Quick Hits & What to Watch

The rest of Nuxt 4.4 in quick-hit form — enough to recognize each change and reach for it when it matters.

Vue Router v5#

Nuxt now runs on vue-router v5, the first major router upgrade since Nuxt 3. It removes the dependency on unplugin-vue-router — if you used that directly, you can drop it. For most apps the upgrade is transparent. Typed routes leaving experimental status is the next step. 👀

useState reset to default#

useState and clearNuxtState can now reset to the initial value instead of clearing to undefined, matching useAsyncData:

const count = useState('counter', () => 0)
count.value = 42

clearNuxtState('counter') // resets to 0, not undefined

Much saner for state you always expect to have a value.

Better import protection#

When server-only code leaks into your client bundle, the error now shows a full trace of the import chain, the exact line, and actionable suggestions — inspired by TanStack Start. Debugging accidental server imports goes from guesswork to a clear map.

View transition types#

Experimental view transitions now support transition types, so you can style forwards vs. backwards navigation, tabs vs. pages, and so on differently.

Normalised page component names (experimental)#

export default defineNuxtConfig({
  experimental: {
    normalizeComponentNames: true,
  },
})

Makes page component names match route names — nicer devtools and debugging.

Build profiling#

Find out where your build time actually goes:

nuxt build --profile

You get a per-phase/module/plugin breakdown plus three artifacts: a Chrome trace (.nuxt/perf-trace.json), a JSON report (.nuxt/perf-report.json), and a CPU profile (nuxt-build.cpuprofile). Use --profile=verbose for console timing detail.

Performance under the hood#

• 14,000x faster module ID parsing — a regex chain replaced with indexOf + slice.
• Faster dev via unrouting — file-system route generation now uses a trie; dev changes up to 28x faster when not adding/removing pages, and route generation is deterministic (no longer sensitive to file ordering).
• NuxtLink visibility prefetching disabled in dev to stop unnecessary Vite reloads.

Recap#

That's Nuxt 4.4. The headline steps (1–5) change how you fetch data, configure layouts, handle accessibility, cache payloads, and manage sessions; these quick hits modernize the router and sharpen the tooling. On to the next release.