Remix, the full-stack web framework from the team behind React Router, has released the Remix 3 beta preview, a ground-up rebuild that moves the project away from React and onto web platform primitives.

Announced by co-founder Michael Jackson, Remix 3 reframes the framework as a complete full stack rather than the "center stack" of routing and rendering that earlier versions occupied. It now bundles routes, request handlers, middleware, sessions, auth, forms, uploads, assets, data and database management, UI components, theming, networking, and tests under a single remix umbrella, built from small composable packages. The current preview sits at v3.0.0-beta.5, and the team has said it will follow up with new releases every week.

The a number of the changes are architectural. Routes are Fetch API routes, controllers return web Response objects, and forms submit to URLs, so the server owns the request lifecycle. On the frontend Remix keeps JSX but drops the React runtime in favour of a forked Preact and an imperative model, where state is a plain variable and a this.update() call signals that something changed.

Events use a universal on prop, async work is cancelled with standard AbortController signals, and server driven UI arrives through "frames", server-rendered fragments with a src that load and reload independently, an approach several observers compare to HTMX. Remix also introduces "unbundling", where the runtime rather than a bundler is the source of truth, with assets compiled and served by Remix and no special semantics around import statements.

Commentary has been sharply divided. Writing on his blog, Alex Kotliarskyi called Remix 3 "the Grug Brain version of what Next.js should have been" and a sign the functional to imperative pendulum is swinging back. Kent C. Dodds highlighted a TypeScript trick the framework leans on, typing this like an argument.

A hands-on review on Zenn found the "one package, close to web standards, explicit over convention" design well suited to AI-assisted coding, though the author felt it was still early for production.

Skeptics focused on churn. A widely read r/reactjs thread argued Remix has become "completely unrecognisable" and compared to Next.js:

…say what you want about Next.js, despite volatility in their major version upgrades and backwards incompatibility often, they atleast stayed put with their SSR identity. Remix on the other hand has become completely unrecognisable…

On Hacker News one developer questioned the value proposition against React Router plus Vite, while others noted the team is "infamous for breaking changes".

Migration is not a drop-in upgrade. Because Remix 3 abandons React, existing Remix 2 apps are pointed at React Router v7 as their continuation, while Remix 3 is positioned as a fresh start, as set out in the Wake Up, Remix post. Early adopters have documented full rewrites in a public migration PR. Set against Next.js, SolidStart, and SvelteKit, Remix 3 is the boldest bet yet on web standards over framework abstractions. Developers can try it today with npx remix@next new my-remix-app.

Remix is an open-source, full-stack web framework created by the team behind React Router and maintained by Shopify, which acquired the project in 2022. It is distributed under the MIT license, with source code and the weekly beta releases available on GitHub.