Vue 3.6 ships with one of the most ambitious features the Vue team has ever built: Vapor Mode . It's a completely new rendering strategy that ditches the Virtual DOM entirely — and the performance numbers are wild.

Let's break it all down.

🤔 First, Why Does the Virtual DOM Exist?

Before we can appreciate Vapor Mode, we need to understand the problem it solves.

Every modern JavaScript framework faces the same challenge: when your state changes, how do you efficiently update the browser's DOM?

The answer most frameworks landed on is the Virtual DOM (VDOM) :

Represent your UI as a lightweight JavaScript object tree (VNodes)

When state changes, create a new virtual tree

Diff the old tree vs the new tree

Apply only the changed parts to the real DOM

This is the model Vue has used since Vue 2.…