Angular version History

The Angular history stated with version 2 back in September 2016, the latest available version as of today is Angular 6. Let us briefly look at the release history and features added to each version of Angular.

Angular 2 was released in September 2016, this version was a complete re-write from the previous Angular 1.x version. Angular 2 introduced the component based development similar to react. Angular 2 provided better performance and support for mobile application development. Angular 2 also used TypeScript for application development instead of JavaScript used in version 1.x

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Angular 4 was released in March 2017, version 3 was skipped due to internal issues with router packages. Angular 4 introduced Ahead of Time AoT compilation of templates, through which the templates a compiled at build time and converted to JavaScript.

AoT compilation has 2 advantages, compilation happens in the server during the build process, hence the client/browser has less load, also by compiling at build time we can capture errors in templates beforehand instead of breaking in the browser at run-time. Angular team also improved the View Engine, which helped in producing less code when you use the Ahead of Time compilation.

Angular 4 introduced a new package for animation - @angular/platform-browser/animations.

Angular 4 introduced some improvements to ngIf, ngFor directives, provides a new titlecase pipe, simplified http request format, improvements to Router and internationalization etc. _____________________________________________________________________________

Angular v4.3 introduced the HttpClient in @angular/common/http which offers a simplified client HTTP API for Angular applications, this new module provides benefits like typed request and response objects, request and response interception, Observable apis, and streamlined error handling.
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Angular 5 was released in November 2017. The focus of Angular 5 was to make Angular faster again. The loading time has been improved by smaller bundles. The execution has been improved as well by optimizations at the compiler. Build optimizer was a major feature introduces in Angular 5, the build optimizer helps clean up unwanted code and reduce the size of the compiled bundle. Angular 5 supports TypeScript 2.4.

Angular 5 added further enhancements to Angular Universal, added modules ServerTransferStateModule & BrowserTransferStateModule. This module allows you to generate information as part of your rendering with platform-server, and then transfer it to the client side so that this information does not need to be regenerated.

Added new lifecycle events to the router to track the cycle of the router from the start of running guards through to completion of activation. The new events are GuardsCheckStart, ChildActivationStart, ActivationStart, GuardsCheckEnd, ResolveStart, ResolveEnd, ActivationEnd, ChildActivationEnd.
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Angular 6 was released in May 2018. Angular 6 introduces Angular Elements, which gives us ability to use Angular components in other environments like jQuery. Using Angular Element and Angular Component can be wrapped in a DOM element and used in a HTML page.

Angular 6 introduces new Angular CLI commands ng add & ng update. ng add helps us to add new packages to the project and ng update helps update the dependent packages in the project. For example, the command ng update @angular/core will update all of the Angular framework packages as well as RxJS and TypeScript, and will run any schematics available on these packages to keep you up to date.