#6 Stephanie Stimac (Igalia) – For a Better Web

[Bruce]: Hello everybody and welcome to the first For a Better Web podcast of 2025.

And I am delighted that joining me, Bruce Lawson, Technical Communications Officer for the Vivaldi browser, I have the amazing Stephanie Stimac, who works for Igalia.

Hello, Stephanie.

[Stephanie]: Hi, Bruce.

[Bruce]: Hey, and your developer relations for Igalia, is that correct?

[Stephanie]: I’m technically project…

Well, I wear many hats. I’m a PM, but I also do communications and marketing. And a lot of that sort of falls into developer relations. I get to do all the things I love.

[Bruce]: Yeah, basically that’s what I do. I just call myself technical communications officer because if you’re DevRel, somebody comes and says, “How do I do this in CSS?” And I think, “I can’t remember.” So I’m very fond of Igalia, but it’s quite possible that our listeners and viewer, might not know them?

It’s an open source consultancy, but that doesn’t actually tell me very much. What does Igalia do?

[Stephanie]: So Igalia has multiple different teams that work on different areas of… In different areas of technology.

I can only really confidently speak about the web platform and our WebKit teams and our Chromium teams, but I am in team support for the web platform. And what that means is people hire Igalia’s web platform team to build platform features for the browser. And I don’t think a lot of people realize that you can do that.

You think that Chrome or Edge or WebKit, Apple or Firefox, they’re the only ones who can build features for their browser, but actually you can hire Igalia to implement whatever CSS or HTML or JavaScript feature you need. And we’re very experienced in the whole process of that.

So from designing a feature and laying that out in a design document and then trying to get buy off from our buy in from Google and Apple and all the major browsers in the standards community so that we can then take that to a standards body and get that implemented. And that’s quite a long process.

And I think Igalia is… Well, we’re very good at doing that, and there’s a lot of benefit to hiring us to implement those features. And then outside of the web platform, we do have teams that work on multimedia and hardware and implementing things in the open source community in many other different spaces.

[Bruce]: Wild.

So for example, if I wanted CSS Bruce Layouts, just for the sake of argument, it’s a great name, folks, I could hire Igalia and your web platform team would write the C++ in Blink and WebKit and Gecko.

[Stephanie]: Yep.

[Bruce]: All three of them.

[Stephanie]: Yeah, all three of them.

We have engineers who are… We have engineers who know all three of the major engines, and even outside of the three major engines, we have folks working on the experimental Servo browser in Rust. So we have a very capable team and we all know how to work with folks who work on Gecko and folks who work on Chromium and WebKit and move that process along.

[Bruce]: So presumably it’s like 700 people or something.

[Stephanie]: Where? Who?

[Bruce]: Igalia.

[Stephanie]: It’s actually much smaller than that. There’s 150, maybe a little bit more than that, 150 people across the whole company. Our web platform team is only 22 people.

[Bruce]: Wow.

I always tease Brian Kardell, who’s a colleague of yours and an old friend of mine, that you all sit around a bong and play tambourine, because it isn’t it like a co-op and everybody gets to vote and everybody gets paid the same or something like that? Not asking you to divulge everything, but it seems like a really nice way to work.

[Stephanie]: It is. And it’s a very different way to work because I spent six years at Microsoft in like full on corporate land and…

[Bruce]: So Microsoft isn’t sitting around a bong playing the tambourine.

[Stephanie]: No. And based on some of my experiences at Microsoft, I don’t want to come off saying my experience at Microsoft was bad. It was not bad. I had a wonderful manager. My manager changed a couple of times, but I always had an incredible direct team around me. I know other people who did not have good experiences.

I know people on Edge who had poor managers, and the way things were handled are much more political and bureaucratic and coming into Igalia in this space where everyone is equal and you have to come in and trust that you’re there for a reason.

You go through an interview process to make sure that you have to be able to communicate well with people and have a lot of empathy and understand their point of view because there is no direct manager. Like if I’m struggling with someone or something’s not going as well as it could be, there’s no higher up that I can go to.

