Minko Gechev spoke at Frontend Nation, where he discussed what the community has been calling the "Angular Renaissance". He explained that over the past two years, Angular has been shipping a slew of features aimed at making it easier for developers to build faster, more reliable web applications with confidence.

Innovations for Faster, More Reliable Web Apps

Some of the major innovations Minko mentioned include deferrable views for lazy loading code declaratively, a new control flow syntax that is significantly more intuitive and faster, and collaboration with the Google Material team to define Material 3 for the web. Angular also made progress in simplifying its reactivity story with signals. Minko highlighted the adoption of Angular Signals by YouTube, which are now used in production for 100% of YouTube's mobile web traffic. This resulted in a 35% improvement in interaction latency on smart TVs and smooth 60fps video player controls on mobile.

Collaborations and Performance Gains

He also discussed the collaboration between Angular and Google's internal Wiz framework, which led to the teams teaming up to open source the best of Wiz via Angular and bring Angular's strengths to Google's consumer products. Minko explained that with most major web frameworks adopting signals, there is now an initiative to bring them to the JavaScript language itself. Angular Signals are currently at stage 1 in TC39, and the reference implementation uses Angular as the proof of concept.

The new control flow syntax looks significantly simpler, is closer to JavaScript, and enables type narrowing. After-build.com saw a one-second improvement in their largest contentful paint after using the new syntax. Other performance improvements mentioned include deferrable views, which allow extracting parts of templates to load on demand, and hybrid rendering techniques like partial hydration, which can significantly reduce JavaScript bundle sizes and improve core web vitals.

Roadmap for Enhanced Developer Experience

To learn more about these innovations and how they can help you build faster, more reliable web applications, watch Minko's full talk. You'll gain valuable insights into Angular's future roadmap, including improvements to change detection, edit-refresh times, streaming SSR, accessibility, and more.