What’s new in Angular 18: You Need to Know

Angular 18, released in July 2024, brings several significant updates and new features aimed at enhancing the developer experience and improving application performance.

Key Features and Updates:

1. Zoneless Change Detection (Experimental): Angular 18 introduces experimental support for zoneless change detection, which eliminates the need for zone.js. This feature aims to improve application performance by reducing the number of change detection cycles and offering more readable stack traces.

2. Server-Side Rendering (SSR) Enhancements: The new version includes improved support for server-side rendering, with features like partial hydration and event replay. These enhancements allow for better performance and a smoother user experience during the hydration process, particularly for internationalized applications.

3. Stable Features:

   • Material 3 Components: The Material 3 design components, which were previously experimental, are now stable, allowing developers to use them confidently in production.
   • Deferrable Views: This feature, which defers the loading of certain views to improve Core Web Vitals, is now stable.
   • Built-in Control Flow: Angular 18 stabilizes the new control flow syntax, improving performance and adding ergonomic benefits.

4. Routing Enhancements: Angular 18 allows dynamic route redirects using functions, providing more flexibility when handling redirects based on runtime conditions.

5. Forms API Updates: A new property called events is now exposed by Angular forms, enabling developers to subscribe to a stream of events like value changes and form resets, offering finer control over form behavior.

6. Developer Tooling and Debugging: The Angular DevTools have been updated to support the new hydration features, making it easier to debug SSR applications. Additionally, Angular now supports TypeScript 5.4, allowing developers to take advantage of the latest TypeScript features.

7. New Developer Hub: Angular’s documentation has moved to a new site, angular.dev, which offers an improved user experience with interactive tutorials, playgrounds, and refreshed guides.

These updates reflect Angular’s commitment to evolving with modern web development needs while maintaining stability and enhancing developer productivity.