Timeline

React 19 RC available on npm.

Mar react.dev launched – the new home for React and its documentation.

React 18 stable release: Introduced concurrent features, improved Suspense, automatic batching, and startTransition API, which enhanced the user experience for high-demand applications.

New server rendering architecture: Improved server rendering performance and allowed for concurrent features on the server side.

React 18 alpha release with Concurrent Mode improvements.

React v17 “no new features” release. This version focused on stability and incremental updates.

React v16.8 - Hooks Released: Allowed functional components to use state and other React features without writing classes.

React Hooks proposal announced: React Hooks introduced a new way to manage state and lifecycle in functional components, drastically simplifying component logic.

React v16 – Fiber architecture released: Significant performance improvements were achieved, including the ability to pause and resume rendering and handle asynchronous rendering.

React v15 release: Improved performance and provided support for the latest JavaScript features.

React v0.14 - Component Model Evolution

Split of React and ReactDOM: React’s rendering for the DOM and logic for components were separated into react and react-dom libraries, a key architectural change.

React Native announced: Facebook introduced React Native, an extension of React for building native mobile apps using the same component-based architecture.

React was open-sourced by Facebook at the JSConf US.

Developer Jordan Walke at Facebook created the initial prototype of React. He aimed to simplify the user interface (UI) rendering process by improving reactivity.