Next.js 16.3, WebSocket on Vercel, cnfast, Instant Navigations, React Libraries for 2026, What RSCs Can Do

Next.js 16.3 preview introduces "Instant Navigations", a new way to make app navigations feel much faster. There are also new dev tools like Instant Insights, a Navigation Inspector, and a Playwright helper for testing instant page changes

A positive look at where Next.js is heading, based on demos shown at Next.js Night in Amsterdam and London. The big theme is better, more declarative caching, plus new “instant insights” in dev mode that help spot slow parts of your app and suggest fixes

Robin Wieruch updated his popular article on the essential libraries and tools for building React applications in 2026. It covers everything from project setup and state management to databases, hosting, and beyond

If you use tailwind-merge with shadcn/ui, this one's worth a look. cnfast is a drop-in replacement that produces byte-identical output but runs 3.8x faster on average (up to 7x in component-heavy code)

A persisted Next.js chat template for eve (Vercel's latest framework for building agents), built with shadcn/ui, Tailwind CSS, Streamdown, Better Auth, Drizzle, Neon, and Upstash Redis

and putting it in front of 7,000+ Next.js developers.

🌈 Related

Compound components are a group of components that work together and share state. This post shows why they work best for layout with mostly static, different kinds of children like tabs or cards, and why data-driven lists like <Select> and <Option> are often the wrong use for them

, and things have moved fast since then. The Pull Request has now been merged, and support was quickly added to Turbopack too. That means you can now try it in Next.js by enabling experimental.rustReactCompiler

Moving Linear from styled‑components to StyleX

Linear shares how they're moving from runtime CSS-in-JS to StyleX for build-time style extraction and stronger encapsulation