Imagine Angular is like building a house. In the past, you had to hire a lot of different contractors and coordinate their work. With Angular 20, the process is now much more streamlined and efficient, thanks to a few key upgrades.
🧱 The Signals Engine 🚦
Think of this as the new, smart electrical system for your house. Before, if you turned on a single light, a “change detection” signal would go out to every light, outlet, and appliance in the whole house, just to check if they also needed to be turned on. This was safe but not very efficient.
With Signals, the system now has a direct line to only the things that need to change. If you turn on a light in the kitchen, the signal goes directly to that light, and nothing else. This makes your whole house (or app) much faster, more responsive, and a lot less wasteful. It’s a huge performance boost and a core feature of modern Angular.
🏗️ Standalone Components (The New Default) 🏠
In the past, you couldn’t just build a single room for your house; you had to first build a “module” for it, which was a special container that had to be connected to other modules in a specific way. It was a lot of extra work for simple things.
With Angular 20, standalone components are the default. This means you can now just build a single room, like a bathroom, and place it anywhere in your house without needing an extra container. It makes the code cleaner, simpler, and much easier to share and reuse.
🌐 The Built-in Control Flow (Simpler Blueprints) 📝
This is like a more modern, easier-to-read blueprint for your house. Old Angular had a special, complex way of showing things like “if this wall exists” or “repeat this window five times.” It used specific commands that felt a bit like a foreign language.
The new built-in control flow uses a syntax that looks a lot more like simple JavaScript, which most people already know. You can now use @if, @for, and @switch to handle showing or hiding parts of your website. It makes the blueprint much more intuitive and less prone to errors.
⚡ Incremental Hydration (Smarter Loading) ⏳
Imagine your website is a house that’s being delivered in parts. In the old days, you had to wait for the entire house to be delivered and fully assembled before you could even open the front door.
Incremental hydration is like having a new delivery system. The browser now gets the essential parts of the house first, so you can see the front door and living room right away. Then, as you start walking around, the kitchen, bedrooms, and other parts are delivered and assembled in the background. This makes your site feel much faster and more responsive, because you don’t have to wait for everything to load at once.