Comment by cockatiel_day | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cockatiel_day | Hacker News Reader

My ongoing concern with Next is the Vercel's team unresponsiveness to page-breaking bugs coming off of features marked "stable" and in the docs.

Lately, it seems like most issues aren't even being acknowledged. It's pretty frustrating to encounter a bug in a documented use case, spend hours trying to fix it, realize it's a Next issue that was filed months ago but has yet to receive a response from Vercel, or to have reproduced and explained the issue and be ignored for months and counting.

The issue count at Next is huge, and I'm sure overwhelming, but if you're going to hype "stable" features that are beta at best, there ought to be some measure of support (or at least acknowledgment) for when they don't work.

People invest their livelihoods in these frameworks, and false claims are damaging. I'm currently knee deep in a project that can't budget a rewrite, so I'm just hoping someone at some point notices these issues and they get fixed. Not great. I've yet to encounter a project that calls features "stable" as carelessly as Next does. I've never felt so burned by open-source marketing.

If I was starting a new project today, I would stay away from Next.

I'm sorry that we haven't been able to respond fast enough. Hundreds of issues are opened every month, and the rate is increasing. We're working hard to try and triage as best as possible and hopefully hiring more folks to help out as well, too.

Could you share the issues you're running into? While there's going to continue to be bugs and things to improve in the framework (it will never be "perfect" or "done"), that does not mean that it's not stable. We mentioned in our conference keynote today that 8,000 of the top 1 million sites on the web are now using the App Router in production.

Regardless, we want to keep improving. It sounds like you have had issues with the Pages Router specifically, and not the App Router, as you mentioned budgeting a rewrite. Is that correct?

Hey Lee, thank you for replying. It's nice to be heard! I know that everyone is working hard, and no software of Next's ambition is perfect, much less at this stage, but all the same, I think there's a threshold for stable that isn't being met, and I think that's doing your users a disservice.

The issues I'm experiencing are for the App Router. Namely, and to keep things reasonable scoped, with parallel routes. These are being recommended for common use cases, but a lot of things are broken along their way (along with intercepting routes)... I'd recommend searching issues for the full breadth, but here are a few that jump to mind:

Server actions don't work in parallel routes unless that route was hard navigated: https://github.com/vercel/next.js/issues/54173

Parallel routes don't unmount if navigated from with anything other than router.back()... this might be a documentation issue, as I recently got this to work as expected in one case with a null page.js at the root of the parallel route: https://github.com/vercel/next.js/issues/49662

CSS Modules don't work on hard navigation... entire paths render unstyled: https://github.com/vercel/next.js/issues/52245 https://github.com/vercel/next.js/issues/56524

Speaking of CSS Modules, they import multiple times in indeterminate order. This breaks precedence and the cascade, making styles indeterminate. There are hacks that mitigate this, but even with the hacks it causes problems: https://github.com/vercel/next.js/issues/51030

These aren't exactly edge cases, and to get at the heart of my complaint, they haven't been acknowledged, or haven't been followed up on for months, despite being marked stable. I don't mean to suggest that you all aren't doing the best you can, and I certainly don't mean to suggest that you can do better technically, but as a user it's concerning to get in deep and continually run into beta issues on what's meant to be stable, and be in the dark as to when they'll get resolved, much less if the team is even aware of them.

I'll add, it's kind of baffling to hear that things are stable, there are just ton of issues you can't get to.

I'd posit that Next has a ton of users, and a ton of issues, because it prematurely marks features as stable, and then markets them aggressively. Instead of working through these issues in beta with a manageable number of early adopters with aligned expectations, Next gets more than they can handle, frustrated that features sold as production ready are not. This, to me, is a questionable business strategy, not a sound technical one.

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