It’s I have to talk to my mentor and then it’s very much like, how do we solve this together and get through it? And it’s a very new experience. I will say the first time that I met everyone in person, we were having meetings and everyone was deciding, like we’re having discussions and deciding on things together.

And to say that that’s the first time in 14 years that I’ve experienced that is kind of incredible. And so after that first sort of in-person experience, I was like, this is actually really cool. And I feel incredibly grateful and lucky that I get to experience this environment where everyone cares about each other and does want the best for the company. Because if we’re all not working together and doing our best, then the company is not going to do best. So it is really great and everyone’s open to ideas and you sort of have freedom to propose new initiatives or projects and it’s a lot of fun.

[Bruce]: It sounds great. It sounds quite like Vivaldi, actually. I mean, we’re 57 people. We all report to Jon who founded it, but he’s always been, he’s always said, “Many heads think better than one. I want your input. We can disagree.” And it’s such a refreshing change from the corporate side and very open source.

Because of course, all the browser engines you mentioned are open source. So if I wanted CSS Bruce layout and I had infinite time and was able to code C++, I could go ahead and commit that stuff myself.

But I’m guessing that people hire Igalia because (a), you’re a known entity. So the people who accept PRs in Blink and WebKit and Gecko, know of Igalia and you know how the engines work, but who are your customers?

Can you give me some examples of things you’ve implemented for a customer and if it’s possible, because I know there are corporate concerns, but why would a customer pay for a CSS thing to be added? What’s in it for them?

[Stephanie]: So I think Bloomberg is probably the best example of a customer that I can talk about. And we’ve been working with them for a long time. And the example I always like to point to is that we implemented CSS Grid for them.

And in its form that it exists today, it’s because of Igalia and because Bloomberg needed it for their terminal. So most of what we do for CSS involves layout and trying to get stuff for them into their terminal.

And there have been so many other things that I’m trying to remember off the top of my head now, but there’s a huge list. I think Brian Kardell has a post that details everything that we’ve done for them, but I believe we also implemented :has for them.

[Bruce]: Oh, I love :has. CSS :has, folks. Saved my life so many times.

[Stephanie]: Yeah. And then the most recent one that I can think of, it was just rolled back because there was an issue with CSS highlight inheritance. So that’s something that was posted on the web.dev blog that we implemented, but we just had to roll it back out of Chromium because it was conflicting with Tailwind CSS.

[Bruce]: Oh. (laughs)

[Stephanie]: And I speaking as a developer and not on behalf of Igalia, I find it fascinating that we would roll something back out of the web platform and not have it baked into the web platform because of a clash with a framework. And so we’re trying to get that back into Chromium right now, but that’s something else that we worked on.

[Bruce]: This was to do with specificity and the inheritance, wasn’t it? And it was doing something other than you’d expect. I’m not a fan of Tailwind, but I suppose it’s always been sort of an axiom of implementing new stuff on the web platform that you shouldn’t break existing sites. So…

[Stephanie]: Yeah. It is something fascinating though that I think about too, because I think about all the work being done to select an HTML form controls and all of the issues there and how long that’s taken, because obviously you can’t break the probably hundreds of millions of sites. I don’t know if that figure is correct, but I’m guessing millions of sites that have select implemented on their site and trying to improve select, you can’t break any of that because some of those sites probably aren’t maintained anymore.

[Bruce]: Absolutely. It’s quite humbling, isn’t it? I remember when somebody was asking me, “why does it take so long to implement something like, for example, Flexbox or Grid? This is a new paradigm”. And I said, yeah, but somewhere in the world, somebody will try and use a CSS Grid inside a CSS table that is floated inside an HTML table layout because that’s what their CMS uses.

And we have to think about all those possible permutations. You can’t just pluck it out the air and implement it as you would if it’s a proprietary language, Adobe thing or Flash, for example.

But so how does it work? Do Bloomberg or another customer come in and say, we’ve written a spec for CSS Grid, make it happen Igalia, or do they, how does it…?

