Igalia is composed of multiple teams deeply specialized in developing innovative open source technologies and solutions in various areas within the Free and Open Source Software (FLOSS) community while covering a wide set of hardware platforms.
This year we are happy to celebrate and look back on our first 20 years, and how we grew to over 100 developers in over 20 countries, playing important roles in the FLOSS ecosystem.
About Igalia Igalia 20 Year History

Technologies

Igalia is a highly-specialized company developing innovative open source solutions for a large set of software and hardware platforms.

Browsers and Client-side Web Technologies

Igalia is a key contributor to each of the Web engines and often lead the development of many feature implementations. We are also the maintainers of WPE WebKit, the official WebKit port for embedded devices.

Our work includes maintenance, optimization, porting, and implementation of new features and standards.

We have the most WebKit, Chromium/Blink and Firefox expertise found in the consultancy business. Our teams include reviewers, committers and API owners.

Graphics Pipeline and Rendering Technologies

The graphics pipeline is crucial for achieving a friction-free user interface.

Igalia has years of experience developing and optimizing key components of the graphical pipeline, such as OpenGL Vulkan drivers, core UI toolkits and libraries and client-side web technologies.

Compilers and Programming languages

Igalia is the most experienced JavaScript Virtual Machine Consultancy contributing code upstream to V8, JavaScriptCore and Spidermonkey.

We are also contributors to the LLVM compiler infrastructure project and other standard dynamic runtimes like Python, Ruby or Guile Scheme.

Multimedia

Igalia's multimedia expertise ranges from hardware acceleration to end-user applications.

For example, we develop and maintain GStreamer VAAPI and many other official elements in GStreamer. Additionally, we develop and maintain WebKit's GStreamer based multimedia backend.

Embedded Linux and Device Drivers

Igalia has years of experience working in the lower layers of the Linux stack with a strong focus in embedded technologies.

We have been developing, integrating, adapting and writing different kinds of drivers, from graphics to networking and storage.

Accessibility Tools and Technologies

Igalia is committed to making access to software and information possible for all users.

With over 20 years in combined experience in accessibility and diverse backgrounds ranging from computer science to special education, our engineers deliver truly integrated solutions.

Linux Kernel

Igalia has been adapting, optimizing and creating new products for the GNU/Linux kernel for over 15 years.

Our engineers write, maintain and port drivers and provide consultancy and solutions for your Linux-based hardware products.

Virtualization & Cloud

Igalia has a team specialized in hypervisors, system virtualization and cloud technologies.

Our engineers write, maintain and port drivers and provide solutions and development services using the QEMU KVM hypervisor as well as the CEPH storage system.

A global company

Headquartered in Spain, Igalia has become a global company, with customers all over the world. Our team spans timezones and cultures, with employees based in Asia, Europe, Oceania and the Americas.

Continuing to fulfill its founding vision, Igalia is a worker owned cooperative, maintaining a constant and increasingly important presence in many upstream projects such as WebKit, Chromium, Mesa 3D, GStreamer and Servo, to name just a few.

Our History

Having shown how individual organizations can help the Web Platform advance by funding implementation work, Igalia partnered with Open Collective to prove it is possible to prioritize work through funding from many sources.

Our experiment, Open Prioritization, offered six possible implementation targets and collected funding from over 70 sources for implementation of in WebKit. Work was completed and delivered in Safari Technology Preview.

Igalia also showed off a new experimental Android build of our official WebKit port for embedded devices, WPE for Android build with WebXR support (added by Igalia), running Firefox Reality.

Igalia helped to develop a Canary build of the popular Epiphany (GNOME Web) browser.

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As independent contributors to MDN, as well as users, we realize the importance of documentation of the commons. In 2020, Igalia joined the MDN Product Advisory Board to try to help steward this important resource.

As a unique company working on diverse and important open source projects, including all of the major browser engines, we have a lot of thoughts and insights to share. In 2020 we launched the Igalia Chats podcast, available on every major podcasting platform.

Partnering with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, Igalia develops a new open source v3dv Vulkan driver for the Raspberry PI 4. It becomes an official Mesa driver and achieves Vulkan 1.0 conformance with the Khronos Group, passing over 100,000 tests in the official Conformance Test Suite (CTS).

