Igalia Chats: Fellowships of the Contributors 2024
Eric and Brian recap and discuss the big annual events geared around the Blink and WebKit engine projects, BlinkOn 19 and the Webkit Contributors Meeting.
Eric Meyer: Hello and welcome to Igalia Chats. I am Eric Meyer. I'm a developer advocate at Igalia.
Brian Kardell: I am Brian Kardell. I'm also a developer advocate at Igalia.
Eric Meyer: This week, we're going to do a little wrap-up of a couple of browser-centric or engine-centric gatherings, BlinkOn, which is a Google gathering for people who work on Blink, and the WebKit Contributors Meeting, which is Apple brings people together who contribute to WebKit, the engine. Igalia was represented there at both and Brian was there personally, but we're going to talk about what was heard there and what we presented and what Brian experienced being at those. So, Brian, tell us a little bit about it.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, three trips to California in about 30 days, TPAC, BlinkOn, then WebKit Contributors Meeting.
Eric Meyer: Right?
Brian Kardell: Sure would be nice to either spread those out or put them all together. So, you could just go out there for two weeks.
Eric Meyer: One of the two.
Brian Kardell: Either one.
Eric Meyer: Put them on some partner, one where you have together, anyway.
Brian Kardell: I talked to organizers from both. I mean, I know you know. Our listeners don't, I guess, but we help a little bit with the organization of these events as well. So, I did mention that it would be really nice if we could optimize that a little bit. I think it would be really cool to have just a web engines hackfest, if you will.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, I was going to say that's a thing that Igalia does each late spring, early summer is a web engines hackfest, which is like these gatherings, but it's a little more platform-agnostic. I mean, it makes sense that Google would have a gathering about people who contribute to Google's browser engine and Apple would have a gathering for people who contribute to Apple's browser engine. Igalia is just like let's get everyone together. Everybody who works at a browser engine, whatever the engine is, come on down.
Brian Kardell: I mean, we get a giant venue that would be able to accommodate any and all of these events really. It's very big. Last year, we had tracks. So, it would be great if we just had one event that was maybe a weeklong that you can have a Blink track and a WebKit track and even a Gecko track, maybe a Servo track.
Eric Meyer: I was going to say a novel engines track maybe.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, right. But then there could also be joint stuff that included even discussions about architecture of those engines, comparative discussions. Do you know what I mean?
Eric Meyer: Yeah.
Brian Kardell: I think it would be really cool if we did that and it would be very optimal for people's travels, unless you happen to work for one of the companies who means you don't have to travel because you're already there.
Eric Meyer: Yeah. I mean now that you talk about this idea, I mean, it's a really good idea. You could get the Interop team literally, because Interop is mostly browser representatives, not entirely, but mostly. You could have like a TPAC where working groups have joint meetings. The CSS and accessibility working groups get together to talk about where they overlap. You could have browser engines talking about where they overlap, and there could be some real Interop discussions, like in person. Interop has been entirely virtual over the years as far as I know. So, yeah, I would love to be there for that week. That would be fantastic.
Brian Kardell: I don't remember if there was an in-person. There was an in-person BlinkOn last year, and I didn't go. Also, I didn't go to WebKit Contributors Meeting. I think there were just things in my life that prevented me from going. But yeah, they were good events. We sent seven or eight people to each one, I think. Yeah, both of them, they're similar but different. They get together, people from the open source project community, and they're full of talks like full length talks and lightning talks and breakout sessions. WebKit Contributors is less on the breakout sessions formally, but there is space and there are breaks. So, people just talk and we go have a 40-minute break. The intent is for you to go self-organize about topics that you want, do some hacking or discussion or whatever, but they're good. You attended them virtually too, right?
Eric Meyer: I did to the extent that one can. Obviously, I was seeing the talks whether full length or lightning. There was some really cool stuff, some of which Igalia was presenting. Some of which other people were presenting.
Brian Kardell: So the BlinkOn was this year at a Google office. It was quite nice actually.
Eric Meyer: That was in the Bay Area somewhere.
Brian Kardell: I don't know how many people. I would guess maybe 150 people in person at BlinkOn, and it was representatives from most of the community, I guess. But I would say actually this year, maybe half the people it seemed like were from Microsoft. It was wild.
