Angular 18, set to launch next week, heralds significant advancements in Google’s web development framework. This upcoming version sees the transition of deferred views and control flow features from developer preview to stable release.

Scheduled for release on May 22, Angular 18 brings forth notable features like deferrable views, also known as @defer blocks. These allow developers to delay the loading of specific dependencies within component templates, thereby reducing the initial bundle size of applications. Additionally, declarative control flow, now a stable feature, introduces new syntax for control flow operations such as NgIf, NgFor, and NgSwitch, which are now integrated into the framework as @if, @for, and @switch respectively. This empowers developers to conditionally display, hide, and iterate elements.

Among the highlighted features of Angular 18 are:

1. Zoneless Change Detection: A groundbreaking capability introduced in this version, enabling change detection without the need for intermediaries like zone.js.
2. Enhanced Angular DevTools: Now featuring hydration and debugging support, Angular DevTools can handle multiple Angular apps running within iFrames.
3. Default Content for ng-content: Default content functionality is now enabled for ng-content.
4. Unified Control State Change Events: Angular 18 streamlines control state change events.
5. Updated Documentation: The official documentation website shifts to angular.dev, redirecting visitors from angular.io.

Angular 18 builds upon the foundation laid by Angular 17, which debuted in November 2023. Angular 17 offered a preview of control flow features and introduced hydration to facilitate server-side rendered application restoration on the client side.