[Stephanie]: So in what I’ve experienced in my almost year at Igalia, typically they come to us and a customer comes to us and says, we want to be able to do this thing in CSS or HTML or JavaScript, whatever. And we typically are the ones who come up with the design document. There’s possibly no, there may not even be a spec written for it yet. And that’s something else that the engineers at Igalia are very experienced in. So we have people updating specs.

One of the things that we’ve also been working on, well, last year is trusted types in the browser and we’ve had folks making spec updates to that while working on getting that implemented in all three engines. So I’m sort of navigating that, but you could come to us and say, there’s a spec for this thing that we want already, but it’s not complete or it doesn’t fully meet our needs, or we need it to be extended. And we work to make that happen. So there’s different ways you can come to us.

[Bruce]: Amazing. And you mentioned the three rendering engines, but when we started, you mentioned the experimental Servo engine, which I think came out of Mozilla originally. They started developing it and what communityfied it. And is it only Igalia who deals with it or is there a, are you one of the contributors?

[Stephanie]: I would say so we are one of the main stewards of it. We have the biggest team working on it. And then we have had investments from companies that I can’t disclose to help move that forward. And then on the other side of that, we also have a very active community of individual contributors. And I know some people in there have been paid by external companies to contribute to Servo, which is great.

So even though we have the, I would say the largest engineering team and where we sort of lead the technical steering committee, it’s very, very community involved.

And actually 2024 was a big year for Servo too. If you look at our, I think there’s a blog post, but it’s definitely on our socials. 2024 was the first year since 2018 that we actually matched the number, went matched and went above the number of commits from 2018. So there was a dip when Mozilla stopped, when they abandoned Servo and basically handed it to Igalia. And we finally come out the other side of that dip. And now we are hopefully going to have more commits than last year. And so it’s very actively being worked on.

[Bruce]: Nice. And what’s its status? I mean, could I take Servo and build a browser on it right now? And that would run modern websites or is it still alpha…?

[Stephanie]: So it’s still marked as experimental. I don’t know if alpha is the right term for it and its state. It’s still missing, ike for example, you can’t go to YouTube videos don’t play. I think SVG support is also not there, or poor. So it’s still missing some like big chunks that would make it competitive.

We have had folks, someone did fork Servo and built a browser shell on top of it called Verso that got picked up on Hacker News last year and got quite a flurry of interest. But the interesting thing with Servo is it’s kind of a– like in my opinion, it’s an important project because browser diversity is good. You don’t want one corporation sort of holding on to all the browser power.

But it’s very dependent on outside interest and someone needing Servo. And so because we are a consultancy and while we would love to just be able to invest all of the time into Servo, we do need customers who want to use it for something to hire us to keep working on it. And so it’s this interesting balance of how much do we do with our own investment from Igalia to continue to move that forward, because it is an important project, versus trying to get those customers to pay for it.

[Bruce]: And this allows me to segue neatly. And I should say listeners now I’m inviting Steph to speak as a Steph, rather than for Igalia, because I first met Steph last year now. I keep thinking it’s this year. In October for the State of the Browser conference in London (which I need to say that the Vivaldi co-sponsored) and Steph gave the first talk of the day because she’d forgotten it was her wedding anniversary and had to run off and do a Romeo and Juliet.

And the first talk of the day was great and it really resonated with me and I recommended it to loads of people. And it was about how do we fund open source, and how do we fund browsers? I mean, obviously browsers are a small part of open source, but it’s the world I know best and work in.

Because of course, recently a US judge has said that Google was a monopoly, surprise, surprise. And there is talk of Google having to divest Chrome and Chromium, which of course powers Vivaldi, Edge, Opera, Brave, lots of other things. And also that’s the technology behind Node, Bloomberg terminals, et cetera.

And Steph, you were painting a bleak, but in my opinion, accurate picture of the browser ecosystem. There are people making billions off browsers, but not investing that back. Could you briefly speak to that and give us a précis of your talk and I’ll link to it in the show notes, folks.

