Google no longer developing Material Web Components

Abner Li | Jun 25 2024 - 12:05 am PT

Google is “no longer actively staffing” Material Web Components (MWC) and has “reassigned the engineers working” on it.

MWC offered a library of Material 3 components (as seen above) — Button, FAB, Icon button, Checkbox, Chips, Dialog, Divider, Elevation, Focus ring, List, Menu, Progress indicators, Radio, Ripple, Select, Slider, Switch, Tabs, and Text field — that developers could use on websites.

Material Web 1.0 hit stable in October of 2023 and had a 2024 roadmap already in place.

Earlier this month, the team announced (h/t Artem Russakovskii) that MWC has entered maintenance mode and will no longer see updates with all future plans abandoned.

MWC is not deprecated or going away, but Material Design is no longer actively staffing its development.

The original team is “investigating ways to continue development of new features and components, including identifying new maintainers.”

Behind-the-scenes, this change is due to a new focus on supporting “Google’s large-scale internal Wiz framework” that saw the existing MWC engineers reassigned.

You may know Angular as the web framework from Google, but Google actually has another web framework: Wiz. Both Angular and Wiz are used by thousands of engineers and thousands of apps inside of Google.

Wiz is leveraged by Google Search, Photos, Payments, and other performance critical applications. For comparison, gemini.google.com uses Angular. The long-term goal is to merge Angular and Wiz to offer a “highly performant framework with great developer experience.” You can read more about that here.

Angular Material (or Material Design components for Angular) does exist, so at least one path for Material on the web remains.