Next.js: Lightning CSS Gets Superpowers & Turbopack Performance Wins
Today brings major CSS flexibility with the new experimental.lightningCssFeatures config option, letting developers override browser targets for specific CSS features. Meanwhile, the Turbopack team delivered impressive performance optimizations across persistence, hashing, and error rendering, plus some solid developer experience improvements.
Duration: PT3M59S
Episode overview
This episode is a short developer briefing from Next.js.
It explains recent repository work in plain language.
- Show: Next.js
- Published: 2026-03-11T10:31:10Z
- Audio duration: PT3M59S
Transcript excerpt
This excerpt keeps the crawler page concise. Listen to the episode or use the RSS feed for the full update.
Hey there, fellow developers! Welcome back to another episode of the Next.js podcast. I'm your host, and wow, do we have some exciting changes to dig into today from March 11th, 2026.
So picture this - you're working with modern CSS features like light-dark color schemes, but you need more control over when they get transpiled. Well, the Next.js team just made your day with a fantastic new addition. Tobias Koppers merged a game-changing PR that introduces the experimental.lightningCssFeatures…
Here's the story - until now, Lightning CSS would only transpile features based on your browser targets. But what if you wanted to force transpilation of a feature that browsers technically support but maybe has spotty implementation? Or what if you wanted to preserve certain CSS as-is for downstream tooling? Now…
The implementation is really thoughtful too - they've got 21 individual features plus composite groups, all using a single source of truth in Rust that both Webpack and Turbopack paths leverage. The testing approach is particularly clever, targeting browsers that do support light-dark functions but forcing…
Now, speaking of Turbopack, Luke Sandberg has been absolutely crushing it…
But…
Nearby episodes from Next.js
- Turbopack Gets a Major Performance Overhaul
- Performance Powerhouse Edition
- Spring Cleaning and Instant Navigation Breakthrough
- Parallel Routes Get Fixed and Dev Tools Get Polished
- Hot Module Replacement Gets a Major Upgrade
- Error Messages Get a Major Makeover
- Turbopack Chunking Gets Cleaner
- Routing Gets Smarter & React Gets Fresher