Recent Browser Events

TL;DR

At Igalia, we attend many browser events. This is a quick summary of some recents conferences I participated to… or that gave me the opportunity to meet Igalians in Paris 😉.

Week 31: Paris - CSS WG F2F - W3C

My teammate Sergio attended the CSS WG F2F meeting as an observer. On Tuesday morning, I also made an appearance (but it was so brief that ceux que j’ai rencontrés ne m’ont peut-être pas vu). Together with other browser vendors and WG members, Sergio gave an interview regarding the successful story of CSS Grid Layout. By the way, given our implementation work in WebKit and Blink, Igalia finally decided to join the CSS Working Group 😊. Of course, during that week I had dinner with Sergio and it was nice to chat with my colleague in a French restaurant of Montmartre.

Week 38: Tokyo - BlinkOn 8 - Google

Jacobo, Gyuyoung and I attended BlinkOn 8. I had nice discussions and listened to interesting talks about a wide range of topics (Layout NG, Accessibility, CSS, Fonts, Web Predictability & Standards, etc). It was a pleasure to finally meet in persons some developers I had been in touch with during my projects on Ozone/Wayland and WebKit/iOS. For the lightning talks, we presented our activities on embedded linux platforms and the Web Platform. Incidentally, it was great to see Igalia’s work mentioned during the Next Generation Rendering Engine session. Obviously, I had the opportunity to visit places and taste Japanese food in Asakusa, Ueno and Roppongi 😋.

Week 40: A Coruña - Web Engines Hackfest - Igalia

I attended one of my favorite events, that gathers the whole browser community during three days for technical presentations, breakout sessions, hacking and galician food. This year, we had many sponsors and attendees. It is good to see that the event is becoming more and more popular! It was long overdue, but I was finally able to make Brotli and WOFF2 installable as system libraries on Linux and usable by WebKitGTK+ 😊. I opened similar bugs in Gecko and the same could be done in Chromium. Among the things I enjoyed, I met Jonathan Kew in person and heard more about Antonio and Maksim’s progress on Ozone/Wayland. As usual, it was nice to share time with colleagues, attend the assembly meeting, play football matches, have meals, visit Asturias… and tell one’s story 😉.

Week 41: San Jose - WebKit Contributors Meeting - Apple

In the past months, I have mostly been working on WebKit at Igalia and I would have been happy to see my fellow WebKit developers. However, given the events in Japan and Spain, I was not willing to make another trip to the USA just after. Hence I had to miss the WebKit Contributors Meeting again this year 😞. Fortunately, my colleagues Alex, Michael and Žan were present. Igalia is an important contributor to WebKit and we will continue to send people and propose some talks next year.

Week 42: Paris - Monthly Speaker Series - Mozilla

This Wednesday, I attended a conference on Privacy as a Competitive Advantage in Mozilla’s office. It was nice to hear about the increasing interest on privacy and to see the regulation made by the European Union in that direction. My colleague Philippe was visiting the office to work with some Mozilla developers on one of our project, so I was also able to meet him in the conference room. Actually, Mozilla employees were kind enough to let me stay at the office after the conference… Hence I was able to work on Apple’s Web Engine on a project sponsored by Google at the Mozilla office… probably something you can only do at Igalia 😉. Last but not least, Guillaume was also in holidays in Paris this week, so I let you imagine what happens when three French guys meet (hint: it involves food 😋).