feat(react-router): upgrade to react router 6

[ShaneK]

Issue number: resolves #24177

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What is the current behavior?

Currently, Ionic Framework React Router only supports React Router 5. This has many issues and unsupported/broken features.

What is the new behavior?

With this change, Ionic Framework will support React Router 6 while still supporting transitions in the same way a native app does.

Most of what caused this change to take a long time is that React Router 5 and React Router 6 have fundamental differences in how they handle components once they're no longer part of the view. In this change, we move away from relying on React Router directly so much and have our own implementation for deciding how views get dealt with during navigation and when they're cleaned up, allowing for us to still transition between them like we need to while still using React Router as much as we possibly can.

This change will also lay the foundation for the migration to React Router 7, which will ideally be easier since most of the hard work has been dealt with here.

Does this introduce a breaking change?

• Yes
• No

Other information

Current dev build:

⚠️ WARNING: If you're going to use this dev build on an existing react project, you'll need to migrate to React Router 6. Migrating a large project at this point might be a bad idea since this will not release until v9, which will require further migrations and have other breaking changes! I do not currently have migration documentation for this, but it's a relatively easy process from the migrations I've been doing.

8.7.12-dev.11764873961.1fedca46

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Project	Deployment	Preview	Comments	Updated (UTC)
ionic-framework	Ready	Preview	Comment	Dec 4, 2025 7:59pm

[mhartington]

Took you long enough...Good job shane

[brandyscarney]

We should either update the breaking changes file to include no longer supporting react router 5 or create a follow-up task since doing so might conflict with next: https://github.com/ionic-team/ionic-framework/blob/next/BREAKING.md

[ShaneK]

Yeah, I still need to document migration strategies and such. For the most part, it's a pretty easy migration (ignore the inline overlay stuff, that was all removed), but I just need to write it out.

[ShaneK]

I went ahead and did this in this branch, figuring it would be an easy enough merge conflict resolution. If you'd like to review in an easier to read way:
https://github.com/ionic-team/ionic-framework/blob/b2a71050344052a4858d0c8b6712f0d5bc9d7219/BREAKING.md