Angular receives a large number of feature requests, both from inside Google and from the broader open-source community. At the same time, our list of projects contains plenty of maintenance tasks, code refactorings, potential performance improvements, and so on. We bring together representatives from developer relations, product management, and engineering to prioritize this list. As new projects come into the queue, we regularly position them based on relative priority to other projects. As work gets done, projects will move up in the queue.
The projects below are not associated with a particular Angular version. We'll release them on completion, and they will be part of a specific version based on our release schedule, following semantic versioning. For example, features are released in the next minor after they are complete, or the next major if they include breaking changes.
Loading external stylesheets is a blocking operation, which means that the browser can’t start rendering your application until it loads all the referenced CSS. Having render-blocking resources in the header of a page can significantly impact its load performance, for example, its [first contentful paint](https://web.dev/first-contentful-paint/). To make apps faster, we’ve been collaborating with the Google Chrome team on inlining critical CSS and loading the rest of the styles asynchronously.
Error messages often bring limited actionable information to help developers resolve them. We’ve been working on making error messages more discoverable by adding associated codes, developing guides, and other materials to ensure a smoother debugging experience.
### Revamp performance dashboards to detect regressions
We have a set of benchmarks that we run against every code change to ensure Angular aligns with our performance standards. To ensure the framework’s runtime does not regress after a code change, we need to refine some of the existing infrastructure the dashboards step on.
To ensure we provide a future-proof e2e testing strategy, we want to evaluate the state of Protractor, community innovations, e2e best practices, and explore novel opportunities.
Earlier in 2020, we shared an [RFC](https://github.com/angular/angular/issues/38366) for Ivy library distribution. After invaluable feedback from the community, we developed a design of the project. We are now investing in the development of Ivy library distribution, including an update of the library package format to use Ivy compilation, unblock the deprecation of the View Engine library format, and [ngcc](https://angular.io/guide/glossary#ngcc).
We want to ensure Angular developers are taking advantage of the latest capabilities of RxJS and have a smooth transition to the next major releases of the framework. For this purpose, we will explore and document the scope of the changes in v7 and beyond of RxJS and plan an update strategy.
The goal of this project is to improve the experience and remove legacy dependency by transitioning the language service to Ivy. Today the language service still uses the View Engine compiler and type checking, even for Ivy applications. We want to use the Ivy template parser and improved type checking for the Angular Language service to match application behavior. This migration will also be a step towards unblocking the removal of View Engine, which will simplify Angular, reduce the npm package size, and improve the framework's maintainability.
In collaboration with Google's security team, we're adding support for the new Trusted Types API. This web platform API will help developers build more secure web applications.
MDC Web is a library created by Google's Material Design team that provides reusable primitives for building Material Design components. The Angular team is incorporating these primitives into Angular Material. Using MDC Web will align Angular Material more closely with the Material Design specification, expand accessibility, improve component quality, and improve our team's velocity.
We want to consolidate release management tooling between Angular's multiple GitHub repositories ([angular/angular](https://github.com/angular/angular), [angular/angular-cli](https://github.com/angular/angular-cli), and [angular/components](https://github.com/angular/components)). This effort will allow us to reuse infrastructure, unify and simplify processes, and improve our release process's reliability.
As part of the v11 release, we introduced an opt-in preview of webpack 5 in the Angular CLI. To ensure stability, we’ll continue iterating on the implementation to enable build speed and bundle size improvements.
We want to unify commit message requirements and conformance across Angular repositories ([angular/angular](https://github.com/angular/angular), [angular/components](https://github.com/angular/components), [angular/angular-cli](https://github.com/angular/angular-cli)) to bring consistency to our development process and reuse infrastructure tooling.
We are working on development tooling for Angular that will provide utilities for debugging and performance profiling. This project aims to help developers understand the component structure and the change detection in an Angular application.
We will redefine the user learning journeys and refresh the introductory documentation. We will clearly state the benefits of Angular, how to explore its capabilities and provide guidance so developers can become proficient with the framework in as little time as possible.
### Better developer ergonomics with strict typing for `@angular/forms`
We will work on implementing stricter type checking for reactive forms. This way, we will allow developers to catch more issues during development time, enable better text editor and IDE support, and improve the type checking for reactive forms.
### Leverage full framework capabilities with Zone.js opt-out
We are going to design and implement a plan to make Zone.js optional from Angular applications. This way, we will simplify the framework, improve debugging, and reduce application bundle size. Additionally, this will allow us to take advantage of native async/await syntax, which currently Zone.js does not support.
After the transition of all our internal tooling to Ivy has completed, we want to remove the legacy View Engine for smaller Angular conceptual overhead, smaller package size, lower maintenance cost, and lower complexity of the codebase.
### Improved test times and debugging with automatic test environment tear down
To improve test time and create better isolation across tests, we want to change `TestBed` to automatically clean up and tear down the test environment after each test run.
### Improved build performance with ngc as a tsc plugin distribution
Distributing the Angular compiler as a plugin of the TypeScript compiler will substantially improve developers' build performance and reduce maintenance costs.
A long-standing feature request is to add the ability to add directives to host elements. The feature will allow developers to augment their own components with additional behaviors without using inheritance. The project will require substantial effort in terms of the definition of APIs, semantics, and implementation.
### Simplified Angular mental model with optional NgModules
To simplify the Angular mental model and learning journey, we’ll be working on making NgModules optional. This work will allow developers to develop standalone components and implement an alternative API for declaring the component’s compilation scope.
### Ergonomic component level code-splitting APIs
A common problem of web applications is their slow initial load time. A way to improve it is to apply more granular code-splitting on a component level. To encourage this practice, we’ll be working on more ergonomic code-splitting APIs.
