Astro 3.0: First major web framework supporting view transitions API now available

Astro Web Framework 3.0, the first major web framework to support the View Transitions API, is now accessible. The Astro Web Framework enables native page transition effects for web applications, such as morphing elements, fading and sliding content, and persistent UI elements. These capabilities were previously exclusive to JavaScript Single Page Applications, but are now available in Astro 3.0.

The latest version of Astro has seen substantial improvements in rendering performance, with components now rendering 30-75% faster. This increase in speed is due to the removal of superfluous code and optimization efforts carried out in Astro 2.10 and Astro 3.0. Image optimization is another enhancement, with the component simplifying image handling and providing automatic optimization for layout stability.

Astro 3.0 introduces several enhancements to Server Side Rendering (SSR) for serverless applications, including an official hosting partnership with Vercel, per-route code splitting, edge middleware, and a host customization API. It also offers support for developers using JSX, with the introduction of React Fast Refresh support, a major refactoring of internal JSX build support, and improved Hot Module Reloading for React, Preact, and Solid.js. Additionally, this new version optimizes build output by automatically minifying HTML output, replacing class names with the data-astro-cid-hash attribute, and inlining small CSS chunks.

There are a bunch of changes, so we recommend taking a look at the full announcement here. The framework can be installed via npm or tested in the browser at astro.new