[Stephanie]: Yeah. So I start the talk off comparing the browsers to the film Dune, because I think the comparison of browsers to Spice, if you’re familiar with Dune, I won’t give a whole explanation of what Dune is, is pretty accurate because it’s like whoever controls the browser controls billions of dollars and access to information. And I tend to be a person who will think about what is the worst case scenario.

And I think we have become as a society just so used to having access to the internet. It’s right there. It’s on our phone. I can just open it. And I don’t necessarily, I think sometimes I personally forget like that I am so embedded into the web and technology and browsers that some people don’t necessarily know what a browser is. They just know that that’s the internet.

And so when you start to look at who actually controls and maintains our access to the internet, it’s corporations. And that is scary when you think about it. And in my view, it’s like by allowing corporations to sort of hold this, what I think is a human right, like access to information and connection and the web.

[Bruce]: – Agreed.

[Stephanie]: – If corporations are the ones maintaining this, we’re sort of saying, well, you can’t fail.

Like what happens if you fail? Who’s going to maintain our access that we have become so dependent on? Like in my talk, I say like there’s not a part of my day that is not touched by like where I’m not interfacing with the web. My job’s dependent on it. Like my bank, my bank is completely digital in the UK. I would not be able to go, I can’t go to the bank of Monzo. It is all on my phone.

So I’m dependent on access to the web there. Like my bills, everything. So yes, my talk gets a little bit doomsday-esque , but also are these companies too big to fail?

Well, we have the Department of Justice saying, well, no, you’re too big. So you need to get rid of Chrome and or split it off, divest it, whatever. But all that money that Chrome generates, like the number of like the number of people who contribute back to Chromium, the biggest company who does that is Google. It’s Chrome.

Like if we lose that, those number of commits that that team does every year, the sliver of multiple other companies, even Edge, like they’re not contributing back in the same amount, like not even remotely the same amount. So what happens to that browser and the web and how does it stagnate if we lose that?

[Bruce]: A hundred percent. I mean, too big to fail, but I’m old enough to remember when the idea that Nokia or BlackBerry would disappear would be ridiculous. And somewhere I saw a stat that said of the top of the FTSE 100 or whatever it’s called of 1924, only six of those companies still exist now or still exist doing the same thing, and they’re not just a name on a incorporated in Delaware doing some nonsense.

So companies do go, is your concern that our access to the web or maintenance of browsers and browser engines is controlled by corporations per se, or is it that it’s controlled by those particular corporations?

[Stephanie]: I think that’s a good question. I think just corporations in general, I think because those ones are so big. And then we sort of get into the whole ethics of billionaires and the people who run those corporations and this could be a whole other podcast, but like, and not to … do I want to go there?

I’ll go there. When we look at like what’s happened with Twitter, like the amount of control and influence just from a social media company. And then we have these tech companies who – it’s not just the browser, it’s technology across a whole different range of areas and devices and everything. Again, the very anxious person in me who thinks about the worst case scenario is like, what is going to happen?

[Bruce]: It’s probably a mistake for an anxious browser person like me to speak to an anxious browser person like you. I’ll have to have a lie down after this and just weep a bit.

But could you imagine if Twitter controlled Chromium and called it Exium or Muscium or something like that? But it’s a real concern. It certainly concerns me. For better or for worse, Google do the lion’s share of the work on Chromium and if it were divested, would they continue to do so?

And also if it were divested, who would want to buy it? Because how would somebody generate revenue from Chromium that was forbidden by law from doing deals with Google search? This worries me. I have no particular love for Google, but I do have a love for an open source web browser engine.

And also, if in the EU and worldwide, Apple is forced to allow other browser engines onto iOS, would they still continue maintaining WebKit? I don’t know. It troubles me sometimes that I’ve been very actively fighting to open up iOS, but people do say, well, what happens then? And the question is, I don’t know.