Eric Meyer: Wow.
Brian Kardell: So I don't know. Do you want to talk about the talks that were there? I don't know how interesting all this meta, what's it like stuff is to people.
Eric Meyer: I think probably not a lot of people realize that these things even happen. I suppose if you follow Igalia on social media at our social media accounts, usually @Igalia, we talk about how we are at BlinkOn this year and this is how many talks we're going to have. So, you might be aware that those things happen, but I think lots and lots of people and probably many listeners to this will maybe not be aware that there are essentially yearly gatherings, at least two yearly gatherings like this. They can be very interesting. Part of it is that we also want to be a little bit careful about what we talk about because one of the things about these is that they let various contributors come together and say, 'This is what we're thinking about working on. These are things we're interested in.' You don't want those to get turned into promises or people regarding them as promises when they're not supposed to be. For us, at BlinkOn, we talked about a bunch of stuff that we've done. I mean, it's easier for us to talk about. So, we had one about our work on Ozone Wayland.
Brian Kardell: We had one on implementing line clamp.
Eric Meyer: Right, yeah, CSS line clamp. Andrew talked about the work that they've done and that was a lightning talk, so they had three minutes. At BlinkOn, if you go to three minute, one second, they will cut you off.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, it's fun actually. That sounds terrifying and terrible, but it is a game show atmosphere, at least it was in the past. The person who ran the lightning talks before didn't run it this year. I think it was just Tab who ran it. But yeah, it was very game showy in the past, and actually, it was very fun. They would cut you off and give you a buzzer sound.
Eric Meyer: They need a gong from the gong show. But anyway, yeah, but I mean it's nice because you can get a lot of different contributors just in three minutes saying, 'Hey, this is what I've been working on. This is what I ran into. This is what I'm thinking about next.' Then boom, next. So, yeah. Tiago had a lightning talk about using Chrome for building apps as an example and stuff like that.
Brian Kardell: We talked actually about the status of... Because we worked on how do you bring Blink to iOS, so we've been working on that. So, we gave a talk about that, which was cool.
Eric Meyer: Gave a little update. Here's where we are now, here's what we've been running into recently. Yeah, I mean just all that stuff. These lightning talks or regular talks can be super, super nerdy, super deep dive into the weeds of libraries and frameworks and implementing this and dealing with that operating system. Sometimes they can be more high level. It's like this is what we've been working on. Certainly, lightning talks don't get too deep into the weeds. They don't have time. They can be a much more high level conceptual, this is where we would like to see things go. This is a thing that we're super interested in and having a deeper support for the sorts of APIs that would make this possible would be useful not just to us, but to the entire web ecosystem. There's room for both kinds of talks, so that's always interesting. Both of them, I should say. We're mostly talking about BlinkOn at the moment because it came first on the calendar, but that's true of both of them.
Brian Kardell: Yeah. It's interesting you noted about what you view as promise or whatever. There is a difference in the philosophy of the two of them a little bit in the policies, I guess. So, BlinkOn, we'll actually link the whole thing on their sans hallway conversations and stuff like that, but yeah, it's all up there. Some of those things I would say do historically... I mean it's not a knock on the event. It's just I think some of those things do historically wind up misunderstood or seeing that they're further along than they are or something. I remember very distinctly, not at this event, but at a Google IO back in 2012 or 2014, there was stuff about web components and it was all this stuff, a bunch of it that model driven views, which is templating, which clearly we do not have. I remember myself and a few other people were like, 'People just think that that's a thing now' and it's not. It probably isn't going to be in the near future, maybe not ever, because a lot of things don't really finally see the light of day. I mean, it's interesting. Google spends a lot of money and a lot of it is effectively R&D for the web. I mean, somebody has to do it. Somebody has to make the proposals and run into the brick walls and find out what works, what's plausible, right?
Eric Meyer: Yeah.
Brian Kardell: But it is interesting. The WebKit Contributors Meeting, you can post your own talks. I guess we didn't record our talks this year, but maybe we can see if some of our colleagues will record them because that's an oversight on our part. We have not thought about it because of the past few, it's been hybrid, so we presented them on a recording. So, we just had the recording, we could post it. But in 2019, I think I did it and that's on our YouTube channel. I did it. Yeah, that too, I didn't do it in person. Actually, this is my first WebKit Contributors Meeting in person was this year.
