View Transition for page navigation

[kenrick95]

View Transition is a feature to enhance page navigation experience by having a animation plays when navigating from one route to another route. Having this page transition gives an overall better user experience so page navigation are not too 'harsh'. Of course, the best practice of turning off this when user prefers reduced motion should be respected too.

Example site having View Transitions: https://web.dev/

Browser support: Baseline Newly Available feature and further enhancement such as Cross-Document View Transtion is in Interop 2026. So by end of 2026, I expect this to be widely available in major browsers.

At time of writing (v3.10), adding View Transition to Docusaurus is not straightfoward because of the need to calling ReactDOM.flushSync to get a snapshot of the next route. When inside client module's onRouteUpdate, it is already too late to call as React is already in progress of rendering the next route. So I'm wondering if there's possibility to explore adding this view transition feature into Docusaurus core?

Thanks~

[slorber]

Hey, I understand the challenge and moved this discussion to an issue to track progress: #12223

It's not my immediate plan to implement this (we first would like to release v4 and eventually upgrade React Router) but if anyone want to give it a try and submit a POC, I'll take a look as an example implementation, but it likely won't be merged.

[kenrick95]

yup understand, I think the implementation really depends on the major version on React Router. My understanding is that React Router v6 onwards has better support for it, although if one really wants, one can hack the 'history' package to inject View Transition (which I did at the company I work for). So if there's plan to upgrade React Router, I feel it's better to do that first to reduce impact of accumulating tech debt. Thanks for considering this!

[slorber]

It's in progress (#12201), but to be honest, React Router 8 is more focusing on server-side features and can be heavier and disruptive to our community, so I'm considering forking React Router v5 for Docusaurus