Issue #48: Don't Worry, Be Happy

🎶 In every life we have some trouble but when you worry you make it double… 🎶

I like summer because, even when things feel sad and lonely, the sun gives off a lot of positivity. The last fortnight was quite calm and pleasant in the webdev informational space, so I’m quite happy to share mostly positive news from the metaframeworks world and everything around.

The Good

The Babel team (yes, Babel is still a thing, it still exists, and it’s still not rewritten in Rust!) released the first major version update in 8 years. It’s cool to hear that it’s not only evolving, but still actively growing.

Babel has grown from 1.7 million weekly downloads in 2018, to 651 million weekly downloads this week (Jun 2026). Babel has doubled its weekly download counts in the last year.

This is a big (and breaking!) modernization release that switches the tool into ESM mode, improves TypeScript support, and deprecates a lot of software archaeology, so check out the migration notes carefully if you use it (I do use it in my personal metaframework project, just saying, as it’s not only a Vite world out there, you know).

While preparing to release a new version (as usual with long-lasting drum rolls), the Next.js team is publishing a lot of interesting previews (including a lot of unsolicited garbage, but still). One thing that can actually be useful is the instant navigations feature.

In Next.js 16.3, we are shipping new opt-in behaviors that let you have the best of both worlds: server-driven apps with instant navigations. You get the full benefits of a server, but navigations are instant like in a single-page app.

Interestingly, Waku, another RSC-oriented metaframework tool, has this feature too (which is also quite early and experimental there). One thing that’s unique to Waku, though, is the Slices feature, which its creator, Daishi Kato, recently elaborated on. The thing is quite nostalgic, as it comes from Gatsby’s history.

The Bad

As I hinted already, there’s not much drama these days in the metaframeworks world, except for the drastically annoying and never-ending AI bangaranga, which, as the guys from the HTML All The Things podcast confirmed, is in 99% of cases caused by the ubiquitous desire to please our CEOs, so none of it is real anyway; we’re good.

One worrying thing that caught my attention last week, though, was an observation by Filippo Valsorda on the devaluing of security reports, which puts us all in quite a bit of danger. I really hope the former and the latter (going hand in hand) won’t spoil the software development party for us anytime soon, but just in case, be warned and prepared: some things are not what they seem!

The Noteworthy

While some products move slowly and stick to unrisky stability, other tools prefer to run fast, break things, test the waters, and such.

The release candidate for the new era of TypeScript — version 7 with a Go-based compiler — is out for testing. I’m sure it won’t take Microsoft too much time to switch, as the preparation and testing phases were running for quite a long time already.

The Deno team also is not stopping, even after squeezing the org chart and stuff, so their new release 2.9 contains a lot of cool new features for the platform, including the ability to quickly turn your metaframework-based web app into a cross-platform desktop application without using Electron or Tauri. The release also includes major performance improvements, features for quick migration from npm, pnpm, yarn, and Bun (including preserving the lockfile state!), testing and security improvements, smaller standalone binaries, and other awesomeness, all of which make switching to Deno quite enticing.

Believe it or not, the changes listed above still don’t tell you everything that got better in 2.9. You can view the full list of pull requests merged in Deno 2.9 on GitHub.

React Router got its new major version 8 (declared “boring”, but we all know the drill with the stuff published on the remix.run website). The blog post contains a lot of nostalgia for the past v7 epoch, so I highly recommend skimming through it. And the positive side — nothing should break, in fact, unless you’re living in a forest.

The Astro team published its new major version (7) too, with more Rust-ification for this Rust-greedy metaframeworks world. As usual, I’m testing it on this newsletter website so you don’t have to; please let me know in case of any issues! 🤞🏼

Vite got slowed down by the recent publicity work (or maybe just because there’s no VC rush anymore) and just came up with the first new minor release since March — the new version celebrates growing weekly download numbers (still a surprisingly minuscule fraction of Babel’s metrics though 😏), provides experimental support for bundled dev mode, and a lot of other technical improvements. The coolest thing I read in the release notes was definitely this excerpt:

In the output bundle, the import statement of a chunk includes the hash of that chunk. This is to ensure the new chunk is loaded if the chunk content has changed. However, this also causes the hash of the chunk importing the changed chunk to change, cascading the change to all the chunks that import the changed chunk transitively.

That’s probably quite similar to what my wife hears when I tell her about Angular’s dependency injection, but still, the actual feature of chunk import maps is quite rad.

RedwoodSDK now supports Vite 8 too in its latest v1.5.0, with backward compatibility to Vite 6+ (kudos for that!), but that’s not all — the team is quite active on new technical updates, like the new navigation-pending suspense feature in v1.4.0, or client-side optimizations and improvements in v1.3.0.

The Vike changelog got some weird series of bumps in a single bundle, but as a matter of fact, it was quite interesting to read about the path the team has taken during the last year.

So you see? I told you — what’s not to be happy about? And, as a bonus for the conclusion, a couple of words about the title song of this issue. Did you know that’s Robin Williams, brilliantly acting as one of the dancing and chilling guys in Bobby McFerrin’s music video? I figured out they were friends, actually; isn’t it nice? I also recently read a piece about another act of Robin’s and highly recommend it, as another positive thing in these trying times.

👋