[RadiozRadioz]

Sorry I am new to Next, and I expect others are too. In Express, middleware runs on the server, and it's a common pattern to handle authentication checks in there before the request reaches any routers. Are you saying that the "middleware" described here is purely a client-side thing? If so, I agree, it's silly to put any kind of auth in there. But the language on the Next website made me think that this was server-side; the mention of the cookie validation (which should not happen on a client), and the mention of the deployment type. I was also under the impression that Next was a framework that spans the client and the server.

So to confirm: where does this middleware run?