Why Polymer Project (Web Components) isn't famous yet in comparison to other approach?

Question

It's been about a while Polymer version 2 is available out there, but

• few people talk about it
• few developers write about it in their blogs
• few developers share their workflow and their experiences

Polymer Project is powered by Google, and the team seems have impeccable philosophy behind it.

Beside lack of browser support, Polyfills are doing the job still fine.

By the way, It seems people don't prefer to switch on it and work on it although Web components is an standard of the web.

There's a big why for me, there should be an explanation.

This is I think is related to Stackoverflow However I know many wouldn't like this kind of questions.

Answer 1

First, it's actually a very new technology since Polymer 2 was officially released in May of 2017.

Second, the fact that it is supported by Google is not necessarily an advantage: web developers who want to rely on this company's products may prefer Angular, which is also promoted by Google and is much more mature and famous.

Third, the fact that it is founded on the Web components standard is not an advantage too:

• polyfills are doing the job (though not always) but their use adds a bit of complexity and can introduce a gap in therm of performance between the native and polyfilled implementation of Custom Element and Shadow DOM.

• developers who know Custom Elements and Shadow DOM may prefer to create Vanilla web components instead as they became very easy to design thanks to... Google :-) That's precisely the purpose of these new web standards.

Fourth, the Material Design flavor chosen for UI elements may not fit everyone's taste.

Fifth, version 2 is not fully compatible with version 1, which may bring some confusion for newcomers, and some disappointments for those who invested on the ephemeral version 1.

Finally, one can question if Polymer is a long-term framework or just a way to support the launch of the early standards (Custom Elements and Shadow DOM) proposed by Google, and promote their adoption.

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PS

Some of the above points are only assumptions.

Personally, I started using Polymer 1 during a few months, then I switched to Vanilla Custom Elements.