning React, we recommend Create React App. ... If you're looking to start a production-ready project, Next.js is a great place to start.

- Start a New React Project

I've been thinking of NextJS 13 as really like, this is the real React 18 release. Because even though we have a lot of primitives in React 18, you can't really take advantage of them unless you have a framework that takes... that is built on top of those architectural primitives. So on Facebook.com, Facebook has an infrastructure that's based on Relay and some other routing concepts that... I mean one way to think of it is that NextJS is an open source implementation of that. In some ways it even goes a step further now with server components. I'm really excited for the rest of the React community to now be able to take advantage of all of these improvements that we spent so many years researching and building.

- Next.js Conf 2022, October 25, 2022

on the other hand, for the past five years, much of our work has been directed towards features that can only truly shine within a deeper stack integration. the most basic one is server rendering; it makes sense to render React to HTML, but this requires a bit of manual wiring!

- Dan Abramov, Oct 25, 2022

this is why I like to think of React as two things. React is a library. it is *also* an architecture (which frameworks may implement). this architecture doesn't specify things like filename conventions, but it's focused on pieces where deep integration with React has most value.

- Dan Abramov, Oct 25, 2022

The Abysmal Handling of App Router

Reacts big new change that has lead them to finally recommend frameworks is React Server Components. An incredible feature who's architecture allows a client and server state synchronization we haven't seen before with this sort of ease. But NextJS's handling of it has been abysmal. Next 13 was released with an experimental app router immediately after the 2022 conference. It was rightfully labelled as an alpha feature because it was far from done. Still, the closer NextJS got to promoting app router from alpha to stable, the social media PR started to get a little heavier. Lee Robinson and Sebastian Markbåge started answering more questions and frustrations on NextJS on Twitter. When people asked when it would be ready for production, their replies would be “It's pretty much ready now.” This drove some of the more naive to start building production apps with app router. Which I'll get into more later.

Not much longer after, a second conference for the year is scheduled and announced by Vercel. Everyone knows what's coming, it's just a question of why and how. Why another conference in the same year? And how is it possible that app router is going to be announced as stable so soon? We're all seeing hundreds of bugs that make this thing unusable. The NextJS GitHub goes into overdrive, the Vercel representatives start pushing more people to try app router and report issues to them. “It's pretty much ready now. But we need more reproducible bugs.”

App router is announced as ready for production on May 4, 2023 and create-next-app now recommends starting with it. It is not done. We all know this. People are pointing it out, Vercel and React won't even respond. They keep asking for reproducible bugs, they're getting hundreds but not a word about whether this was a good idea to begin with. Vercel is communicating through the filter of PR and marketing and they are not being transparent.

i still love programming but i’m totally burned out on the programming discourse. at least atm. not good energy. i wonder what a fun and playful version of this could look like

- Dan Abramov, Jun. 26 2023

also i’m obviously speaking from my own personal perspective. the react party line is we’re working on it yada yada. because we are. non-heckin-stop. but my personal feeling is that this attitude and climate will eventually burn people out one by one. no future is assured

- Dan Abramov, Jun. 30 2023

imo app router 1.0 was the nextjs ios 7 moment. a radical cleanup but everything is too flat, the labels are misaligned, and the moving blur is jerky. marked as stable early but clearly (imo!!!) a move into the right direction, with the visual layer architecture persisting to now

- Dan Abramov, Sep. 14 2023

Dan is the only person that got close to speaking honestly about the reality of app router and it's RSC implementation. He's quite nice and plays the game well. I feel he does hold back in the interest of public image and not hurting feelings. But to me, this is not a professional approach, we need to learn to treat our profession as a profession, not a family gathering. If something is going wrong, we need to be frank and open. If technologies or companies are handling something poorly, that has nothing to do with any individual. We can allow the building to take the insults get offended while we humans work on progress. It's unhealthy to take criticism against a company or product as an individual, no matter how much you've contributed.

While the bloggers were enjoying the ability to async/await their favorite CMS directly in a React component, a lot of people were discovering some very alarming issues. Losing access to server side basics like headers and cookies. loading.tsx files conflicting with one another causing Suspense to fire loading states multiple times. No official way to handle dynamic forms. No stable way to handle forms period. Hundreds of issues related to Next bundling experimental versions of React (RSC isn't even stable in React yet.). Official current documentation using experimental imports such as useFormStatus, useFormState and useOptimistic. A lot of people seem to have forgotten that Next aliased the experimental “use” hook for React as a stable feature and silently removed it soon after because of how many bugs it had caused. This is barely touching the tip of the iceberg in terms of issues app router has and still has today.

