Frontend development is moving fast again.
Ask developers what stands out most about 2025, and the answer is almost always the same: the pace.
New frameworks, new rendering patterns, and a constant stream of AI-powered tools arrive almost every week. Kevin Quaedvlieg, one of our frontend developers at Prepr, describes it like this: “Every week there’s something new, Cursor, Windsurf, Claude, Claude Code, Amazon’s Kiro. We went from simple coding assistants to fully integrated AI IDEs. I’ve tried a lot this year, and I keep coming back to Claude, Claude Code, and Cursor.”
When asked to describe the state of frontend development in a single word, he doesn’t hesitate: “Server-First.”
The shift is clear: more work happens on the server, less JavaScript ships to the browser, requests are fewer, and bundles load faster. The result is a web that feels lighter, and a development process that depends more on strong defaults than manual optimisation.
Meta-frameworks are the standards
Going into 2026, the stack feels more mature and more opinionated than it did a year ago. Recent Stack Overflow data shows React still leading by a wide margin, Next.js expanding its role as the default meta-framework, and Svelte and Astro steadily gaining space.
For most frontend teams, 2026 no longer starts with the question “Which framework should we use?”.
The ecosystem has consolidated. Meta-frameworks like Next.js, Astro, SvelteKit, Remix, and Qwik have become the default starting point for new projects.
Developers describe this shift as practical rather than ideological. Meta-frameworks simply take care of the work that used to slow projects down: routing, data fetching, server-side rendering, build optimisation, and deployment targets. As frontend developer Kevin Quaedvlieg puts it, “These frameworks come with an opinionated approach that works out of the box and solves the problems you keep facing on every project.”
