Rego’s Everyday Life

A blog about my work at Igalia.

The main building on the ULB Solbosch campus

FOSDEM 2026

Last weekend I was in Brussels attending FOSDEM. A big event with lots of people and lots of things happening in parallel, where it’s impossible to be everywhere.

Browser and web platform 🌐 #

My main participation was in the Browser and web platform devroom, a new devroom (it seems it already happened back in the days, but not in the recent years) where I had the chance to speak about Servo with a talk titled The Servo project and its impact on the web platform ecosystem. My colleagues from Igalia Eri Pazos and Mario Sánchez Prada were also speaking in that devroom about Interop and MathML Core and The Web Platform on Linux devices with WebKit: where are we now? respectively. The room was fully packed a big part of the day, not unexpectedly many people are interested in the web platform.

MathML #

Eri was the first igalian talking in the room, they summarized the work Igalia has been doing for many years in MathML, on the standards side proposing the MathML Core spec, and on the implementation side bringing it back to Chromium and improving it in Gecko and WebKit.

In the talk, Eri went into deep detail about the last additions we have been adding around MathML: math-depth, math-shift, RTL mirroring, font-family: math, etc. This work is part of an agreement with the Sovereign Tech Fund, big thanks for your support.

MathML is more ready than ever for production, someone from arXiv.org in the audience mentioned that they are shipping it on millions of webpages today. Waiting for the day when Wikipedia switches to it by default, it will be a huge milestone.

WebKit on Linux #

Mario talked about the Linux ports of WebKit: WebKitGTK and WPE, both maintained by Igalia.

He explained what they are, the differences between them, reviewed their history and highlighted the big progress on the recent years, with multiple improvements in several areas: WebView API, WebKit Container SDK, switch from Cairo to Skia graphics library, etc.

If you are curious about the status of things regarding them, you shouldn’t miss his talk.

Servo #

My talk started with an introduction to the Servo project and the current status of things. I showed a few demos about how Servo works and some of the things it can do already. After that introduction, I explained how Servo has been contributing to the wider web platform ecosystem.

Like for the rest of talks, slides and video are already available if you want to know all the details. Kudos to the organization for being so quick.

Picture of my talk with the slides about conclusions at the back

Picture of my talk with the slides about conclusions at the back

As an anecdote, the night before the talk a new project based on Servo was published, a browser developed fully with web technologies using Servo underneath. I couldn’t resist the urge to build it, play with it and add it to the presentation. It looks really cool what Servo can do these days.

Screencast of the new Beaver browser based on Servo

In addition, in the same devroom there was another Servo talk, this time by Taym, one of the Servo maintainers, Implementing Streams Spec in Servo web engine, where he explained all the work behind adding Streams support to Servo.

I am also very happy to met many Servo contributors at the event: Delan Azabani (@delan), Eri Pazos (@eerii), Jonathan Schwender (@jschwe), Martin Robinson (@mrobinson), Taym Haddadi (@Taym95), Tim van der Lippe (@TimvdLippe). We had the chance to have some informal conversations about the project, discussing some technical topics and ideas about things we can do in Servo.

The feedback about Servo has been extremely positive, people are really happy with the evolution of the project and excited about the future.

Apart from that, we also had the opportunity to talk to the nice folks from NLnet and the Sovereign Tech Agency who both have ongoings collaborations around Servo. The work these organizations do is really important for the open software development, and more should learn from them and join forces to try to fix the funding issues in FLOSS (more about this later, when talking about Marga’s keynote).

Igalia #

Igalia presence in the open source community is very big, and not unexpectedly we have more talks at FOSDEM this year. This is the full list:

Also our work in different projects was mentioned in several talks and conversations, we’re really happy regarding all the good feedback we got about Igalia contributions.

Keynote #

Marga Manterola was doing one of the keynotes talking about funding open source software: Free as in Burned Out: Who Really Pays for Open Source? . First time Igalia was doing a keynote at FOSDEM, in the year we celebrate our 25th anniversary, and in a historical auditorium where May 68 started in Brussels. 🎉

Picture of Marga Manterola's keynote at FOSDEM 2026

Picture of Marga Manterola's keynote at FOSDEM 2026

The talk was great, Marga explained many of the issues with open source software sustainability and some potential ideas about how to improve the situation. This is a recurring topic in many conversations these days, we should find a way to get this fixed somehow.

There I learnt about the Open Source Pledge, an interesting initiative to get companies donating 2,000 USD per developer to open source software maintainers. 💰

Wrap up #

All in all, it was a nice but very busy weekend in Brussels, weather was ok (a bit cold but not rainy) and waffles were delicious as usual. 🧇😋

Next big event on my calendar is the Web Engines Hackfest in June, more than 50 people have already registered and a bunch of Servo folks will be there too. If you’re interested in the web platform and willing to discuss about different topics, we would be very happy to host you there.