Last week (June 15–17), Igalia hosted the 2026 edition of the Web Engines Hackfest at Palexco in A Coruña. More than 150 browser developers, standards tinkerers, low-level engineers, and interested folks from around the world joined us, in person and remotely, for three days of talks, breakout sessions, and in-depth conversations. Thanks to everyone who came — the event wouldn’t be the same without you!
On Monday, we had nine talks, all live-streamed on the Hackfest’s YouTube channel. Individual recordings will be posted soon; in the meantime, you can watch the full livestream:
- “Accessible Testing in WPT: From Dream to Reality” by Valerie Young — Cross-browser test suites have long helped browsers track interoperability, but until recently they couldn’t tell you whether a feature’s accessibility support was complete. This talk covers the tests you can now write in WPT and WebDriver, the challenges along the way, and the work still in progress.
- “HarfBuzz at 20!” by Behdad Esfahbod — A look back at twenty years of the HarfBuzz text shaping engine, its current state, and its future, with significant focus on the Rust port, HarfRust. Behdad’s slide deck is well worth a read — and far too long to have presented in full.
- “Iterable Streams” by James Snell — Node.js and Cloudflare Workers have been experimenting with an async-iterator-based stream API that’s faster than both Node.js streams and Web streams. A look at the approach, to prompt a conversation about how to move forward.
- “Decoupling Extensions from Chrome: The Journey to a Modular Extensions Layer” by Miyoung Shin & Lorenzo Tilve — The ongoing effort to decouple Chromium Extensions from the Chrome layer for a more modular, embeddable architecture, covering the motivation, migration strategy, lessons learned, and current progress, with a live demo.
- “The EU Cyber Resilience Act: what is it, and how does it affect web browsers?” by Aki Rose Braun & Daniel Ari Ehrenberg Goldberg — The EU Cyber Resilience Act applies to nearly all software in Europe, no matter where it’s built. Aki walks through the broad strokes of the regulation, and Dan digs into the specific obligations of browsers and what makes them special.
- “Introduction to the RustNN ecosystem” by Markus Tavenrath — An overview of RustNN, a high-performance WebNN implementation, including its model exporters for PyTorch and ONNX and bindings for Python, JavaScript, and the browser.
- “DOM Localization” by Eemeli Aro — A proposal for a set of core HTML attributes that would let developers bind DOM elements and fragments to localized messages, defined using Unicode MessageFormat, so users can experience the web in their native languages.
- “How to ship a registry when nobody wants to run one” by Aki Rose Braun & Ethan Arrowood — TC55 (formerly WinterCG) needed a runtime keys registry, but nobody wanted to operate the infrastructure. This talk explains how they solved that by publishing it as an Ecma Technical Report instead.
- “npmx: a fast, modern browser for the npm registry” by Daniel Roe & Matias Leandro Capeletto — A community-built alternative npm registry browser, with features for choosing modern packages, promoting JS standards adoption, and collaborating with communities like e18e and atproto.
On Tuesday morning, we also ran a dedicated WPE WebKit track, with sessions on building an embedded browser on Raspberry Pi with the new WPEPlatform API, refactoring composition with Skia, reducing GPU usage, profile-guided optimization, QA practices, and the WPEPlatform API for Android.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, we had more than twenty breakout sessions on everything from memory safety in WebKit and the Web security model, to MathML Core, AsyncContext, Servo DevTools, FedCM, and Web Components. Standards bodies took the opportunity to meet face-to-face on site too, including a WHATWG meeting and a CSS Working Group meeting. The full schedule is on the Hackfest wiki.
The Web Engines Hackfest is an event that brings people together to discuss and work on different browsers and web standards. Our goal is to foster collaboration in benefit of the open web.
Many thanks to our outside sponsors, Mullvad Browser, ARM, and Huawei, for helping make this year’s Hackfest possible, and to everyone who attended in person or remotely for being a part of the growing Hackfest community. See you all next year!
