Repository navigation
What is the current testing/shipping status of WebNN in Chrome and Edge, and what should developers use today? #964
Description
Hi! I'm a advocating WebNN by running talks and demos on Web AI at multiple tech conferences around the world, and I'm struggling to describe WebNN's current status accurately. Apologies if this belongs elsewhere.
What a developer sees today (20 Oct 2026)
- Chrome Platform Status feature 5176273954144256: status "Proposed", flag web-machine-learning-neural-network.
- The Chrome origin trial is listed as "Closed — Complete", Chrome 147 to 149, end date Aug 11, 2026; the Edge origin trial as "[Closed] This trial is no longer accepting new registrations", expired August 11, 2026.
- On blink-dev (Intent to Experiment) the trial was re-enabled for M147 (Mar 10) and disabled again on Mar 27, 2026: "Due to more release blocking issues reported, we decided to disable the Original Trial. We will update here once we have a new target milestone" (CL 7702513). I found no later update.
- Stable builds are still flag-gated: kWebMachineLearningNeuralNetwork has default_state = false (M155 branch, same on main), and MachineLearningNeuralNetwork no longer has an origin-trial entry.
- webnn.io still says the OT "is now available for testing" but lists "Chrome: 160 (TBD) to 164 (TBD)" (updated Oct 9); its installation page points to Canary + flag.
Questions
- What is the current status in Chrome and Edge: is a new origin trial (M160?) or an Intent to Ship planned, and is there a rough timeline?
- What should developers use to test today: stable + flag, Canary/Dev, or an enterprise policy? Which backends/devices are expected to work?
- Is there a canonical, maintained status page (chromestatus, webnn.io, or this repo) that reflects the real state, including the OT being disabled?
- A short, dated status note (README or webnn.io) plus guidance on what to build against now would help a lot. Happy to help write it.
Thanks for all the work on this!
— Maxim Salnikov, Senior Solution Engineer at Microsoft
P.S. My new demo covering full stack of Web AI features: https://webai.isainative.dev/
Reacted by Belem Zhang
Activity
anssiko commentedon Oct 20, 2026
@webmaxru, thanks for the questions. @ibelem is happy to work with you on improvements to https://webnn.io/
I agree that web developers shouldn't need to look into the Chromium codebase or understand the Blink launch process intricacies to get started with exciting new features. This highlights the importance of developer advocacy and outreach. Thank you for your work!