Eric Meyer: Oh, cool. Yeah, I'm hoping to make it one year. Just schedule-wise, it did not work for me this year. Unfortunately, neither of them did. It did work for you. BlinkOn, some of the interesting talks, we've got a list here about some of them. One of them was about the trials and tribulations of trying to implement masonry layout, so CSS masonry and talking about here's what masonry is when you sort get a little more into it. It's weird. It doesn't exactly fit into any of the existing CSS layout models, but it fits into a couple of them. Yeah, I thought that was really interesting. There was a presentation about the baseline initiative from... [inaudible 00:14:51] did that one, right?
Brian Kardell: Yup.
Eric Meyer: Yeah. Basically talking about here's what baseline has done and is intending to do.
Brian Kardell: I'm curious, how did the Q&A come across online? Were you able to hear the questions and stuff in the room?
Eric Meyer: A lot of times, no. So, speakers who took Q&A and who repeated the questions were very much appreciated.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, I mean, we had a mic. We're walking around with a mic, but I'm never quite confident if they're routed properly to get into the same feed.
Eric Meyer: I mean a lot of them were, don't get me wrong, but there were a couple where it was like, 'Boy, I really hope they repeat that question.'
Brian Kardell: Yeah, yeah. Anyway, I think there was some interesting conversation around baseline. I want to go back and watch the video and see if I can hear, because I think there were some interesting ideas at the end of it, I think. There was one on customizable select that was interesting. There was one on sharing styles with declarative shadow DOM that was Kurt Caddy Schmidt from Microsoft. It focused a lot on Microsoft's CSS imports, but they also talk about the other ideas like using at layer or at style, the stuff like we talked about when Mia was on the show. So, my favorite talk was Chris Wilson's talk, and it's funny because I ran into him. I went to get some coffee and I don't know which one I missed, but there was a talk. We should say a lot of the talks are way lower level because they're about people who are working on the engine. So, there's stuff that's way over my head. So, a couple of sessions, I went and got coffee and just had hallway conversations with people. I went out and I ran into Chris and we were having this conversation because I had talked to somebody from Microsoft. I met somebody new at Microsoft. When I'm at these events, sometimes I see somebody, I don't know them. I introduce myself so that you get to know more people. I mean, it's the point of these events. So, it was a young guy and I think he was at Microsoft. He was talking about man, this standard stuff, it takes so long. I've been working on it for a year. I was like, 'A year, what?' I'm working on things that were from the late '90s and they're still not done. So, he was like, 'The late '90s? I wasn't even born yet.' I know. So, yeah, I'm old, I guess. But I was talking to Chris and we were talking about, 'Yeah, it does. It takes a long time.' We're talking about some of the things that we've worked on that are very few things fall into that category, but there are the really hard things like HAS, MathML, SVG that have truly been going on since the beginning of the web. We're continue to make progress on them very, very, very, very slowly. Then sometimes we get this breakthrough like HAS and we get it shipped or MathML, we got the last MathML implementation shipped in a form. But yeah, anyway, Chris and I spent a lot of time talking out there and he actually ended up incorporating some of that into his presentation. But even without that, Chris was my favorite. He had some really good quotes in there that I tweeted about them or tutored about them or skeeted about them, probably all of the above where he said this, 'Chrome is the fourth browser we've done. At every point, those browsers were the dominant engine.' They were pronounced by someone as the winner. Not everyone but people in industry were like, 'Well, let's just adopt that. That's the winner.' None of them exist anymore. The companies that make them don't exist anymore.
Eric Meyer: Netscape Navigator had 97% of the browser market at one point. Internet Explorer, which he also worked on, had 95% of the browser market. While Microsoft certainly still exists, Internet Explorer well doesn't exist in effect. There's Microsoft Edge now and it does not have 95% of the browser market. Hopefully, I don't mangle it, but the line that he had that I think a few people quoted was the web outlast browsers that outlast companies that outlast industries.
Brian Kardell: That's right. It's amazing.
Eric Meyer: It really is.
