Enable withIncrementalHydration() by default in for SSR Angular projects

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Description

Currently, Angular SSR applications generated with the Angular CLI (ng new --ssr) do not enable withIncrementalHydration() by default. Developers need to manually update the server configuration to opt in to incremental hydration.

Incremental hydration is now the recommended, modern hydration strategy and provides significant UX and performance benefits compared to the legacy full hydration approach. Because of this, it would be beneficial for developers if new SSR projects used this configuration automatically.

Please enable provideClientHydration(withIncrementalHydration()) in all newly generated Angular SSR applications.

Describe the solution you'd like

Suggested change:

When running:

ng new my-app --ssr

the generated app.config.ts (and/or other relevant project scaffolding) should automatically include:

export const appConfig: ApplicationConfig = {
  providers: [
    provideClientHydration(withIncrementalHydration()),
  ]
};

instead of the current default provideClientHydration().

Describe alternatives you've considered

Developers can manually modify app.config.ts to include withIncrementalHydration(), but:

It is easy to overlook.
Tutorials and docs are inconsistent.
It adds friction to adopting SSR best practices.

@AndrewKushnir

//cc @AndrewKushnir & @thePunderWoman

FWIW, I was also surprised when I tried to follow the docs about @defer with hydrate triggers and it "didn't work" in a new project.

It's too late for us to do this in v21, but yeah, we should enable it by default.

@thePunderWoman

Following a chat with @thePunderWoman, it was mentioned that before doing this we'd likely want to do some changes to the framework such as enable it by default make it default, not just add it in the schematic.

I've been testing this a bit, and I see that if we have withIncrementalHydration set to default, the bundle size will increase by approximately 23kb. I'm not sure if it would be worth the cost for all users, considering that there may be some who don't use it (in my case, some projects I've participated in).

That said, I understand the importance. An alternative would be to perhaps have a other function / entry point?

provideIncrementalHydration(), which could be the new default for incremental hydration.

And we could keep provideClientHydration working as it does for those who don't need incremental hydration, as well as perhaps deprecating withIncrementalHydration.

@SkyZeroZx

@SkyZeroZx I think that provideIncrementalHydration() defeats the purpose of having it be the default behavior. We would also provide a way to opt out when making incremental hydration the default. We can also look into ways of improving tree shaking for incremental hydration.

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Enable `withIncrementalHydration()` by default in for SSR Angular projects #65263

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Enable withIncrementalHydration() by default in for SSR Angular projects #65263

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alan-agius4 commented on Nov 14, 2025

hybrist commented on Nov 14, 2025

thePunderWoman commented on Nov 14, 2025

alan-agius4 commented on Nov 17, 2025

SkyZeroZx commented on Mar 29, 2026

thePunderWoman commented on Apr 8, 2026

angular-automatic-lock-bot commented on May 10, 2026

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Enable `withIncrementalHydration()` by default in for SSR Angular projects #65263