At React Advanced 2025, Aurora Scharff presented Building Interactive Async UI with React 19 and Ariakit and shared how ARIAKit, an open-source accessibility library, enables developers to build custom UI components that meet WCAG standards without requiring deep accessibility expertise. The presentation showcased a practical approach to combining ARIAKit's unstyled primitives with modern React patterns to create production-ready, accessible interfaces.
When you are building a social feed, data grid, or chat UI, everything feels fine with 10 mock items. Then you connect a real API, render 50,000 rows with myList.map(...), and the browser locks up. The core problem is simple: you are asking the DOM to do too much work. Virtualization solves this by rendering only what the user can actually see. Instead of mounting 50,000 nodes, you render the 15-20 items that are visible in the viewport, plus a small buffer.
Modern web development is all about efficiency. We have libraries, frameworks, packages, AI tools, and Hooks. We need to build and ship fast. When React Hooks came into the picture, it was revolutionary. It changed the React game forever. Now, we know and use built-in Hooks like useState or useEffect, but we also know that there are custom Hooks. React is flexible enough to let developers write and reuse their own Hooks, or share them so that other developers can benefit too.
Meta is transferring React, React Native, and JSX to a new organization: the React Foundation. This foundation will become part of the Linux Foundation. The organization's purpose is to ensure that the development of the popular JavaScript framework is no longer under the direct influence of a single company. React was developed by Facebook in 2013. It has grown to become the most widely used front-end framework for web development.
React allows multiple updates to be batched together, which minimizes the number of render passes and significantly improves performance in applications. With this optimization, developers can create smoother and more efficient user interfaces by reducing the number of times components are rendered.
The article discusses creating a typed routing navigation system for React apps, focusing on scenarios where simpler solutions replace traditional URL navigation, especially for apps like Electron.
The React View Transition API simplifies the addition of animations during page transitions, streamlining the process for developers by automatically managing DOM interactions.