⚠️ Warning: this post criticises the React and Next.js frameworks. Cultists with a weak disposition may struggle to disassociate themselves and feel personally attacked. Take a deep breath, remember that React is a tool and not a lifestyle choice, you’ll be ok :)

Imagine you’re browsing the web. You visit a website that appears to have fully rendered. You’re two paragraphs into reading the content and then…

Highly memed comic book panel of Batman slapping Robin. The sound effect caption is replaced by a Next.js error message.

KAPOW!

The entire website vanishes before your very eyes!

Nothing remains but a solitary error message in the centre of a bleak page. Black text on white, or white text on black, because dark mode support is still priority.

Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).

You don’t need to imagine it. Just visit any domain infected by the blight that is Next.js and this error can jump scare you. Vercel’s popular React-as-a-service product is a plague on the web and a liability to any business that uses it.

Next.js error message

Maybe you’ve visited or built a Next.js thing and never seen this error? Oh good for you! The error is real has been reported on for months to no avail.

Obliteration

There are so many things wrong with this error. Let’s start with the fact that it’s obviously not written for regular visitors. Why is it shipped in production code? It’s an error of last resort for developers and yet provides scant detail.

If a website is nothing but an error, that means something has gone catastrophically wrong to the point of no recovery. But this error occurs long after a perfectly readable page has rendered. It can take several seconds before the page vanishes. There is absolutely no need for client-side JavaScript “hydration” to obliterate an entire page.

Bug Reports

Is this one bug in Next.js, or can we point the “skill issue” finger at developers? Either the framework authors, or the developers using it, are doing something very, very wrong (it’s both). Evidently, neither party are able to avoid this error.

Attempts to report the issue on the Next.js GitHub repo are automatically closed by a bot. Multiple reports include evidence of the error occurring on nextjs.org.

the nextjs.org website erroring

The Next.js documentation is not immune to this error (issue #79622)

#79622 — 26th May ’25
#78518 — 24th Apr ’25 (I tried)
#75637 — 04th Feb ’25
#65772 — 15th May ’24
#48635 — 20th Apr ’23 (remains open)

Now in fairness “it doesn’t work” is not a helpful bug report. But when you’ve designed your framework to throw “it doesn’t work” errors in production, what do you expect? You’d think such a critical issue that randomly takes down high profile websites, including the Next.js website itself, would be a priority? Apparently not.

Considering the prevalence and longevity of this error I suspect the mountain of complexity and footguns within Next.js make it impossible to track down any one cause. Have they tried looking at “the browser console for more information”?

Whatever is at fault here, the resulting error is still a major issue unto itself. If HTML is pre-rendered on the server there is absolutely no reason to ever replace the entire page with an error, regardless of client-side bugs. It doesn’t need to work that way.

Anakin looks confidently at Padme: 'We're doing client-side hydration', Padme responds smiling: 'With graceful degradation, right?', Anakins does not reply, Padme no longer smiling: 'Right?'

Next.js was designed to work that way, graceful degradation be damned.

Put The Framework Down

If you’re a developer, please do the web a favour by not building upon broken legacy tech. Next.js is a rotten incompetent framework with no signs of improvement. It can’t even do basic metadata properly. If a framework can’t handle such fundamentals it’s not fit for purpose. When a framework tries to cover up embarrassing security vulnerabilities, maybe it’s not a good choice?

Some — for the sake of my mentions: not you — React and Next.js fanboys are so trapped in a bubble they think the web and React are synonymous. Some have learnt to code nothing else. Sorry, the web is not React. It never was. It’s time to wake up and face reality. Stop drinking the Kool-Aid and escape Facebook & Vercel’s fever dream.

Have you considered that you don’t need a JavaScript framework to build a website?

Something to think about.