Angular 3, so soon?
Angular 2 has barely been released and we’re already hearing about Angular 3
Considering that we had 6 years between Angular 1 and Angular 2, it might come as a bit of a shock to hear that Google is considering releasing Angular 3 in March. That’s barely 8 months between them! Some people reacted like this:
First of all, relax, Angular 3 is not a new major version, you won’t have to go back to the drawing board for this one. Angular 2 was a complete rewrite of Angular 1.5 but Angular 3 is predicted to be just an improvement of Angular 2.
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From Angular 1 to Angular 2
Angular 1 and Angular 2 are very different frameworks. So, even though 2 comes after 1, Angular 2 is not another version of the original Angular. It’s a brand new baby that came to life because Angular 1 had a few issues that were going to be addressed in a new version. But, those issues were on such a scale (inability to be server-side rendered, rendered on other environments etc) that the framework couldn’t be improved or updated, it had to be rewritten. So that’s how Angular 2 came to be.
Angular 3
This version is just an improvement of Angular 2, a normal update. That’s why it will come out in such a short period of time (compared to the timeframe between Angular 1 and 2). Just think of it like this, Angular 1 had 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 etc. and Angular 2 will have versions 3, 4, 5, 6 and so on. Angular 3 will have several improvements including improved tooling and a reduction in generated code. Rob Wormald from the Angular core team said that they will have new versions about twice a year, but we’ll see how this will play out.
Note: after the publication of this article the Angular team announced that they will skip Angular 3 to avoid confusion with an NPM package. Angular 3 will actually be Angular 4. In the future it will remain just Angular.
