Google to Stop Dedicated Staff on MWC Project but Material Design Still Has a Future

TapTechNews June 26th news, according to 9to5Google, Google will no longer assign dedicated developers to the Material Web Components (MWC) project and has reassigned the original engineering team to other projects.

MWC provides a component library in the Material 3 design style, covering buttons, floating action buttons, icon buttons, checkboxes, cards, dialog boxes, dividers, shadows, focus rings, lists, menus, progress bars, radio buttons, ripple effects, dropdown selection boxes, sliders, switches, tabs, and text boxes and other common elements, facilitating developers to quickly apply the Material Design style in websites.

Although the MWC 1.0 version was released in stable version in October 2023 and was originally planned to be continuously updated in 2024, the project team announced this month that MWC will enter the maintenance mode and stop subsequent new function development, and the existing roadmap will also be shelved.

Google said that the MWC project itself will not be abandoned, but the Google Material Design team will no longer invest dedicated manpower for development. The project team is exploring ways to continue to develop new functions and components, including finding new maintainers, etc.

TapTechNews noted that behind this adjustment is the increase in support for the Google large-scale internal Wiz framework, and the original MWC project's engineer team has therefore been reassigned to the Wiz project.

Wiz is another large internal web development framework used by Google, existing alongside the well-known Angular framework. Both of these frameworks serve thousands of engineers and applications within Google, among which Wiz is mainly used for applications with strict performance requirements and is used in key applications such as Google Search, Albums, Payments, etc. In contrast, the gemini.google.com website uses the Angular framework. Google's long-term goal is to merge Angular and Wiz to create a comprehensive framework with both high-performance and excellent developer experience.

It is worth noting that the Angular Material project is still under continuous development, providing developers with Material Design components based on the Angular framework, so Material Design still has a place in the field of web development.