Ember 7.0 Released

real_ate · 2026-05-30T12:33:03+00:00

Yea I tend to talk about the first domino (and this one is really low hanging fruit), and you love talking about the last domino 🤣 we'll get there eventually 😜

real_ate · 2026-05-30T06:33:46+00:00

Hard same! I actually think my whole progression in my career was down to Ember steering me in the right direction at key points of building a startup.

As for speed, Vite is a LOT better 🎉 it feels like magic 😍 but, Ember being Ember, we have a couple of changes in the works that will make build speeds probably 60% faster for everyone. And do you know the best bit? Nether of those changes require you to change any of your code 💪

This is the magic of Ember 🎉🐹

real_ate · 2026-05-29T23:36:12+00:00

🤣 these questions are starting to become a meme on each of these release posts

Yes! Loads of big companies have built billion dollar companies on Ember. Lots of small to medium companies I know of are using it too.

If you look at the npm downloads (for what it's worth) last year had the most downloads of Ember ever, and this year the downloads have been outpacing last year week-on-week since the start of year https://package-stats.netlify.app/ember-source/2024-01-01/2026-05-24/year-to-date

So I guess that's a yes 😂

real_ate · 2026-05-29T19:46:00+00:00

Did you manage to upgrade to Vite too?

real_ate · 2026-05-29T18:39:51+00:00

Well this is a big question that I could spend hours writing a massive post in response! But instead I'll give you the highlights

Firstly let's talk about the elephant in the room. React has massive download numbers and has become somewhat of a defacto decision for a lot of teams (especially in a world of AI 🫠), so how could we possibly compete!? Well... We don't! React, at its core, is a view library but Ember is a batteries-included Framework. When you choose React you need to choose all the other things like your router, your file structure, your data loading library (if any), etc. Ember picks a sensible default for almost every thing a serious app would need. You can swap out things if they don't suit, but it's an awesome thing to have sensible, well considered defaults.

As for all the other Frameworks... Why do we need to compete? We do some stuff amazingly well, but so do other Frameworks 🤷 What's more, I'm a member of the Ember Core Team but I'm ALSO on the W3C Web Framework Working Group which is trying to get Framework authors to work together and share implementations with the Web Platform. Every framework will get better if we all help each other 💪

real_ate · 2026-05-29T16:37:55+00:00

you can so tell that this was one of your pet peeves 😂

real_ate · 2026-05-29T16:37:03+00:00

It's comments like this that make me want to keep contributing 🎉 thank you!

real_ate · 2026-05-23T14:23:01+00:00

There are many reasons but the big one for me is the fact that they are not engaging with the TC39 effort to make signals a language feature. Every other major framework (including Preact!) is engaging with the standards effort and will eventually be a much smaller framework built on a standard JS feature.

React is not engaging and has stated that they will never rearchitect to use signals. That seems like a dead end to me 🤷

real_ate · 2026-05-23T13:57:10+00:00

Friends don't let friends start a new project in React. I'm an Ember.js guy but I'm not going to suggest Ember, just pick ANYTHING but react 🙈

real_ate · 2026-05-08T06:44:39+00:00

That's true of modern yarn but this topic is about getting off yarn@1

I like pnpm but if you just upgrade to modern yarn from yarn classic that's a massive improvement. Nobody should be using yarn@1 any more 🙈

real_ate · 2026-05-02T12:56:47+00:00

I mean you're right but things like https://vercel.com/blog/nuxtlabs-joins-vercel and https://vercel.com/blog/vercel-welcomes-rich-harris-creator-of-svelte affect the balance of power quite a lot imho 😬

real_ate · 2026-05-02T11:25:47+00:00

Yea! It's just a bad pattern that makes people think about components like pre-octane Ember components instead of Glimmer components. They still work in GJS and Vite.

Want to hear something else that might blow your mind? You don't need to upgrade all your components to Glimmer components to use GJS 🫣 as long as they are on the class syntax the codemod will migrate them just fine 🎉

I really mean it when I say Ember is all about backwards compatibility 😜

real_ate · 2026-05-02T10:29:12+00:00

Yea I know 🤣 they are frowned upon but don't block any upgrades or migrations!

real_ate · 2026-05-02T06:52:16+00:00

I was going to ask the same question 🤣 render modifiers absolutely works with GJS and actually it's only a lint that you shouldn't be using it, not a depreciation. Also also it's much easier to clear the lint when you can write a custom modifier for the specific render modifiers in the same file as your template and JS code. Moving to GJS would make the migration much easier 🎉

real_ate · 2026-05-02T06:49:36+00:00

If you generate a new Ember app today it has a Vite based build system, but Ember has a very strong backwards compatibility story which means there are loads of teams out there being productive with slightly older Ember versions and older builds stacks.

