Blink launch process update

[Johnny Stenback]

Hello Chromium Web Platform contributors,

As was initially announced over a year ago our intention is to move most of the Blink launch process logistics into the Chrome Status tracking tool. Since then we’ve made some changes to the tool, a lot of planning has been happening behind the scenes, a team has formed to work on this, and a good bit of work has been lining up towards this goal.

A bunch of things have happened since we first started thinking about how the Chrome Status tool should evolve. One significant change is that there are an increasing number of non-Google employees contributing to Blink, and more browser products are being built on top of the Chromium project as well. For that reason, we’ve decided to move the Blink launch process and feature tracking aspects of the tool to a domain and name that is separate from the Chrome browser product name (we’ll keep the old domain around and make sure old feature links continue to work, as well as likely keeping Chrome Browser metrics on that domain, etc). We’re not yet at a point where we can announce the new home for the tool, but the internal project name for this work is Web Status.

There have also been lots of discussions around what the Blink launch process really should look like, including a desire for more guidance, earlier reviews, formalization of new concepts such as dev trials, integration with the origin trials process, etc. And we’ve heard clearly that the current entry point into the tool, i.e. the giant wall of form fields, is not working well. We’ve also heard that people want a way to iterate on entries before publishing things etc. All that is being worked on, so expect to hear more about how this will all evolve in the coming weeks and months both here as well as on various pages on the chromium.org site.

This project continues to live on Github, and please don’t hesitate to file issues with the tool there.

Thanks,

Johnny & the Web Status team.