Angular 21 says goodbye to zone.js
Accessible UI patterns and experimental Signal Forms are included in Angular 21, while Zoneless Change Detection now replaces zone.js.
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Angular 21 has been released. The new main version of the web framework offers experimental Signal Forms, a developer preview for Angular Aria for accessible headless components, and other innovations. The zone.js library is no longer included in new Angular applications in favor of Zoneless Change Detection.
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Accessible Components thanks to Angular Aria
Angular Aria is included as a developer preview. This library for common UI patterns focuses on accessibility – for accessible headless components according to the web standard suite WAI-ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative – Accessible Rich Internet Applications) from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Currently, Angular Aria includes a set of eight UI patterns – Accordion, Combobox, Grid, Listbox, Menu, Tabs, Toolbar, and Tree – with 13 components. These are not styled and can be provided with custom styles as desired.
Angular Aria can be installed with npm i @angular/aria. For this new feature a guide is available, which contains code examples for all components, skins to try out, and further information.
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Experimental Signal Forms
Angular developers can now try out Signal Forms, an experimental library for managing form state based on reactive signals. It aims to provide both a good developer experience and complete type safety for accessing form fields, and to follow central, schema-based validation logic.
For using the experimental Signal Forms, the corresponding guide and the documentation provide all the details.
Farewell to zone.js and Welcome to Vitest
Vitest has been chosen as the default test runner in Angular 21. This applies to new projects, while the previously used technologies Karma and Jasmine continue to enjoy full support from the Angular team, so developers do not yet have to migrate to Vitest. However, those who wish to test it can perform the experimental migration.
Finally, Angular 21 is saying goodbye to zone.js – a process that has been evident since Angular 18. The standalone library zone.js, which has been used in Angular from the beginning, is no longer included by default. New Angular applications will therefore use the Zoneless approach, while for existing applications a migration guide is available.
According to the Angular team, Zoneless Change Detection offers numerous advantages: improved Core Web Vitals, native async/await, ecosystem compatibility, reduced bundle size, simplified debugging, and improved control. Nevertheless, zone.js played an important role in shaping Angular, the development team emphasizes.
Further information on the updates in Angular 21 is available on the Angular blog.
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