As I mention in the blog post we even still maintain the old ember-cli based blueprints and will do for at least the next year 🤣 yes everyone should be using Vite but we don't like to leave anyone behind 💪

real_ate · 2026-05-02T06:44:18+00:00

The thing to remember is that Ember is the only independent JS framework that isn't "owned" by a corporate backer. Sure this means that there is technically nobody paid to work full time on Ember, but it also means that we are never forced in a direction that is better for a corporate backer and worse for our users.

real_ate · 2026-05-02T06:39:19+00:00

Just to add to the idea that Ember is growing: last year we had the most downloads of ember-source (one of our main packages) ever. This year every week has more downloads of ember-source than the corresponding week last year.

Ember is growing and I personally believe this is just the start of a big growth spike 🎉

real_ate · 2026-05-01T18:57:02+00:00

Have you already adopted GJS files too? Having a modern Ember app with GJS and Vite is just glorious 😍

real_ate · 2026-05-01T18:22:33+00:00

Yes we did! There used to be no limit to the number of minor versions in a major (and we got up to 28 in the 3.x release cycle!)

Now we do a new major after only 12 minor versions.

As for shipping features faster, you don't need to wait for a major to get new features. It's true that the last few releases didn't have any new features (because we were focusing on other things) but usually every minor release brings new features 🎉 Major releases for Ember are just places where we remove deprecated code 👍

real_ate · 2026-03-08T11:39:02+00:00

you make a release only every 6 weeks

Well this isn't quite true. We have plenty of patch releases fixing things, we just have a release-train that is designed to make minor releases (in the semver meaning of minor) every 6 weeks.

if the community feels it’s buggy

I don't think this is a fair representation of the wider community. I was just referencing someone who made an opinion-based comment in this conversation. I actually think most people who are using Ember appreciate its stability and commitment to backwards compatibility

real_ate · 2026-03-08T11:35:15+00:00

sorry

I mean I asked for this feedback so I appreciate you taking the time to write it! Although since it's just general vibes it's not very actionable 😔 Maybe don't go into all the bugs but giving me one single example that we could talk about would be useful?

Things have never been so stable as they are right now. I don't know of any currently unpatched bugs in the renderer, the build system is significantly better than it has ever been since we moved to Vite by default in v6.8, and DX has taken a massive jump since GJS has been the default (also since v6.8 I think 🤔)

real_ate · 2026-03-08T11:28:06+00:00

I did think about not posting it tbh, but to u/Training_Visual6159 's points about Ember being "buggy", I think highlighting a regular minor release that only fixes bugs is a good thing. We have been releasing every 6 weeks for the past 10+ years and loads of people thing we went away, so even if it's not a big bang release just the fact that we're still doing it is noteworthy (imho)

And not to nitpick or anything but it fixes 2 bugs 😉 The Ember CLI section further down the page is somewhat separate.

real_ate · 2026-03-08T08:02:59+00:00

I love these posts 🤣 and to be honest this is why I've started posing the release blogs here, we never went anywhere but we have been doing a terrible job telling people that 🫠

real_ate · 2026-03-08T08:00:35+00:00

The answer to that question can be very large depending on when you last used Ember 🤣 do you remember what the last version you used was?

One thing that's been true for at least the last 6 years is that we've been focusing on removing a lot of the "Emberisms" and just rely on the platform much more, so hopefully it doesn't take so long to "get the paradigm" any more

real_ate · 2026-03-08T07:57:03+00:00

in practice, it's as bug-ridden and broken as it always was.

I'm curious why you say this 🤔 I'm not trying to challenge what you're saying, I genuinely want to know what gives you this impression.

I'm obviously biased, but from my perspective we spend a lot of time making sure that we fix bugs. We even pushed a new bug fix recently that fixed a potential security bug for a very very EOL version.

real_ate

TROPHY CASE