Issue #495: TanStack's smaller React for the browser

#495 — October 30, 2026

Together with

Putting MUI, Mantine, Ant Design
and React Spectrum Under Load

Den Odell wanted to see how popular design systems cope when you give them real work, so he timed ten of them, including MUI, Mantine, Ant Design and React Spectrum, and profiled the slowest cases. "Performance belongs on the design system team's priority list, next to accessibility," he says. Some highlights:

📊 With the CPU slowed 4x, opening a 249-country dropdown took 84ms in Mantine and 134ms in Ant Design, but over 200ms in MUI and React Spectrum, both of which froze the UI past his 100ms budget.
🔍 React Spectrum's problem was React Aria measuring options one at a time and forcing layout for each. Den filed an issue and a fix is in review.
⚖️ Framework alone didn't decide the results as non-React Ionic was by far the slowest to open (1,266ms) yet was quick at checking 100 checkboxes, while MUI handled them in 70ms compared to Ant Design's 421ms.
🧪 Want to try this on your own components? Den's Playwright tests are available on GitHub.

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Expo sponsor

TanStack Redact: A Smaller React for the Browser — A drop-in replacement for React/React DOM in the browser. Add it to your build config (Start, Vite, Vinext and Next.js are supported) and ship less JavaScript. But it renders synchronously, with no time slicing, so the compatibility guide is handy.

Tanner Linsley

💬 Does Redact pay off? On r/reactjs, commenters pondered who needs it and how it differs from Preact, while one tester found re-renders cost about twice the CPU across two production sites.

IN BRIEF:

⚠️ Next.js has a security release scheduled for November 3, fixing seven medium-severity vulnerabilities. Advisories will be published with the patches.
Dan Abramov is fuzzing React's Flight protocol, the format behind Server Components, by streaming random value graphs through the real server and client. It's turned up six stream bugs and three writer bugs so far.
TanStack AI 1.0 is stable: a vendor-neutral AI toolkit with React hooks like useChat(), 23 provider adapters and MCP support.
📱 React Native Windows 0.85 completes its move to the New Architecture, and there's more React Native on the desktop with Expo Desktop (an independent project – not by Expo) and Legend Spark for macOS.

React.lazy, Suspense and the Hidden 300ms Startup Delay — A lazy component can suspend on its first render even when its code is already loaded, and React can throttle reveals of suspended content to once every 300ms. Here's how one team traced the delay, and what fixed it.

Matthew Wong (Tab Widgets)

TanStack DB 1.0 RC1, and How 'Oracles' Found Its Bugs — The reactive client data layer is now API stable, but check the migration guide, as mutation handlers, hooks and errors have changed. Kyle explains how agents, checked against simple reference models, found many of the bugs fixed.

Kyle Mathews (TanStack)

🤖 Ship Less JavaScript in Next.js with Your AI Agent – A new skill hunts bundle bloat using Turbopack's module graph. Will Binns-Smith (Vercel)

📄 Porting 287,000 Lines of React to Foldkit in 3 Days – Focuses on how they built a harness to ensure visual and behavioral parity. David Granzin (Maple)

📄 Async React and Progressive Server Actions – How to keep server action forms working before hydration, even with optimistic UI. Jacob Ebey

📊 React Compiler in Next.js 16.4: Babel vs Rust, Benchmarked Waseem Anjum

🛠 Code, Tools & Libraries

Puck 0.24: The Visual Page Editor for React — A drag-and-drop page editor you embed in your own app, using your own components. 0.24 lets you lay out a component's settings panel as you wish, improves drag and drop, and more. GitHub repo.

Fede Bonel Tozzi

react-window 2.5: Virtualized Lists That Scroll with the Page — Brian's long-standing virtualization library adds a scrollElement prop, so lists/grids can scroll along with the page or an ancestor, plus a headless useVirtualizer() for building your own virtualized layouts. Docs and demos.

Brian Vaughn

Vinext 1.4: The Vite-Powered Next.js Reimplementation Gets Faster — A Vite plugin that reimplements the Next.js API so you can deploy anywhere. 1.4 focuses on performance, with a Hacker News clone example now using 43% less server CPU per request vs 1.3, putting it slightly ahead of Next.js in that test.

James Anderson

OpenTUI 0.8 – Terminal UI library with React bindings that powers OpenCode. Now repaints only what changed each frame.
React Hook Form 7.91 – Lots of useFieldArray and async validation fixes, plus fewer re-renders. v8 is also now at beta 5.
React-Toastify 11.2 – Popular toast notification library. Now with theme="auto" to follow the OS color scheme.
emoji-picker-react 5.1 – Full-featured customizable emoji picker. Live demo.

🎃 And finally…

Halloween is almost upon us, so how about a round of Graveyard Pinball? It's built with React Three Fiber, with skulls, cauldrons and a skeleton mage. Its creator explains more about how it works here, including how the 3D table actually uses 2D physics.