axios ❌ hurl ✅ — Here's Why I Stopped Using axios in 2026

axios had a great run. For years it was the HTTP client. You installed it without thinking. You recommended it without question. It just worked. But it's 2026. Node.js has had native fetch since v18. Cloudflare Workers, Vercel Edge Functions, Deno, and Bun are mainstream. And axios — a 35KB library built around XMLHttpRequest — isn't built for any of that. I built @firekid/hurl to fix that. What's wrong with axios? Let me be specific, because "axios is old" isn't an argument. 1. It doesn't run on edge runtimes. Cloudflare Workers, Vercel Edge, and Deno don't support Node.js built-ins. axios depends on them. You hit a wall the moment you try to use it outside of a traditional Node.js server. 2. It's 35KB. For a package that wraps HTTP requests. @firekid/hurl is under 9KB gzipped. 3. No built-in retries. You either write your own retry logic or reach for axios-retry — another dependency, more config, more maintenance. 4. No request deduplication. If your app fires the same GET request th