Man, I love Next ... but I also love Vite ... and I hate the Next team, because they focus on fancy new features for 0.1% of their users, at the complete expense of the other 99.9% of the Next community (who they basically ignore).

This gives someone like me everything we want. Better performance is something the Next community has been begging for for years: the Next team ignored them, but not the Cloudflare team. Meanwhile Vite is a better core layer than the garbage the Next people use, but you still get the full Next functionality.

I wish Cloudflare the best of luck with this fork: I hope it succeeds and gets proven so I can use it at my company!

What is it you love about Next that isn’t tied to Vercel and isn’t available elsewhere? I love Next too but I find the value is inextricably linked to Vercel. I can’t imagine choosing to use Next if I’m not choosing it for Vercel’s fancy stuff.

You think you'll get better long-term support from an experiment that a single engineer did in his spare time?

Next is the worst framework I’ve ever used next to rails. It’s pure overhead for most apps.

at my job we have some 7+ year old nextjs apps that don't receive new features but still do their jobs perfectly fine, and they keep changing random shit around for no reason, we've had to waste time on multiple refactors already for major nextjs version bumps once the older ones are no longer supported

It may be sacrilege to bring it into this conversation, but I've spent the last year building a fairly large community site in Nuxt, vite has been wonderful, though I prefer vue over react. I am a little annoyed I paid for NuxtUI Pro like 3 months before it became free, but whatever.

I don't get it, honest question (like the others), what exactly do you love?

Weird, I hate Next and I love Vite. We have a big (I mean _really_ big) production app that runs on Next.js at work and it's the slowest thing I've ever worked on. I had to upgrade my machine to an M4 Pro just to get local dev compile times down from 5-8 minutes to ~30-60 seconds per route. And my hot refreshes are down from ~15-20 seconds to 5-10. It's _bad_. All the Next.js team does is give you the run-around and link to their docs and say here, try these steps, you're probably doing something wrong, etc. Nope. The framework is just slow. They use simple toy apps to demo how fast it is, but nobody tells you how slow it is at scale.

Yeah, Vercel should have done this with NextJS a while ago. There is a reason why quite literally every other framework uses Vite because it amazing, easy to use, and easy to extend.

Everything just becomes a plugin.

I mean you don't want really want to use javascript for the backend anyway... What's the problem with just using vite and any backend of your choosing?