The “State of the Browser 2026” Conference was held on Saturday, the 28th of February in The Barbican Centre, London. It is a yearly conference organised by London Web Standards. This is year is the 14th Edition.
From Igalia, this year we had Luke Warlow and myself attended in person, Javier Fernández attended online. My colleague Stephanie Stimac introduced this event to Igalia a couple of years ago. Now Igalia has become one of the sponsors for this great event. Luke had participated this event previously so it’s very helpful to understand more about this event from his note.
The event is a one-day, single-track conference that is community focused. While queuing for the registrations, a couple of attendees commented that talks for this event had been very good in the past few years. I’d say, this year was not an exception. I thoroughly enjoyed the talks, and the whole experiences.
Talks throughout the day covered a wide variety of topics including CSS features, accessibility, JS footprint, playing with gaming APIs and the art of connecting to people etc.. As someone who loves food, maybe I can describe it as a feast with content, taste, depth, variety…and a bit fun factor?
The open talk was Anchor positioning by Bramus Van Damme. The walk-through on the feature with examples were pretty cool, especially the case of a popover… with a little triangle (You’ll know what I mean if you look up the talk). Igalia worked on popover for Firefox in 2024, sponsored by Google. It’s really great to see that anchor positioning is in Firefox – popover has now found its place.
It was nice to hear that Igalians’ names were mentioned in the Temporal talk by Jason Williams from Bloomberg. A big shout out to Philip Chimento, Ujjwal Sharma who have participated substantially in the discussions about standardizing Temporal over the years and my fellow Igalians who have been writing spec PRs and tests for the feature. Check on Tim Chevalier’s blog on “Implementing the Temporal proposal in JavaScriptCore” if you’d like to find out more.
The atmosphere of the event was friendly, inclusive and energetic. I was very happy bumping into some ex-colleagues and making new friends.
One final note – This event brings a range of attendees, many are web developers. There are representatives from companies and browser vendors etc.. For some web developers, “Igalia” is a new name. I had a question like “Oh, is it the company with rainbow colours in the sponsors?”. Yes, Igalia is a private, worker-owned, employee-run cooperative model consultancy focused on open source software[1]. And Igalia has been a part of the Interop Project since its inception in 2021. Here is Igalia’s “rainbowy” logo :-).
