Next week (June 2–4), Igalia will host the 2025 edition of Igalia’s Web Engines Hackfest at Palexco in A Coruña. We’ve got a lot planned and we’re really looking forward to it!

On Monday, we’ll have nine talks, all will also be streamed live on the Hackfest’s Youtube channel:

• “Compiling JavaScript ahead-of-time” by Oliver Medhurst  — Essentially all JS engines today are just-in-time, but what about compiling ahead-of-time like C++ or Rust? Previously dismissed, this approach is having a resurgence with new open-source projects like Porffor, which Oliver will discuss in this talk.
• “WinterTC: a standard for server-side runtimes” by Andreu Botella & Luca Casonato  — A discussion of efforts around standardizing Web Platform APIs on server-side and edge JavaScript runtimes (such as Node.js, Deno, Bun, Cloudflare Workers…).
• “JSR: under the hood & native support in the ecosystem” by Leo Kettmeir  — This talk will discuss The JavaScript Registry (JSR), a modern alternative to npm that’s natively supported in pnpm, Yarn and Deno. It will detail various aspects of how JSR is architected, its capabilities and features, how current tooling supports it, and how more tools can add support natively.
• “Versioned Web Components” by Christian Ulbrich  — A proposal of how Web Components can be versioned; i.e., how a custom element with the same tag can be updated in the life cycle of a web application as well as ““versioned””
• “Jumping Over the Garden Wall - WPE WebKit on Android” - by Adrián Pérez de Castro  — Introduction and history of the WPE-Android project, and how having a flexible, embeddable Web engine allowed making it work in an unexpected platform, bringing the original Android system web engine back.
• “Automating Assistive Tech with Standards” by Mike Pennisi & Chris Cuellar  — This talk explores the unique challenges of automating ATs, shares the latest implementation status, reviews concurrent standards work that also surfaces the experience of AT users, and discusses the future of these efforts.
• “Built-in AI APIs for the Web” by Thomas Steiner  - An overview of proposals for AI-related APIs in the browser, a demo of their implementation in Chrome, and general discussion.

At the same time, the Hackfest will host a half day Web Applications Working Group Face to Face.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, we’ll have a jam-packed series of 24 breakout sessions on everything from new web engines and JavaScript engines, to discussions of funding challenges given recent legal threats.

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, Huawei, and ARM for helping make this year’s Hackfest possible! And to everyone attending in person or remotely for being a part of the Hackfest community!