Hi, interesting PR - but I don't see how this is different from ngIf?

Note that since #12078 transluded content is lazily compiled only if/when needed.

You're right, after stripping most of our custom stuff for submission here the directives functionality as submitted here is very close to ngIf.

There are however, a few differences:

• ngIf removes and then re-attaches the DOM element from the tree, ngDefer simply stops compilation
• ngIf keeps a persistent watcher whereas ngDefer removes the watcher once the condition is fulfilled
• ngIf creates a new scope, ngDefer doesn't

All of these make for better performance, in particular not modifying the DOM means there is no re-layout event triggered in the browser, which is crucial for fast initial page rendering (in progressive enhancement use-cases).

But looking at it again, it might make more sense to implement this as an extension to ngNonBindable (as in supporting an ngNonBindable attribute value) than as a separate directive?

1. and 3) are valid points - I think point 2) can be achieved with a one-time binding on the ngIf condition. Even so, we won't add it to core, as I think it's still quite similar to ngIf, which does a fine job in most cases. Progressive enhancement is also not something AngularJS is especially good at, so I assume it's a bit of a rare / power user use case. I still think this could be a nice 3rd party module / directive, though. Actually, it wouldn't surprise me if something like this exists in user-land.