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Unlock Seamless Page Transitions with Astro View Transitions
Astro 3.0 has taken a significant leap forward by introducing native browser transition effects between pages, thanks to the View Transition API. This innovative feature is supported in Chrome ≥ 111 and allows developers to create smooth, animated transitions when navigating between pages.
Getting Started with Astro View Transitions
To explore Astro view transitions, let’s create a starter project. Run the following command to clone a starter Astro project, install dependencies, and start the application:
astro new my-project
Open the local port (localhost:4321) and view the starter application. Notice how the navigation between the home page and the main article page feels standard. Now, let’s add some view transitions to elevate the user experience.
Two Ways to Automatically Include View Transitions
Astro view transitions kick in when navigating from one page to another. To enable view transitions, we need to import and render the ViewTransitions component in the head of an Astro page. There are two ways to do this:
Option 1: Lone-Page View Transitions
Add ViewTransitions to the head of specific pages to enable view transitions between those pages.
Option 2: Full-Site View Transitions
Render ViewTransitions within the <head> element of a shared Layout component to enable view transitions across the entire application.
Customizing Astro View Transitions
Astro automatically infers corresponding elements in the origin and destination pages based on the type of DOM element and its location in the DOM. For finer control, we can leverage transition directives:
transition:name: Associate a pair of DOM elements from the origin and destination pages.transition:animate: Customize the animation behavior of specific transitions.transition:persist: Persist components and HTML elements across the origin and destination pages.
Handling Fallback for Unsupported Browsers
While ViewTransitions works best in browsers that support view transitions, it also provides support for other browsers. If you wish to disable support in other browsers, pass none to the fallback prop. This will trigger a full-page reload in non-supporting browsers.
With Astro view transitions, you can create seamless, native-like transitions between pages, elevating the user experience and setting your application apart. Explore the Astro view transitions examples GitHub repo for more inspiration and get started with building better transitions today!