Comment by UserMark
13 hours ago
I have a Nextjs heavy app which takes around 7 minutes currently. But I've been thinking of moving away from next for a long time now. TanStack seems to be a good fit. This gives me a bit more confidence in just doing it.
Is server-rendered HTML that bad for 2026 web or is everyone building complex apps?
Many of my customers insists on using Next.js or similar but when I browse their website I don't get the point. They are downloading and executing megabytes of JS while in-page interactions tends to be limited to few basic stuff. Never seen one of their project requiring offline mode. Maybe that's being able to easily replace a [FRAMEWORK] dev with another.
I think the unfortunate truth is the simplest. Web development has long been detached from rationality. People are drawn to complexity like moths to a flame.
> People are drawn to complexity like moths to a flame.
Not to complexity, but to abstraction. The more something is abstracted away, the more fungible "developers" become, to the eventual tune of Claude Code.
No one cares that trying to debug a modern application is as hellish as its performance, the KPI that executives go for is employment budget.
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It is fashionable, and Vercel has made a chain of partners that make Next.js/React the only official option to extend SaaS products.
I recently switched from NextJS — where every one of the dozens of projects I built would have 7-8 minute deployment times, regardless of hosts — to React Router, and saw my deployment times drop to 1-2 minutes.
Aside from some difficulty with mastering environment variables, I’ve been delighted with the change and will probably not look back.
I made two serious attempts to get into front end web development, around 5 years apart. Both times I started with the most popular framework. Both times the most popular framework was something different before I even finished the project.
Looks like maybe things haven't changed much?
As a cpp developer I had to chuckle there. And I thought our compile times were bad.
I've been pretty happy with TanStack start for a medium-sized project. I would not know how its build time would compare to Next, but our similarly sized Remix (sorry, React router v7) app takes longer to build.
TanStack just has a nicer mental model overall and works great with TanStack query for cache I validation and stuff like that.
Remix was promising but there was so much ceremony in registering API routes and stuff. Tanstack just lets you define server functions arbitrarily with no ceremony.
Might be worth a spike and some tokens to ask Claude Code to migrate and test the build time and ergonomics.
I've been on the remix on a previous project, I have to say that Remix was even worse. But that's probably of the setup with vite etc not being correctly done.
Are you on turbopack? It's available on Next 16 and just took our build times down from 6 minutes to 2 minutes
Yep this is what's often misunderstood.
We also recently cut our build times in half moving from Webpack to Turbopack on production builds after jumping to NextJS 16. We'd already been using Turbopack in development for a while which yielded massive DX improvements related to performance. Production build times will drop further once Turbopack production build caching is stable.
Webpack -> Turbopack is the smart initial migration. I'd bet Railway went straight from Webpack -> Vite not realising that their real gains sat with the build tooling, not NextJS vs Tanstack.
Yes I'm on turbopack and running the latest version of Nextjs.