Igalia is the #2 contributor to both WebKit and Chromium Projects, as well as in the top 10 contributors in Firefox/Gecko for 3 consecutive years. In 2020 we contributed over 15% of all commits to WebKit.

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Igalia are top contributors to both WebKit and Chromium projects for 2 consecutive years, top 10 in Gecko/Servo.

Working with the MathML Community and Chromium engineers, Igalia works to create a proposal to align MathML with the rest of the platform and answer outstanding questions raised along the way. As part of this, Igalia provides a prototype downstream for testing implementation and informing discussions.

Thanks to our significant contributions, the CSS Working Group nominates an Igalian as a co-editor of the CSS Grid specification.

2019 marks 10 years in Igalia's current headquarters.

Igalia's contributions help the Intel Mesa driver for Linux to officially conform with the Khronos Groups' new OpenGL 4.6 Adopters Program: A certification program by which the OpenGL Working Group reviews and approves OpenGL products. Intel Mesa for Linux and NVIDIA for Windows were the very first drivers to obtain this certification, obtained on the same day the conformance program was announced.

This was the year Igalia announced the first official release of WPE WebKit, which we had been developing for some time. It is the official port of WebKit for embedded systems and today powers hundreds of millions of devices from cable boxes to cooking machines.

In 2018 Igalia also celebrated a decade of collaboration with NGOs, contributing 0.7% of our revenue to NGOs chosen by Igalians.

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Increasing our commitment to web standards, Igalians began funding the participation of our peers in leadership roles in important standards groups.

Our long work in implementing CSS Grid Layout, funded by Bloomberg Tech, is released in stable Chrome and Safari releases. Mozilla also releases their Grid implementation, marking one of the most highly anticipated, closely coordinated and significant additions to the web platform ever.

Given our strong graphics team and interest in many developing graphics technologies, Igalia joins the Khronos Group, the standards organization where most graphics standards are set and conformance suites defined.

Igalia announces the development of WPE.

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Igalia began to develop and share ideas which would eventually become an official WebKit Port, WPE - as well as a lightweight WebKit port based on Wayland, avoiding the use of heavy traditional GUI toolkits.
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Igalia hosts the first ever Web Engines Hackfest, an event bringing together implementers from different browser engines and different areas of the web platform. It will become one of the most notable cross-browser web platform events focused on implementation.
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In 2012, Galicia, home to Igalia's headquarters hosts Guadec (the GNOME community’s largest conference) and Libre Software World Conference. Igalia played a relevant role in both conferences.

That same year we also began expanding our interests in several projects, notably: GStreamer, chromium and v8. Chromium and V8 had already begun in a port of WebKit itself, and as such, Igalia has been contributing since its very beginnings would become an important contributor.

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By 2010, Igalia's interest in creating healthy ecosystems only grows, and we begin to join larger and broader efforts which we see as attempting to shape the future of open source and free software. Our interests around browsers also continues to grow as we begin to get invoved in efforts toward making WebKit on Linux ports accessible, collaborating with the maintainers of the Orca screen reader.

By 2008, Igalia's work with GNOME and mobile platforms led to new discussions and new interests in WebKit related projects and ports. This marks an important turning point for Igalia, where we would begin to figure out how to apply the same principles and model that we had been developing to web browsers.

Several early mobile platforms were developed using GNOME technology. Igalia quickly joined the Maemo platform, and later Moblin, MeeGo and Tizen. We became important contributors to key projects including Linux, GNOME itself, Freedesktop.org, QT and WebKit.

This work helped Igalia receive a prize recognizing it as the most innovative company in Galicia, the region in Spain in which Igalia is located.

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By 2002, Igalia had become interested in finding ways to fund R&D efforts related to the GNOME project and hopefully contribute to the project itself. In many ways, this is the beginning of the practical roots of our interest and model for improving the open source and free software ecosystems.

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Igalia was founded in September 2001 in A Coruña, Spain, by a group of ten young software professionals. They were inspired by their experience in free software, and shared the goal of creating a free software company based on cooperation, innovation, and shared responsibility.