Brian Kardell: I've written about that so many times because we had a friend of mine who was really advanced in the industry. He was probably my age when I worked with him when I was getting started and my age now I'm saying. He was seasoned veteran. He came and talked to one of my college engineering courses and he said, 'Hey, if there's one thing I can instill on you, stuff changes. Everything that you think is going to be forever, it's probably not if it's attached to a company or even maybe a programming language, if that's not an open programming language or something. Paradigms change and big giant tech companies or things just change.' I mean, cassettes, records, whole paradigms change all the time. It's slow and you don't notice it, but it's important to keep it in mind that the world outside of your current thing is not stable. It's going to continue to change and evolve. I think that's super important for a lot of the discussions that we have because we talk all the time about how the web is currently funded. That won't last forever. It can't. I don't want it to last forever anyway because it's not a very good way to do it. But yeah, it's important to keep in mind, I think. So, it was great. It was great to hear somebody like Chris articulate that in that stage, especially because I think he even said, 'The web will outlast Google.'
Eric Meyer: Probably, or it will at least outlast the position Google has with respect to the web. The web has not yet outlasted Microsoft, but Microsoft's role in the web and how that thing has certainly changed a lot. That is likely to be the same for Google or Apple for that matter. We often think, 'Wow, these tech titans are now permanent fixtures of the landscape.' It's like maybe, maybe not.
Brian Kardell: Right there at the top with Blockbuster video.
Eric Meyer: Right, exactly. But speaking of Apple, the WebKit Contributors Meeting-
Brian Kardell: Wait, before we go to the WebKit Contributors Meeting, there's two things that I want to say about BlinkOn before we wrap up. One that dovetails really nicely into the collective, so Shruti gave an update on this. I don't know if we talked about this before, but they haven't formally announced it, unless it happened in the last week and I may have just missed it, but it's public now. They are creating a Chromium collective where they're getting people downstream from Chromium who use Chromium and rely on Chromium who aren't Google to pay into a common pot that will then be used to fund development from companies like Igalia and independent prioritization to some degree of the work in Chromium. So, to widen who is contributing and funding. Anyway, it's a neat idea. We'll see how it goes. I don't know how it will affect us.
Eric Meyer: So I mean the idea is that, for example, Microsoft and Opera both use Chromium.
Brian Kardell: Yes.
Eric Meyer: Just to pick two examples, they're not the only ones.
Brian Kardell: I do believe though, that they are among the ones that they announced.
Eric Meyer: Yes, they are. So, they're contributing money to this collective. They're effectively paying back for being able to use this browser engine in their products and their projects. The idea is that anyone who does that, anyone who uses Chromium as the core of a product will contribute to this collective, which is housed at the Linux Foundation and will be administered by the Linux Foundation. I don't know if these will be the actual terms or a steering committee, a governing committee that will determine, okay, we need this done and we're going to hire this independent contractor, this sole programmer, this company like Igalia to implement it. We will pay them out of this collective, out this pool of money.
Brian Kardell: That is correct.
Eric Meyer: Whatever amount of dollars. If it's a small project, it might be a few thousands or thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. If it's a huge project, it could be a multi-year, possibly six or seven figure contract. Who knows? That is for that steering governing committee to decide. That, like I say, is administered by the Linux Foundation is the idea.
Brian Kardell: That's right.
Eric Meyer: Again, there hasn't been a formal announcement, but through these talk I believe is or will be on YouTube. So, people can see that and we'll link to it while we'll link to the BlinkOn-
Brian Kardell: Playlist.
Eric Meyer: The BlinkOn 19 playlists and people could look it up there. Yeah, that was really cool.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, I love that we're experimenting with this. So, we tried to do a very similar thing with Wolvic, which is a show that we'll be doing soon, but we try to do a similar thing with Wolvic. Servo works in a similar-ish way where you can put money to the Servo Collective and it is the technical steering committee that has to decide how to allocate those funds. That's all part of the Linux Foundation. It's very similar to that in a way, except that in this incarnation, the way that you get onto the board of this is to put money into the pot in the first place, which is actually just the way we did it for Wolvic, but more technical. Anyway, it's really interesting. I like to see it being experimented with. To keep it in perspective, it is 0.1% or 0.01% of the money it costs to maintain Blink. It's not like an immediate paradigm shift or anything, but having actual money from downstream as a practice would be great. It would be great if all of the downstream, if that was the norm. Yeah, anyway. So, the other thing I wanted to mention is that, like I said, Microsoft had a really big presence there. One of the things that happens in that meeting is some keynotes and they summarize the state of the community and they do lots of things to measure it. They have lots of ways we measure in terms of commits and reviewers and all that stuff. This year is the first year that Microsoft surpassed Igalia on those.
