Google is “no longer actively staffing” Material Web Components (MWC) and has “reassigned the engineers working” on it.
MWC provided a library of Material 3 components (as shown above) for developers to use on websites, including a button, FAB, icon button, checkbox, chips, dialog, divider, elevation, focus ring, list, menu, progress indicators, radio, ripple, select, slider, switch, tabs, and text field.
Material Web 1.0 became stable in October 2023, with a 2024 plan already in place.
Earlier this month, the team revealed (h/t Artem Russakovskii) that MWC is in maintenance mode and will no longer receive updates, with all future ambitions abandoned.
The original group will be “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,” which has resulted in the reassignment of existing MWC engineers.
Wiz is used by Google Search, Photos, Payments, and other performance-critical apps. For comparison, gemini.google.com employs Angular. The long-term goal is to combine Angular and Wiz to create a “highly performant framework with a great developer experience.” You may learn more about it here.
Angular Material exists, thus at least one avenue for Material on the web survives.