Comparison Between Angular 6 Vs Angular 7 Vs Angular 8

Due to the growing popularity of mobile apps & web applications, companies are looking for a better option to build mobile & web apps with faster speed & fewer resources. To achieve that there are few frameworks globally available like Angular, React, Meteor. To stay abreast with the growing need of the customers and businesses, the constant inflow of the niche technology, frameworks, and platforms need to update. In this blog, we are sharing the differences between the features, changes, and improvements related to Angular 6 vs Angular 7 vs Angular 8.

Angular is a JavaScript framework written in TypeScript developed by Google and is known as a “Superheroic JavaScript MVW Framework” . Angular (version 2 +), originally released in September 2016, is a complete rewrite of AngularJS. The latest major release is version 8 at the time of writing. Google AdWords, one of the most important projects at Google, developed on Angular - so Angular is likely to be around for a while.

Major differences and improvements between Angular 6 vs Angular 7 vs Angular 8

Angular 6 Features

Angular 6 was released on May 4th, 2018. The major highlights of Angular 6 include the Angular Command Line Interface (CLI), The Component Development KIT (CDK), Angular Material Package update and with new TypeScript version 2.7, it is much easier to code with conditional type declarations, default declarations, and strict class initialization.

Angular Element

To create a widget or component that can be included in any existing web page was made possible with Angular Elements.

The Angular Elements package provided the ability to create an Angular component and then publish that component as a web component which can be used in any HTML page

Service worker

Service workers were first introduced in Angular 5. It is the scripts which run in the web browser and manage to cache an application. Service workers come with some bug fixes, including some new functionalities as there was no straight way for deactivating the service worker and to overcome this, Angular 6 came up with a new script file safety-worker.js in production bundle. This script file helps them to unregister an existing service worker.

Internationalization (i18n)

One of the major changes introduced to Angular 6 is internationalization (i18n) feature with runtime rendering so that there is no requirement to build one application per locale.

Bazel Compiler

Bazel optimizes your Angular compilation, it only rebuilds what is necessary to build as it does not make any sense to rebuild the entire application for every little change with this so we can archive fast and incremental builds.

ng-add

ng add helps you install and download new packages in your angular apps.

ng-update

ng update is used to update and upgrade your packages it will help you to upgrade from Angular 5 to Angular 6, or any other package in your Angular app.

Tree Shaking

Tree shaking is a build optimization step which tries to ensure any unused code does not get used in our final bundle which helps you to make your app smaller. It uses new injectable services where we can register a provider directly inside the @Injectable() decorator, using the new providedIn attribute.

Know more about Top 10 Features of Angular 6.0 

Some Major updates in Angular 6

• Typescript 2.7.x supports
• Improved decorator error messages
• Fix platform-detection example for Universal
• Added to supports of Native-Element
• Added Optional generic type for ElementRef
• Updates on NgModelChange
• Add type and hooks to directive def
• Enable size tracking of a minimal CLI render3 application
• Add canonical view query
• <ng-template> now becomes <template>
• Long-term support(LTE) added to Angular from v4

Angular 7 Features

Google has released Angular version 7 in Oct 2018 with a lot of optimum features and significant changes like Angular Material, CLI prompts, Scrolling, Drag, and Virtual and Drop & Component Dev Kit (CDK)

CLI prompts

In Angular 7, the command-line interface (CLI) prompts have been updated to v7.0.2, When the user executes common commands like ng add @angular/material or ng new it will automatically prompt users commands like ng add @angular/material help you discover built-in features like routing or SCSS support.

New ng-compiler

Angular 7 added a new compiler called the Angular Compatibility Compiler (ngcc). Just like the name suggests, the angular compiler offers an 8-phase rotating ahead-of-time compilation(AOT) and most of the angular applications noticed a massive reduction (95-99%) in bundle sizes.

Angular Material CDK (Component Dev Kit)

• Virtual scrolling
  The scrolling package enables loads and unloads items from the DOM depending upon visible parts of lists, resulting into a much faster experience for users having huge scrollable lists.

• Drag & drop
  Now you can re-order the list just by dragging and dropping with new @angular/cdk/drag-drop module which provides free dragging, sorting within a list, transferring items between lists, animations and much more.

Application performance

Many developers include the reflect-metadata polyfill in the production, so they decided to fix this part by automatically removing it from your polyfills.ts file and to speed up the performance new applications will warn when the initial bundle is more than 2MB and will error at 5MB which user can modify it in angular.json file. 

Angular Do-Bootstrap

Angular 7 added a new life-cycle hook (ngDoBootstrap) and interface (DoBootstrap), It's used for bootstrapping modules that need to bootstrap a component.

Router

In Angular 7, If you try to trigger navigation outside of the Angular zone it logs a warning (only in development mode). Also, adds navigation execution context info to activation hooks.

Some Major updates in Angular 7

• Angular 7 now supporting to TypeScript 3.1
• Added a new ability to recover from malformed URLs
• Downloadable console for starting and running Angular projects on your local machine
• compiler-cli: update tsickle to 0.29.x
• Export defaultKeyValueDiffers to private API 

Angular 8 Features

Angular 8 has introduced with a bunch of workflow and performance improvements and a lot has changed in the framework under the hood in terms of tooling. Comparing Angular 6 vs Angular 7 vs Angular 8 Finally, Angular 8 released with ivy rendering which Angular team was along with updated angular core framework, Angular Material, and the Command Line Interface or CLI.

Ivy Engine

Ivy is a major part of this release, and it took most of the effort from Angular 6 to release it. 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. Know more about what is ivy?

Web Workers

Web workers are essential for improving the parallelizability and the speed of your application. Angular 8.0 added support to CLI which provides one bundle for every web worker & they do it by writing code off the main thread.

Lazy Loading

Lazy loading is based on the concepts of Angular Routing and Angular 8 added support for dynamic EcmaScript imports in router configuration as it helps bring down the size of large files by lazily loading the files that are required.

Angular Firebase

Angular 8 officially added support for firebase and now deploying an Angular app to Firebase is very easy, and it doesn’t take too much time using Angular CLI, Service Worker.

Differential loading

Your Angular 8 apps now will more performant thanks to differential loading and two bundles are created for a production build i,e bundle for new browser with ES2015+ and with an old browser with ES5 version. The correct bundle will automatically load by the browser with new ES6 modules present in the new browser.

The ng build command with the --prod flag will take care of bundling everything out of the box.

Opt-In Usage Sharing

With Angular 8, we can switch between IVY and the regular View engine build. It enables opt-in to sharing telemetry about your Angular CLI usage with the Angular and can collect data like commands used and the build speed if users allow them which will help developers improve in the future.

Angular CLI Builders

The CLI Builder API is stable and available to developers who want to customize the Angular CLI by adding or modifying commands.

Major features included in Angular 8

• AngularJS API Migration Improvements with $location service
• Updated Typescript to 3.4.x
• @angular/platform-webworker and@angular/platform-webworker-dynamic both the packages are deprecated
•  @angular/http removed from the list of packages
• ng-build, ng-test, and ng-run are equipped to be extended by 3rd-party libraries and tool.
• Angular router backward compatibility
• Dart-sass for Sass files
•  The ViewChild and ContentChild decorators now must have a new option called static.