Eric Meyer: On what? Sorry?
Brian Kardell: It's like commits.
Eric Meyer: It's the number of commits to Chromium.
Brian Kardell: So congratulations, Microsoft.
Eric Meyer: Well done.
Brian Kardell: For now. Yeah, no, we'll see. I mean, I'm really happy that they are because they went to Chromium and then very much slowed down a lot. It is really nice to see actually them stepping up and doing. They are doing a lot now, so it's great.
Eric Meyer: Yeah. Awesome. Let's talk about WebKit Contributors Meeting.
Brian Kardell: The WebKit Contributors Meeting.
Eric Meyer: Yeah. You noted that this one's been going for longer.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, because it predates Blink, right? The Blink was WebKit, and so all the Google people would go there. So, it's been going on for a long time, actually. The guy who started it actually was there. John pointed him out to me, but I didn't get to meet him. But John mentioned to me. At some point, I just inherited this and I hadn't been here before. So, I'm not sure if it's much different than it was before that. So, yeah, I don't know. I wonder what it was like. We should ask some of our people, because we work with people who have been working on WebKit for more than a decade. So, they would know, maybe a decade and a half. Well, no, I mean Rob Bouse and Nicholas Zimmerman, technically they wrote the SVG engine in the late '90s. So, there you go.
Eric Meyer: That's coming up on a quarter-century here.
Brian Kardell: That's the OG.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, seriously.
Brian Kardell: OG contributors.
Eric Meyer: Yeah. So, how big was this one? How many people?
Brian Kardell: This one was at the Hyatt Hilton, which I'm sure everybody has made the joke, but it's called Hyatt House. I was like, 'Is it David Hyatt's house?' Only the olds will get that one, I guess. Maybe do we need to explain it?
Eric Meyer: Dave Hyatt, he was a browser engineer really early on and worked at Apple for a while.
Brian Kardell: So yeah, it was good. Mario from Igalia gave our talk. So, basically, this one is organized a little bit differently. We don't do quite the same thing that we do at BlinkOn, but every port, WebKit has ports. So, there's a Safari port. Well, there's two Safari ports, I guess. There's iOS and macOS, and then there's our embedded port and there's the APE. Then there's the GTK port for Linux desktop, and then there's the Sony port.
Eric Meyer: Which runs PlayStation 4, 5.
Brian Kardell: Yes. Then there are some other not quite ports, but interested parties, but the major contributors who have ports, they give a state of our ports. Also, typically those have a team around them. They're not just like an individual contributor or two. So, they give this is what we're interested in as well in the next year, this is what we'd like to work on, what we're hoping to work on. This is where, like you say, we try to be real careful about, it's not a promise. It's hey, if you two are interested in these, let's talk. Maybe I should just get out of the way and let you do it, or maybe we can work on it together or whatever. Yeah. So, I thought it was good, Mario's presentation.
Eric Meyer: On the status of our WebKit contributions.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, we're still number two in WebKit.
Eric Meyer: Behind Apple. Yeah, very nice.
Brian Kardell: By a lot too. I mean, it's big. WebKit is very different than Blink in that in Blink, 98.9% of the commits or some very, very high, over 98, it might be over 99% of commits come from Googlers. The whole rest of the world put together contributes the remaining 1 or 1.5%. But in the WebKit code base, we contribute something like 15 or 16% of the overall contributions. If you look at outside of Apple, we contribute like 65% of commits or something like that. So, we have huge contributions to WebKit. I guess part of that comes with maintaining ports though too.
Eric Meyer: Right. Yeah, I mean because these are being ported to other platforms, there's probably going to be a lot of commits around those. That is fair. We talked about Laura had a WebDriver BiDi.
Brian Kardell: That's good. Can we talk about WebDriver BiDi for a minute? Because BiDi, if you follow CSS, totally different thing.
Eric Meyer: Yes. Right. In CSS, it's bidirectionality. Here?
Brian Kardell: It is bidirectionality.
Eric Meyer: And yet, totally different.
