The Chromium project has a very important process for launching new features. MathML is a well-established standard implemented in two other web engines (Safari and Firefox) and frequently requested by users of Chrome and Microsoft Edge, but it also has a complex history in browsers. As a consequence, it was necessary to proceed a bit differently than other new web platform proposals.
From the beginning, Igalia engineers have gathered feedback from the community by participating in the MathML Refresh Community Group and talking to browser implementers and other standardization groups in order to reach a consensus on what eventually became MathML Core.
In parallel, they have been working on a Chromium branch in order to obtain concrete results for discussions with Google engineers and the web community in general, for the MathML Core specification and for Chromium’s design documentation.
Finally, they have contributed to the inter-operability effort by creating a test suite of about 2000 subcases and making necessary changes to existing browser implementations.
After all of this, there is a solid proposal with a wide consensus on MathML Core. The “Idea” and “Design” phases of the launch process are complete and a significant portion of the “Implementation” phase is ready. The upstream process can start!