Next.js: Cached Navigation Control & Performance Wins
Today we're diving into 13 merged PRs that bring major navigation caching improvements, a huge ImageResponse performance boost, and some solid developer experience fixes. The team shipped the new `experimental.cachedNavigations` feature flag, updated @vercel/og for 2-20x faster image generation, and fixed several critical bugs around prefetch inlining and instant validation.
Duration: PT4M15S
Episode overview
This episode is a short developer briefing from Next.js.
It explains recent repository work in plain language.
- Show: Next.js
- Published: 2026-03-06T11:32:50Z
- Audio duration: PT4M15S
Transcript excerpt
This excerpt keeps the crawler page concise. Listen to the episode or use the RSS feed for the full update.
Hey there, developers! Welcome back to another episode of the Next.js podcast. I'm so excited to chat with you today - March 6th brought us some really fantastic updates that I think you're going to love.
So we had 13 pull requests merged yesterday, and honestly, there's some genuinely exciting stuff happening in the codebase. Let me walk you through what caught my attention.
First up, we've got a really smart addition from Hendrik with the new `experimental.cachedNavigations` feature flag. This is actually a perfect example of how the team approaches rolling out new features safely. You know how cached navigations have been bundled with the broader cache components feature? Well, now…
Now, here's something that made me genuinely excited - Shu updated the @vercel/og and satori vendors, and the performance improvements are incredible. We're talking 2x faster for basic images and up to 20x faster for complex images. Twenty times faster! That's the kind of improvement that actually changes how you…
Andrew Clark tackled a tricky build failure issue with prefetch inlining and dynamic routes. The problem was that when prefetch inlining was enabled, it was creating special response keys…
Josh…
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