Brian Kardell: So it's bidirectionality of communication, not bidirectionality of writing mode or something like that. It's not about layout. It's about communication. So, yeah. If you're somebody who's interested in the web and might run into that, it probably will confuse you. But some people suggested, 'Well, we should change that.' Well, there's no point in changing it really, because that is really what it is, and it's just adding bidirectionality to WebDriver. So, when it's done, we won't talk about WebDriver BiDi. It's not a special thing. It will just be WebDriver, right? So it's adding bidirectionality to WebDriver. Anyway, it was a good talk.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, yeah. Our other extended talk was about Skia integration in WebKit Linux ports. So, Skia is a rendering library.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, well, it's like a 2D graphics library, and there's a lot of 2D graphics work that goes into the web. So, it's the foundation of a lot of the things draw basically, especially Canvas and all that stuff too. So, yeah, I guess it's the library because other than Apple's ports, which use a thing called Core Graphics, I think, we were the only ones who weren't using it. We used a thing called the Cairo that was another 2D graphics library, but it was unmaintained. But everybody uses Skia as the interesting thing. Microsoft uses it, Mozilla uses it, Google uses it. So, we were the last ones. It's hard to make a 2D rendering thing that is very performant, that works on the web, works on all devices. You know what I mean? Lots of companies contribute to. So, anyway, our ports used for a long time Cairo, which is another library like this, but it was not really maintained for a long time. It had some nice things to it, but also it caused us a lot of headaches. We had been working on potentially our own solution to this, our own graphics thing because we have a lot of graphics expertise inside. Actually, the initial work we did was really amazing. Even some of it outperformed Skia, but the job is too big, it just wasn't going to happen really. We ran into some other problems. So, we decided to also benchmark Skia, to try to measure how it worked out for us. It turns out the answer is really well, it seems. Yeah, I mean it was good. It's a good talk. I hope that we do actually record it and post it because it's very interesting, I thought.
Eric Meyer: Right. Yeah. Cool. Then there were some lightning talks. They're a little longer at WebKit Contributors Meeting. Lightning talks are 5 to 10 minutes and they don't have that three-minute guillotine cut off.
Brian Kardell: They'll let you go on if you go on long.
Eric Meyer: But these were things like Justin from Igalia had a couple of lightning talks. One was about new WASM features, new WebAssembly features, and the other was about binary exploitation of the JavaScript core. So, that's always fun.
Brian Kardell: So the three of our talks were by Justin, who used to be at Apple, but now works here. Actually, one of them, he was talking about this binary exploitation thing that you were talking about. He made a program that you could corrupt just easily and to demonstrate, and it was like, 'Hey, let's make this audience participatory thing.' His talk needed somebody to come up and volunteer. Very few people there were compilers people probably. So, I don't know. I was like, 'There's no universe in which I'm volunteering for this.' Maciej from Apple actually was like, 'Wow, I mean if you don't need to have special knowledge or whatever, I'll do it.' Well, I mean, wow, what a sport. He got up there and struggled with it, but figured it out. Yeah, it was cool. We just let this play out, but there were two talks right after one another. Another one was from Apple's people that was on similar topics. So, we had this really nice deep dive into the ways that these things can go wrong. It is amazing actually. So, it was interesting.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, it's very cool stuff. Again, that's the point of these meetings, these conclaves summits. That's the point of getting everyone together is for someone to say, 'Hey, by the way, I found this amazing, concerning, whatever it is thing in this engine that we all work on. I think the rest of you might want to know about it.' The reason you get everyone together is that, sure, you could send that as an email, but it's easy to read an email and forget or never read the email in the first place because we all have way too much email. Whereas if you're sitting in a room and someone is showing you literally on slides or whatever or live coding or whatever, check this out, that sticks a lot more. So, yeah.
Brian Kardell: There was a representative there from Nvidia and he was talking about gaming on the web. They have some stuff that they were showing off. It's not announced yet. I can't talk about it too much, but it's very cool. Yeah, it's very cool. He also had some XREAL glasses, which I had never tried.
Eric Meyer: Okay.
Brian Kardell: Also very cool actually.
Eric Meyer: Yeah. How were those?
Brian Kardell: What's that?
Eric Meyer: How were those?
