> 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.
> 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
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.
Google is heading for a world of hurt with their internal web framework decisions as of late. They've been spinning their wheels for years trying to reinvent Wiz, and it's not going well.
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.
Funny enough, one of the new forks of Wiz can't use components from the other fork of Wiz, but _could_ use web components, because web components work anywhere HTML does.
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.
Can someone explain this crazy decision ? It makes no sense at all. This is the web framework library that implements their official and public UI design language using formal web standards.
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.
The Chrome team is indeed building all their web UI (things like settings and bookmarks) with web components and... Material Web Components! Chrome OS is also building most or all of their built-in apps this way.
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.
It already is an issue and it works both ways. Engineers going to companies with proprietary stacks need to spend a lot of time onboarding. And engineers moving out of companies with proprietary stacks need to reorient themselves to the open source tooling.
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.
> 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.
This is already happening. At a previous job I saw an applicant who was struggling to figure out how to use any of the company’s standard tooling for version management and development because they spent their whole career only working with the Google internal versions.
I'm far less interested in what happens to ex-Googlers.
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.
In a way, it's returning to Google's roots. Before the public cloud became a thing, more of their stack was proprietary. (And without having contracts with customers, there was more churn.)
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.
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?
No. Is all liberally licensed, and there are already many Material implementations.
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.
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.
The biggest advantage of open source is that anyone can fork it and develop further - see e.g. Servo abandoned by Mozilla or Ubuntu Touch, but still being developed. The same would definitely be with VSCode/ium.
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.
With Material Components for iOS, they said that bug fixes would be merged on a “best effort basis” but then ignored pull requests for show-stopping compile errors. I think this is Google-speak for being abandoned.
That is not a manager's photo, that is Liz who works on the team and is a fantastic person. Google does not control or dictate employee's personal GitHub photos, and I'm glad for that.
>I’m going to save this as a case study for if anyone dares suggest relying on Google for something.
I don't get it, the code is going into maintenance mode. It's still usable and forkable, isn't it? Is Google obligated to pay people to work on it forever?
Perhaps the most important part of evaluating a software dependency is identifying it's structural risks to your business/project. Eg, if you're relying on a business's product, does them going bust mean the end for your project.
In Google's case, they often will create an open source project in license, but not community. They take the reigns and hold them so tightly that if they let go, nobody is there to pick them up. Compare this to projects created by a single individual: for those to grow in contributors, diversification happens automatically. Transitioning a project in a healthy way requires others to already be actively contributing, and probably in a minor leadership role.
The thing here isn't that Google is obligated to spend engineering resources on this forever. It's that the systemic risk of choosing a major Google product at first appears low because Google is one of the most successful companies in existence. However, it's actually very high because they have a history of the above behavior.
Legally obligated, no. But there is an obligation of a certain level of reliability in order for a party to maintain a reputation that their products are worth adopting for anything important.
You're absolutely right about the software and absolutely wrong about the profile photo. What aspect of it makes it not seem like Google is a serious company? Non-compliance to 1950-1980s appearance norms? Finally getting rid of the universal suit/tie/shaved/etc dress code was the best thing my generation has done.
Google is currently within the last month suffering from an appearance of being juvenile; and I would not be surprised if it’s causing concern that something is wrong with their mindset.
The last example of this was the Marc Rebillet performance at Google I/O. The mother of all cringe.
If it was just one employee having fun - whatever! Who cares! My point should be taken in context with the rest of Google’s juvenile image problems, even as they play with fire.
I work in games, so this doesn't even phase me. I don't particularly care what people think of my maturity as long as the money keeps flowing in.
>"When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
“An atheist can’t find God for the same reason a thief can’t find a policeman.” — C.S. Lewis
But seriously, Lewis was not a fan of immaturity. “Childish” endeavors is one thing like fairy tales - but do you think even children would like the Google IO performance?
If this is my vendor that my business is relying on, and they approved nonsense like the above or like this, why the heck would I trust their judgement?
You're free to your values and decisions, but Google is the progenitor and linchpin of surveillance capitalism and comparatively I can't find it in me to be bothered that they put on silly shows.
There's a point to be made that these silly little shows are what let Google promote a self-image that they are some ineffectual, twee organization like a local art collective, and it's this mild image that let's Google manufacture spyware without more intense scrutiny. It's subterfuge, and two sides of the same coin.
I cringe more about the terrible "serious" design decisions Goog and friends are shoving through the IETF like HTTP/3 based on their QUIC. Their new HTTP protocol basically is designed only for corporate use cases to the deteriment of "juvenile" human person use cases. Their actions are super serious even if their words and appearance are not. And it's a problem.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something but quic has been really great to work with and solved a lot of problems in places other than http for me personally
I'm not saying HTTP/3 is bad for the type of things people get paid to do. I'm saying it's bad for the type of things people chose to do without being paid. For example, it's impossible to connect to a website with HTTP/3 that does not have a CA TLS cert (and all HTTP/3 libs in major browsers are compiled with self-signing disabled). That means it's impossible to host a visitable website (by random people) without getting the continued permission from a third party corporation (there are no CAs included in browsers that are run by human persons, there are only corporate and government CAs).
This is extremely sensible for for-profit corporation and institutional practices. But it makes hosting a website from home far, far more complex, fragile and gives all websites a very short lifetime (just months) without continued active mantainence. Normal HTTP+HTTPS websites are visitable forever without doing anything. And that's ignoring the problems of CA centralization and censorship. Having to ask permission from a corporation to host a website is absurd. It is not required in HTTP/1.1 or HTTP/2.
HTTP+HTTPS is the most robust and accepted solution to CA TLS problems but HTTP/3 doesn't allow it.
They are wearing an eternity collar, which means they are in a BDSM relationship. Wearing something highly visible like that is basically performing your kink in public. There is much more discrete jewelry they could wear. I don’t think it’s appropriate for a work place even in 2024.
That looks like a regular necklace to me, of a fairly generic choker variety that is popular today and was popular 20 years ago.
I see nothing explicit in that necklace.
Maybe to you it does have some additional meanings, hell maybe it does to her as well, but so do wedding rings, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say you aren’t critiquing people for having profile pics with those.
I guess people with this knowledge are probably part of that subculture, not sure why would they be pothered by that fact. For others, like me it looks like random necklet.
And how is that any different than any other piece of jewelry? It in no way impedes or impacts your life, just like hair color or cut, earrings, other necklaces, even wedding rings.
Why does it matter that it has a significance beyond "it's pretty"? As long as it's not obviously discriminatory in nature (like a necklace full of swastikas), then why does it have to pass your "decency" tests?
I literally just see a normal person’s profile pic? Are they meant to be corporate/employer logos or something?
I need you to be super clear here because her profile pic looks like pretty much anyone else’s so I’m trying to give you the opportunity to explain what is wrong with it, rather than making any assumptions about what you think is wrong.
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.