What's the difference between BrowserAnimationsModule and NoopAnimationsModule?

Question

With the new Angular-Material release, you need to add a module for Angular-Animations. You can choose between two BrowserAnimationsModule and NoopAnimationsModule. The official guide states:

Some Material components depend on the Angular animations module in order to be able to do more advanced transitions. If you want these animations to work in your app, you have to install the @angular/animations module and include the BrowserAnimationsModule in your app.

npm install --save @angular/animations
import {BrowserAnimationsModule} from '@angular/platform-browser/animations';

@NgModule({
  ...
  imports: [BrowserAnimationsModule],
  ...
})
export class PizzaPartyAppModule { }

If you don't want to add another dependency to your project, you can use the NoopAnimationsModule.

import {NoopAnimationsModule} from '@angular/platform-browser/animations';

@NgModule({
  ...
  imports: [NoopAnimationsModule],
  ...
})
export class PizzaPartyAppModule { }

I don't quite get what is the difference here. Seems to be exactly the same :) What's the difference between the two modules?

Answer 1

As the name noop ("no operation") says, that module doesn't do anything. It is a utility module that mocks the real animation module but doesn't actually animate.

This can be handy on platforms where animation would be too slow, or for testing (unit, integration, e2e with Cypress, Protractor, ...) , if animation isn't involved in what you actually want to test.

@NgModule({
  imports: [
    BrowserModule,
    environment.production ? BrowserAnimationsModule : NoopAnimationsModule,
    ...
   ]
   ...
}
export class AppModule {}