What’s with all the big changes in R2025a?
Bio: Hi, it's Michelle here. You might know me as the woman who falls on her sword when MATLAB isn't meeting your needs (dark mode), who gives big fancy presentations, or as MathWorks first blogger as founder of Scott and Doug's Pick of the Week blog (IYKYK). I was MATLAB Head of Product for many years and am now the unofficial head of MATLAB-iness. I'm responsible for driving a great overall experience using MATLAB.
By now you've likely heard about all of the great new capabilities in the new MATLAB desktop released in R2025a – dark mode, customizable rails that make it easy to access the tools you need right now, tabbed figures, and tons of new side panels for helping with anything from navigating the outline of a program, running tests, and managing interactions with source control. Maybe you've already used these new capabilities in R2025a or one of the many beta versions we put out over the last 2 years. Or maybe you use MATLAB Online and are wondering what all the fuss is about, because you've been using many of these features for quite some time.
If you are an experienced MATLAB user, let me guess – you've found some things you like, but there is at least one thing that annoys you a little bit, or maybe a lot. An awful lot has changed, so you've got to figure out new ways of doing things you've done one way for years. Even if things are better, they are different. And you might not think some things are better – you can't configure your desktop in exactly the same way, you need to tweak the layout of your apps, or something feels slower.
I'd like to give you a little bit of a peek behind the scenes so that you understand why we've done what we've done. It may or may not make you feel any better about any specific change, but hopefully I'll leave you with a sense that we are doing everything we can to try to give you the best MATLAB experience now and for years in the future.
Moving to web-friendly technology
R2025a represents a major rebuild of the MATLAB desktop and graphics system to use JavaScript and HTML instead of Java. We also moved to a new architecture where we are separating the front end (the stuff you see on the screen) from the back end (MATLAB execution). Together, these changes make MATLAB "web-friendly", so it can work just as well on the web as it does on the desktop.
We had a good run with Java. It powered the MATLAB desktop and graphics system for 20 years. One of the things we really liked about Java was that it allowed us to develop (approximately) one code base that worked on Windows, Mac, and Linux. This was a huge improvement from the days when developers had to have both Windows and Mac computers in their office to be able to support both platforms. This helped enable our steady stream of simultaneous releases on all supported platforms, and gave developers more time to build the things you want instead of writing two or three versions of the same feature.
The big change is that the web/cloud is now just as important a platform for the global MATLAB user base as Windows, Mac, and Linux. This may come as a surprise to many of you, but more than 2.8 million people used MATLAB Online last year. That's more people using MATLAB Online than locally installed MATLAB on Mac and Linux combined! With the growing importance of MATLAB Online, we've been back in the situation from decades ago where features often needed to be developed separately for desktop MATLAB and MATLAB Online. With the new desktop and graphics, we are now maintaining (again, approximately) a single code base for all platforms – Windows, Mac, Linux, and MATLAB Online.
Our shift to web-friendly technologies enables so much more than just traditional MATLAB Online, such as:
- File Exchange submissions and GitHub repositories can be opened directly in MATLAB Online, which makes it super easy to share MATLAB code that anybody can run in an instant.
- You can share MATLAB apps and Simulink simulations as browser-based web apps.
- You can run MATLAB in Jupyter notebooks, and open the full MATLAB desktop right in your browser any time you want to access additional features
- The separation of the front end and back end enabled us to build the MATLAB Extension for Visual Studio Code, which now even supports debugging MATLAB from VS Code.
- You can run MATLAB on Domino Data Lab.
We expect this list to keep growing, as we give you greater flexibility to use MATLAB anywhere you need it and give greater continuity between web and desktop workflows. I'm particularly bullish on the work we are doing to split the front end and back end, with APIs that we will be increasingly formalizing and documenting over time. One early example of this is the MATLAB language server, our implementation of the Microsoft Language Server Protocol. We built this to support the MATLAB Extension for VS Code, and other users have integrated it with the Neovim editor. We draw a lot of inspiration from the great work Microsoft is doing with VS Code. You can use VS Code (the "front end") on your desktop or in a browser, and the compute ("back end") can be on your computer, on a remote computer (your powerful work computer), or in the cloud.
These capabilities might not seem relevant to you today, but all signs point to a greater likelihood that they will be in the future. The most conservative companies, and even the United States Department of Defense, are adopting cloud-based workflows.
Moving the desktop design forward
The design of state-of-the-art development environments has also changed significantly over the last 20 years. Modern development environments launch in a flash, have less cluttered designs that help you focus on your work, and are extensible so you can customize with the tools you need. And of course, they support dark mode.
Given this change, we knew that it didn't make sense to just copy everything about the existing 20-year old MATLAB desktop when we built the new one. The challenge we set for ourselves was to modernize the MATLAB desktop to give you a great experience, while still preserving all the most important capabilities and workflows of the existing one. We knew this would not be easy, since so many of you have each developed your favorite ways of working with the tools you use day-in and day-out.
There's only one way to really know if changes you make work well for users, and that's to let people use the software. So, that's what we did. We ran longitudinal betas of the new desktop for the last 2 years. This allowed us to gather thousands and thousands of points of feedback as users tried to adopt the new desktop for their daily MATLAB use. We also used the desktop ourselves, with thousands of MathWorks engineers using the new desktop day-in and day-out as they developed and tested the most recent MATLAB releases. Trust me – our engineers are not shy about sharing their opinions about what is working and what is not!
There's no option to enable the old desktop
One of the questions I hear the most is "Can't I just switch back to the old desktop?" No, you can't. The only way to switch back to the old desktop is to use R2024b.
I pushed our engineering teams very hard on this question. I'm a pretty cautious person, so I was looking for ways to make the transition more gradual and more optional as we moved towards the eventuality of the new desktop. We explored several alternative release strategies. However, they all proved infeasible when shifting from beta releases to a product-grade release that meets MathWorks high quality standards. We needed to put all our testing and development energy into the new desktop to ensure the best possible experience.
Give it a try and let us know what you think
I happen to think R2025a is pretty great. It's not perfect*, but I cringe any time I need to use the old desktop. I really miss the new projects interface – I won't do any real work in MATLAB without it. I also miss the source control and testing panels, which have been a huge help as I've recently been trying to adopt slightly better software development practices to help me write more reliable code. I miss the ability to arrange desktop side panels into logical groups that I switch between, expand, and collapse in a single click.
It took a little while for me to get used to all these changes, but the payoff for me has been totally worth it.
But that's enough of my opinions. Give it a try and let us know what you think. I hope you'll be able to spend some real time using it to get a feel for how to best use the new design and the new features.
We could not have made it to this release without extensive feedback from users like you. It helped us refine our designs and prioritize addressing issues. In fact, we found the feedback so useful that for the first time we are putting a feedback button right in the MATLAB Desktop:
We want your feedback on anything and everything in our products, so don't hold back. We can't wait to hear from you. Use the new feedback button, or share your thoughts below.
* For the record, my job is to think that MATLAB can always be better!
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