Google no longer developing Material Web Components

> Material Design is focusing on support for Google's large-scale internal Wiz framework, and has reassigned the engineers working on Material Web Components. This places MWC into maintenance mode.

At one point, it seemed like Google was trying to move their stack toward stuff they could publicly release.

Now, they seem to be less and less interested in trying to release stuff like this publicly. At some point, if everything google uses is a proprietary stack, eventually people who have worked at google are going to have more trouble getting jobs elsewhere when all the tools they've worked with are things that nobody outside of google has heard of, and that could make it harder for Google to attract developers.

This is no great surprise. We used Google’s Material Components for iOS and that was abandoned a few years ago. They weren’t even merging small pull requests with fixes for show-stopping bugs stopping it from compiling. The writing has been on the wall for a while.

https://github.com/material-components/material-components-i...

Flutter next

If someone was to fork Material and attempt to make a successor project from that foundation, are there any Google-shaped crosshairs they might be inviting unto their person?

Material and web components have been major initiatives at Google for years. Google pulling the plug on this despite recording huge profits and despite already slashing thousands and thousands of jobs tells you everything you need to know about how much you can trust any Google tech under their current magpie syndrome management.

Flutter is great tech but you'd be nuts to bet your company on it now.

Check out mui.com, a mature and robust React UI components project loosely based on Material Design. It's powerful, easy to use, well documented, and generally a pleasure. Probably my single favorite web technology. I wish all libs were this good.

It's open core, so partially free and open source with a few premium components with features that can be enabled/extended with a paid license.

> Material Design is focusing on support for Google's large-scale internal Wiz framework, and has reassigned the engineers working on Material Web Components. This places MWC into maintenance mode.

This shows that even widely used open-source projects aren't immune to being abandoned by the companies. I'm currently enjoying VS Code, but I wonder if it will face a similar fate. There's a risk Microsoft could prioritize VisualStudio or move important features behind a paywall. It may be one or two board members away from abusing their market power to push for full monetization of the product.

I never got to use them. I tried to use the previous version on the web, but the setup was either unavailable or too convoluted for me to bother. Was it even available to use then on websites?

Seems like “maintenance mode” isn’t the same as “unmaintained?” It’s more like using a long-term release, which is what some people want, because they don’t want it to change.

If you dislike churn, maybe this is good news?

This doesn’t make any sense to me. They are web components, can’t Wiz use web components? Why would it need a different implementation?

So is this only for the web components or does this include the icons as well?

Material design isn't used as part of Android spec?

RIP