Why Leave NextJS Now?

When App Router went stable, I tried building a new application with it from scratch. Dynamic content with lots of updates by multiple users. Getting it to even build, was a massive headache. I spent weeks trying to find workarounds for broken features. What I ended up with is the slowest site I have ever built in over 20 years of building for the web. One that I don't trust to work and one that I'm not proud of showing off. It killed my energy for the project entirely.

I won't say app router didn't work for everything I migrated it to. I have a basic site that pulls data from Sanity. Incremental Static Regeneration is good. But moving this project to app router wasn't using anything other than RSC. None of the new NextJS features, just the one feature that came from React itself. It was the same for my blog, it's all statically built, very difficult for Next to mess it up. Except for my new homepage. Paginating through multiple categories of data on the same page. This is what told me I'm done with NextJS.

The simple answer to multiple paginations on the same page is client side rendering. But this caused an issue with NextJS because fetching new data would trigger Suspense to reload every category. So I thought, let me wrap each category in it's own Suspense boundary. This way, the loading state will be caught for the individual category. This does not happen. Instead, both loading states are triggered. All categories reload, and then the individual category reloads when going to a new page. Meaning when you move to a new page on a category, you see all categories as a loading spinner or skeleton, they all load, then the one that you moved to the next page on goes into a loading spinner or skeleton AGAIN, before finally showing the content again.

The official NextJS solution to this seems to be parallel routing. But parallel routing has to be setup in a layout file. And for the homepage, that means the RootLayout. If I put those categories in the RootLayout that means it shows on every page. Now I've got to do some ridiculous conditional logic to hide it, or do a URL rewrite from another route. And I'll say, btw, that next config rewrites are just redirects. They don't exactly work.

I called this out from the beginning. Using file naming conventions to handle logic was a bad idea. It creates restrictions and removes escape hatches. This is the wrong kind of opinionation. There's no possibility for an inversion of control.

And of course the NextJS subreddit has become an advertising board, immediately deleting any criticism about app router beyond simple issues that seem fixable in the immediate future such as the slow dev server and hot reloads. And... can I just say, who cares about a slow dev server? Why on gods earth would that ever be a priority? There are far more important issues to pay attention to. The focus for Vercel seems to be to maintain the attention of Twitter and public GitHub issues, which lets be honest, is primarily hobbyists who aren't deploying most of what they're doing.

When you couple this with all the other frustrations I had building with NextJS, I found it's just not worth it. So I started looking for other frameworks. I like .NET as a backend, but Razor pages aren't something you can just whip up in a minute like you can with JSX. Remix is basically just a copy of Next 12 and I never really trusted it. Gatsby's data layer is a pest and not great for working with anything that isn't a GraphQL CMS. Svelte has too much Vercel influence who I've lost all trust in. So I finally landed on Astro.

Astro > NextJS

Astro provides an easy way to hydrate client side components via their signature islands. And allow you to prebuild pages so they aren't refetched on request. Then this can be opted out of for, let's say a dynamic API route that needs pagination params. It just checks all the boxes with none of the headaches.

The compile step of Astro is refreshing. I get a simple dist directory and I can use node to run the index file. Build it with a Dockerfile and hand it off to Render for deployment. I feel like Vercel lured me into the illusion of convenience. Sure, if I want to build projects and put serious time into them, I can't spend a bunch of time on cloud platforms like AWS. That's a project in itself. So serverless means I can focus on building. But there are plenty of great options out there that are honestly better than Vercel. So my current stack is as follows:

In the future, I'm likely to move images to Cloudflare as well. (Or Cloudinary) I'm very surprised by the number of simple services Cloudflare offers. They remind me of a network service version of DigitalOcean. A couple clicks and you get what you wanted.

Astro also provides a simple way to have some fun with multiple frameworks such as LitHTML which I've always wanted to make use of. This feels right. Building with Astro has been as fun and as useful as building with NextJS used to be. And I can't wait to get into converting more projects.