For a brief moment at the start of the year, Google’s Chrome browser could render mathematical notation written in MathML. Since then, things have got worse for mathematics on the web.
In February, the MathML rendering code was removed by Google, citing concerns about security and code quality. Now, a member of the Chromium team has announced that Google will not be supporting MathML in the foreseeable future:
MathML is not something that we want at this time. We believe the needs of MathML can be sufficiently met by libraries like MathJax and doesn’t need to be more directly supported by the platform. In areas where libraries like MathJax are not good enough, we’d love to hear feedback about what APIs we would need to expose so that MathJax, et al, can create an awesome MathML implementation.
Peter Krautzberger, manager of the MathJax project, is not happy.