Next.js: Instant Navigation Revolution - New Testing APIs and Performance Breakthroughs
The Next.js team shipped a groundbreaking Instant Navigation Testing API that lets developers write deterministic e2e tests for cached UI states. Major contributions from Andrew Clark (acdlite) include comprehensive testing primitives that work in both dev and production builds, while the team also tackled deployment skew protection and improved developer experience with better error reporting.
Duration: PT4M5S
Episode overview
This episode is a short developer briefing from Next.js.
It explains recent repository work in plain language.
- Show: Next.js
- Published: 2026-02-05T11:15:38Z
- Audio duration: PT4M5S
Transcript excerpt
This excerpt keeps the crawler page concise. Listen to the episode or use the RSS feed for the full update.
Hey there, Next.js builders! Welcome back to another episode. I'm your host, and wow - do we have some exciting stuff to dive into today. February 5th brought us some truly innovative changes that I think are going to change how we think about testing and navigation performance.
Let me start with the star of the show - Andrew Clark has been absolutely crushing it with a series of pull requests that introduce something called the Instant Navigation Testing API. Now, if you've ever tried to write e2e tests for loading states or cached content, you know the pain of dealing with race conditions…
The core idea here is brilliant in its simplicity. This new API lets you write tests that can assert on the prefetched, cached portion of a navigation before any dynamic data streams in. Think about it - you click a link, and instead of hoping your test runs fast enough to catch the loading skeleton, you can now…
Andrew didn't stop there though. He followed up with support for full page navigations - not just client-side routing, but actual page reloads, plain anchor clicks, and browser back-forward navigation. The implementation is pretty clever too - it uses request headers for client-side…
What…
Nearby episodes from Next.js
- React Upgrade & Memory Leak Fixes
- Performance Optimizations and Clean-up Day
- The Great Infrastructure Upgrade
- Instant Navigation and Smart Caching Get Major Upgrades
- The Server Function Logging Dance
- Turbopack's Infrastructure Upgrade
- Rolling Forward with v16.2.0-canary.23
- Turbopack Takes Center Stage with Optional Support and Cache Performance Wins