Google no longer developing Material Web Components
github.com
github.com
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 has already happened. Many companies offer dictionaries to translate the names of Google tools to their tools. Open source ones exist as well: https://github.com/jhuangtw/xg2xg
An issue I’ve ran into is startups being very hesitant of hiring Googlers because of a perception that they can’t engineer without other teams of developers supporting all of their tooling. One startup specifically asked how to create a dashboard without using Plx - a wild question given the vast OSS dashboarding ecosystem - but it was still a concern to them.
I'm sure they've wasted literally billions of dollars in salary and opportunity costs. And in the end they're building multiple incompatible proprietary systems, with seemingly no checks on the team in charge of this effort. Even if they manage to succeed somehow, they'll have a system that no new hire will know, that doesn't have any external ecosystem, and definitely, that doesn't attract up-and-coming talent that wants experience that applies to the rest of the industry.
So MWC actually was their only viable option for Material Design components. I think the Wiz team was desperately trying to find or fund another option because of how bad the managers thought this looked. Maybe you can't get a promotion embracing interoperability.
Why in heaven's name would this go into "maintenance mode" ? Do they not want people making web-apps using Material Design anymore ? I thought the Chrome team was all gung-ho on web-components and shadow DOM as the one true, standards-compliant way of developing web-apps.
They are pretty put out by this decision, and will have to maintain Material components themselves, but the Material Design team doesn't prioritize Chrome as a customer - the VPs weren't graded on helping them for some reason.
But to a certain extent, that's part of the job description. If you move from a company that uses RoR stack to one that uses GraphQL or Node, you're going to have to learn the ropes.
From March, 29 at https://blog.angular.dev/angular-and-wiz-are-better-together...
> Our long-term goal is to gradually and responsibly merge Angular and Wiz over the coming years. Our strategy is to steadily open source Wiz features via Angular and follow our open model of development, allowing the community to both influence the roadmap and plan accordingly. We’ll use the public RFC process to ensure we gather community feedback on the relevant proposed features. The primary goal is to improve the Angular framework.
What's just wild about this to me is that Google does not give a crap about outside developers anymore.
None of the new plans court the outside world. Google is all in on Google tech for Googlers. ChromeOS tried to mix in some regular Linux-stack tech: dead, replaced by bespoke Android-ism forever and ever. Cutting off a toolkit used to help folks make good Google style web apps is again that cutting loose ties with the outside world, is turtling up inside their own inland empire.
It still worked out fine for Google, though.
https://github.com/material-components/material-components-i...
I think the most difficult thing would be understanding the CSS and de-Googlefying it. The SCSS is generated from Google's internal design tokens system, which makes everything more complicated than a pure open implementation would be.
Flutter is great tech but you'd be nuts to bet your company on it now.
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.
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.
If you dislike churn, maybe this is good news?