Angular is the most popular platform for developing client-side (front-end) mobile and desktop web apps or SPAs. With the new release of Angular 8.3, we have some really cool new features.

In this post, we are going to summarize some of the most important new features officially announced by the Angular team. Angular 8 brings many new features, particularly for the tool-chain.

This version is a major release that involves the complete platform, including the Angular core framework, Angular Material, and the Command Line Interface or CLI. We have a new set of powerful features that developers will appreciate which are added at many levels; the core framework, Angular Material library and the CLI. It has also enabled many major partner launches such as NativeScript (a framework for building native mobile apps with Angular), Angular Console (console for running Angular projects on your system),@angular/fire (for integrating Firebase with Angular) and StackBlitz (an online IDE for Angular).

As planned, Angular 8 was released and these are the new and most important features:

Preview of Ivy

With the release of Angular 8, a preview version of Ivy is now available for testing. Ivy is a new rendering engine that will produce smaller bundle sizes. But it's not recommended to start using it in production not just yet. If you would like to start playing with Ivy, you can instruct the Angular CLI to enable Ivy in your project using the --enable-ivy switch:

$ ng new angular-project --enable-ivy

Web Workers

Thanks to Angular CLI 8, web workers are taken into consideration when building the production bundles which helps increase the performance. Angular CLI 8 provides now one bundle for every web worker.

Lazy Loading

The Angular Router has always supported lazy loading but now with Angular 8 the support for dynamic EcmaScript imports is added. For example:

{

   path: 'lazy',

   loadChildren: () => import('./mylazy/mylazy.module').then(mod => mod.Module)

}

Improvement of ngUpgrade

Angular 8 has also added new features to upgrade which makes easier for angular developers to upgrade their Angular.js apps to Angular 8. 

Angular 8.3 has been released a few weeks ago! Also, the Angular team has made more steps closer to the final release of Angular 9 with many bug fixes, a few breaking changes, and performance upgrades and improvements to Ivy, the new powerful renderer of Angular that will be the default renderer starting with Angular 9.