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slug: governance-standards
created: 2026-05-12
updated: 2026-05-16
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# Governance and Web Standards

The Chromium project decides what to ship through a formal pipeline that has no obvious analogue in most engineering organizations. A proposed web-platform feature passes from idea to stable Chrome through six gates: a public Explainer in a WICG or W3C repository, an Intent to Prototype on blink-dev, developer-trial feedback, an Origin Trial with real-world traffic and user consent, an Intent to Ship with three Looks Good To Me votes from cross-cutting API owners, and graduated channel progression. Each gate has required artifacts, public accountability, and an explicit population of approvers. The pipeline prevents individual teams from shipping features that break the open web or introduce security regressions without community scrutiny — and it is the reason "we have a feature ready" is never the same thing as "we ship next week."

This section names the mechanisms an engineering leader needs to read a blink-dev thread, evaluate whether a proposed feature is feasible on a project timeline, and understand why removal is as governed as addition. The governance patterns are the entry point: every architectural decision downstream of them — Site Isolation, the V8 heap sandbox, the deprecation of third-party cookies — moves through this pipeline whether the team building it likes it or not.

The patterns and concepts in this section name each gate explicitly. The WICG Explainer is the public-first artifact that turns a feature idea into a reviewable proposal before any code lands. The Intent to Ship Pipeline names the six-gate sequence end-to-end. The Three-LGTM API Owner Gate is the concept that explains *who* the three approving votes come from and why the rotation matters. Origin Trial is the structured-evaluation mechanism that gives a feature real-world traffic before commitment; Deprecation Trial is its symmetric mechanism for removing an existing platform feature. The Experiment That Became Permanent antipattern names the failure mode where a trial graduates to default-on without clearing the Intent to Ship gate. Web Platform Backward Compatibility is the concept that explains why the project treats a shipped feature as a permanent commitment to every page on the open web that relies on it.

The Intent pipeline runs hot. New Intent threads appear weekly; feature-lifecycle state transitions happen daily on chromestatus. A reader new to the project who consults this section can place a current Intent thread in context without spending a week in the archives.

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