What’s new in Angular 20.1?

Alain Chautard Angular

Angular 20.1 was just released by the Angular team, with a lot of good tools for improved developer experience:

Developer Tools

  • Signal Dependency Graphs: The Angular devtools extension includes an experimental feature to visualize the dependencies between signals in a graph. You can also inspect a signal and jump directly to its definition in the code. Signals also “blink” in the graph when their value changes.

Testing

  • Simplified Component Testing: New binding helpers (inputBinding(), outputBinding(), twoWayBinding()) allow you to set a component’s bindings directly during testing, without doing manual assignments or using wrapper components.

Performance

  • Optimized Template Compilation: The Angular compiler now uses more efficient, DOM-only instructions for elements that don’t have any directives applied, leading to better runtime performance.

Templates

  • Assignment Operators: You can now use assignment operators like +=, -=, and *= directly in your component templates.
  • NgOptimizedImage Decoding: The NgOptimizedImage directive now includes a decoding option, which can be set to async to avoid blocking the main JS thread.

HTTP Client

  • New HttpClient Options: A variety of new options have been added to HttpClient, including timeout, cache, priority, and credentials, giving you more control over HTTP requests and helping to improve Core Web Vitals.

AI and Angular CLI

  • AI-Assisted Development: Angular is integrating with AI development tools through the new ng mcp command, which starts a Model Control Protocol (MCP) server. This allows AI tools to better understand your Angular workspace for more accurate suggestions.
  • New Asset Loaders: The CLI now supports dataurl and base64 loaders, allowing you to inline small assets directly into your application’s code.

Alain Chautard

Alain is a Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies, Angular, and Google Maps. His daily mission is to help development teams adopt Angular and build at scale with the framework. He has taught Angular on all six continents! A world traveler and photographer, Alain is also an international conference speaker, and a published author of several video courses.