It doesn’t mean that I’m not going to fight an unjust monopoly because the future could be worse. Because it could be better. But God, I’m depressed now.

[Stephanie]: I mean, it feels like my view of the US government is that oftentimes I feel like the people who are setting laws and sort of managing these lawsuits, or trying to get TikTok banned or whatever, I’ve watched parts of the congressional hearings and everything, and you have a whole group of people who have no idea how any of this works making these decisions.

And like you said, not that I am against sort of dissolving this monopoly, but the way the system that we have in place for funding browsers and funding the web is advertising. And I didn’t quite realize until I had been researching my talk about this, how much different browsers try to get you to stay in their browser because they want you to search.

It never like because I’m still a Microsoft Edge girl. I use Edge. I’m still loyal to my old team, but I never put two and two together until this last year and was like, oh, so Bing has actually gamified things so that you search and with every search you get points. And then with your points, you can redeem that for Starbucks cards or Amazon cards. And they do that to keep you in the browser so that you’re searching and you get those ad hits. And I’m like, how did I never realize that like this was all just.

[Bruce]: I didn’t realize that until you showed me until I watched your talk and then went and had a look and thought, wow, yeah, yeah. This is how important advertising is. And it’s important to us at Vivaldi. Now we have to make money or you can’t develop a browser.

You know, I was going to say I like paying my mortgage, but that’s a lie. I like not sleeping out in the rain is probably more accurate. But yeah, ultimately the money that comes through Lawson Towers and keeps me in champagne and caviar is advertising money. Yeah. (Commerce does as commerce is.)

[Stephanie]: Yeah. The system that we have in place. I mean, again, it is in case folks are listening and haven’t seen my talk.

I talk about how Google pays Apple for their placement and it’s like $5 billion or something, which is just also, if you look at Apple’s total revenue is like $20 billion. It’s like, even if you take the $5 billion away that Google is giving them, that is an atrocious amount of money. And so the system that we have in place has literally billions of dollars just like exchanging hands, but so little of that is actually going back into tech and the ecosystem and continuing to help make it robust. And it’s…

[Bruce]: So if you could wave a magic wand because, or at Igalia, a magic bong, if you could wave a magic bong and just solve the problem. What would you do? And this is Steph rather than Igalia.

[Stephanie]: I, let’s see, in an ideal world, I, I think in my ideal world, there would be some sort of, well, I don’t know, because I don’t know if that would be ideal. I’m just going to stream of consciousness. What is going through my mind and whether or not that’s actually a good idea.

I don’t know, but ideally there would be some sort of like organization that does not have corporate interests. That doesn’t want to steal personal information or use your customers as the product. That would sort of help ensure that browsers are continuously evolving and have funding.

But then where does the funding come to that organization? Because that’s the other thing about browser development too. What gets prioritized oftentimes when you’re working on a browser at a browser company, somehow benefits, it has to like roll up and benefit the company. Trying to implement CSS highlight inheritance, let’s say just for developers is often like, well, that doesn’t show enough impact or it doesn’t like what’s the business impact.

And so in an ideal world, you’d have people just advancing the web forward without having to worry about the bottom line, the business impact.

[Bruce]: But this sounds to me like a not-for-profit or a charity.

[Stephanie]: Yeah.

[Bruce]: I mean, I’ve heard people say, well, why doesn’t the Linux Foundation take over Chromium? But that’s all well and good, but still somebody has to pay.

[Stephanie]: Yeah.

[Bruce]: You know, developers don’t get out of bed for free.

[Stephanie]: No, no. And I don’t necessarily know that I have a good answer to that. In my talk, I mentioned alternative funding models and some of them are like, some people aren’t already thrilled about, but they’re very like Web3 or cryptocurrency based. And that in itself has, I mean, like ethical and environmental concerns.

But the money has to come from somewhere. And so I don’t necessarily know that I have a good answer because it is such a huge task to try and undo this system that we are deeply integrated into. And how do you undo that without everything just sort of collapsing?

