Roadmap 2026 (2026-02-04)

Hello from the webpack Technical Steering Commitee member Even!

The different contributors in the organization are working hard to ensure that webpack is still a good alternative to building your web applications. Even though there has emerged a lot of different tools lately, we hope that using webpack as a stable choice is still an option for you. Our work this year is not only focused on improving existing functionality, but also work on some new things that might be beneficial in other ways.

So what is on our agenda this year? Let me walk you through it!

• CSS modules — built-in CSS support in webpack (≈90%). Native CSS support webpack#14893. ETA: Feb–Mar.

• Universal target — works across Node.js, browsers, Deno, and Bun (≈98%). Finish CommonJS wrapper, add target: "universal", and expand tests. Outputs ESM only; write environment-agnostic code.

• TypeScript — built-in support. enhanced-resolve honors tsconfig.json. Add parser wrapper to module.javascript.parse, improve resolver for ts/cts/mts, support extensionAlias, and add tests.

• HTML modules — first-class HTML: import HTML files and use HTML entry points. Aim to replace html-webpack-plugin. See webpack#536.

• ESM output — fixes and improvements. See webpack#17121.

• Webpack everywhere — build webpack for Node and web (including universal), reduce Node internals and Buffer usage, add a site playground.

• Deno & Bun — Deno supported; add tests. Bun: assess and test.

• Lazy barrel — evaluate Rspack’s approach.

• Dev tooling — merge webpack-dev-middleware and webpack-hot-middleware. Extract overlay from dev-server and consolidate overlay + WS/EventSource logic for reuse. Add plugin support to dev-server.

• CLI — consolidate packages, refactor help and subcommand logic. See webpack-cli#4619.

• Docs & site — auto-generate options docs from webpack schemas/types into JSON, then render Markdown on the site. Priority: accurate, complete docs.

• Minimizers — combine terser-webpack-plugin, css-minimizer-webpack-plugin, html-minimizer-webpack-plugin, and json-minimizer-webpack-plugin into one minimizer-webpack-plugin.

• Multithreading API — bring ideas from thread-loader into core; needs design discussion.

• Design — new design assets for projects and swag.

• Community — outreach via articles and conferences.

• GSoC — mentor students starting their OSS journey.

• Donations — grow sponsorships to sustain maintenance.

Other tasks

• Move loader-runner into core to unify loader context logic.
• Reduce internal TODOs in preparation for webpack@6.
• Improve test coverage.
• Strengthen type coverage (fewer any/unknown/...).
• Add more benchmarks (potentially merge with webpack/benchmark) and CI to compare versions.

Final remarks

I hope that you found this list useful and that you are excited for 2026, we are! One of the most important parts of our work now, is to get enough donations to keep the project sustainable. We use our resources on payouts for all contributors once they reach a certain threshold. In addition to that, we want to make sure that over time, the project has some left-over resources so that we can save when times are hard. We also want to give back to our maintainers working hard to make the project great in terms of merch (aka swag). This year we will try something new, which is so have dedicated sections where companies/individuals that contribute a significant amount will have a place to showcase their product/thing.

If you are interested in contributing to the organization either finanically or whatnot, please reach out to us! 💙

~ webpack TSC