[Bruce]: I agree. I mean, I’m slightly disappointed, but not surprised, you didn’t just have the answer because I’ve been thinking about this for ages and you are cleverer than me, but it’s a Gordian knot because I don’t think personally, I don’t think that lawmakers in the American Congress or even attorneys in the DOJ have the technical understanding to resolve this.

But I don’t know that anybody can resolve it without some sort of legislative or regulatory framework on which to hang any resolution. And that requires the lawmakers. We’ve been very lucky in the UK that the people who’ve been dealing with the browser ecosystem in the UK, they might be lawyers and economists, but they’re really switched on with the technical stuff.

I haven’t necessarily seen that level of tech acumen in the US House, but maybe that’s just because I’m unacquainted with Mr. Trump’s knowledge of rendering engines. I doubt it’s particularly significant. And of course, the new lot coming in seem to make noises about being opposed to any kind of tech regulation anyway. So not holding out much hope.

[Stephanie]: The thing that scares me when I think about –one other thing that continues to scare me in this conversation– is when I talk about the internet and access to the internet being vital to our day, it’s infrastructure. And when I look at the way infrastructure in the US is cared for, like roads, the electrical grid, all of that, I’m just like terrified, terrified because that’s already not taken care of.

And browsers are vital infrastructure, in my opinion. And I don’t think many of the people in the government making these decisions understand that. And I almost wonder sometimes too if, well, okay, so I don’t think they understand that.

But my hope would be, if someone did understand that, there would be a way to force tech companies to take some of this profit from advertising and say, you have to invest a billion dollars over the next 10, 15, 20 years back into the ecosystem to make sure that not just browsers, but other open source projects that are the backbone of many programs and other things that the government uses, especially making sure that those are maintained and healthy and people are getting paid to work on that.

Because what happens if the banking system goes down because of, I don’t know. I don’t know. But…

[Bruce]: – Yeah, it’s such a problem.

And it’s weird because 30 years ago, that’s before I got onto the web. I think I got involved in sort of ’99 or something. But 30 years ago, the nerds, people like us, were celebrating that the internet was a place that was out of the reach of government regulation. And we were celebrating that. And the tech bros and the advertising boys and the data marketing collection people have effed it up so badly that now the nerds like us are actually begging for government regulation just to protect it.

And I blame the Silicon Valley people or the equivalents worldwide. It’s not only the Bay Area. There are equally culpable people across the world who’ve just monetized and monetized and monetized it, but put comparatively little back and left it too big to fail, but also too big to divest almost. Oh, God. I’m really going to have to go back to bed and take a Valium or something now. Other sedatives are available, listeners.

Stephanie, I’ve taken up loads of your time. I hope that when you come up with a definitive answer, you’ll come back on here and tell us what it is. Are you giving the talk again or a follow-up talk? I would like to give the talk again if anyone is listening who runs an event or a conference.

[Stephanie]: I don’t have anything scheduled for 2025, and I would very, very much like to give this talk again. And it will even be improved upon and updated because lots of things have happened since when did I give this September. So it will be the same talk, but with new updates, so new content.

[Bruce]: I’ve been giving a talk now for years called Whose Web Is It Anyway? Which I talk about our fight with the open web advocacy’s fight with Apple, et cetera. And every time I give it, something’s changed. So it never feels like the same talk twice as always an update for good or for bad.

Thank you so much for taking time to talk to us. Thank you very much for thinking the depressing thoughts. And please give Vivaldi’s love to all your friends at Igalia.

It’s really great that somebody is actively contributing to all the three browser engines that are a bunch of hippies, and not under corporate control. It’s really good. And I wish more people knew, and I’ll make sure I link to all the stuff about MathML and SVG and all the other stuff that Igalia is doing that we haven’t had time to talk about.

So I hope 2025 is great for you. I should always be indebted to you for being the woman who made me become Amish.

[Stephanie]: Amazing.

[Bruce]: Have a great year. Have a great rest of your day. And thank you so much. Thanks for listening, folks. Bye.