Brian Kardell: Yeah, they were neat. I mean, they're just seemed like a 2D, mostly presentation, but virtual and the contrast was really good. I was really surprised. I thought it would not be because they're so small, but they're tethered, so they're just really screen mirroring. But yeah, it was neat, anyway. I guess the other advantage to that is it's private. Nobody can see it except for you. So, I think we've talked about the use cases for some of these things. It's great if you're on an airplane or something. So yeah, that was neat. Then also, you have from Shopify, former Googler, Yo Vice was at this on behalf of Shopify and talking about what they're interested in and what they would like to do. Unfortunately, it's not recorded, so you can't hear Yo verbally respond to the look on my face of disbelief. That's something that he said. I don't think that's ever happened to me before where I've been in the audience and somebody caught my so shocked look that they responded to it. He was talking about the way that people use import maps and saying that there are people with thousands and thousands of entries in their import maps. I was like, 'What? That seems like really a lot.' But yeah, it was interesting. As always, a lot of these events we always say is the valuable part is meeting people, having relationships with them, and the ability to have conversations outside the context of a meeting where it seems like I am trying to do my job and you're not paying enough attention. You're getting in the way. Do you know what I mean? It can get really tense because everybody goes to meetings to try to push their things forward and it can feel like people aren't giving your things enough attention. They're not getting the implementation priority. When it's all virtual and people are trying to make the most of their time, it can really feel like maybe people are not so friendly toward you or anything. But then being able to see them and have a meal with them, I think it's just helpful. It's just helpful. It opens the door for a lot of conversations also, that wouldn't happen where it's like, 'Yeah, I had this wild idea about this. What do you think about this? What's the likelihood do you think that we could do such and such?' I always see really positive things come out of these events. So, yeah.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, it's very cool and really glad that they happen every year. Sometimes I think it would be nice if they happen more often, and then I think about that's a lot of travel for everybody. So, once a year is probably about right. Yeah, I'm still jazzed about your idea of just having them all in one place.
Brian Kardell: I don't know that we'll be able to convince everybody to do that.
Eric Meyer: No, probably not.
Brian Kardell: One thing about the WebKit Contributors Meeting that I really like is that, like you said, you can't watch Apple's presentation anywhere. So, it's easier to communicate in that environment where you say, 'Look, we're trying to do the best we can to be as open as we can, and you all work with us. You have shown your commitment. You work on WebKit as well.' So it's in everybody's interest to be as communicative as we can, and this is what we can tell you, but always understand that none of these things are promises. Apple doesn't comment on upcoming releases, but you know what I mean. The most open communication that I find happens there in that. One thing I really liked about this is Maciej every year who's been on WebKit forever, he was on the tag. He's been around the web for forever. He gives the state of our things and then what we're going to be interested in next year for Apple. He shared this year at the end, it's like these are all the areas that we're talking about focusing on. Then at the end, there's this donut pie thing that's like here are the slices of our engineering resources that we'll dedicate to each one of those things. When you see the presentation, you're like, 'Man, that's a lot of stuff.' But also, there's a way bigger group of stuff that's not on that list. You know what I mean? When you see the pie at the end, you're like, 'Yeah, we need a lot more pies. We just need a lot more pies.' That's not a commentary on Apple. It's just like when you see it. You gave that great talk that was about how no matter how much money you spend on this, you'll need more money.
Eric Meyer: It doesn't matter. Google could do the same thing at BlinkOn where they say, 'Here's what we're thinking about doing in next year.' It would be this, like you say, a pie chart of here's how much of our resources we're going to dedicate to each of these things. Absolutely, you would say, 'We need more pie.' It's not a bad way to live your life, but at any rate, yeah, no matter how much you do, you could literally have both Apple and Google decide that they were going to dedicate 90% of their operating revenue to expanding their browser's feature lists and there would still be stuff that would not make the list.
Brian Kardell: Probably.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, because there's just so much. The web has become so ubiquitous and therefore so desirable to make even more ubiquitous as it were and more powerful that there's always going to be something. We've managed to put a thousand things on the list that we're going to get done in the next two years, and somebody really wanted number 1,001, right, or several somebodies.
Brian Kardell: We're in the process of doing Interop now and Interop 2025, the process is going where we will pick a lot of things to not choose to be on the priority list.
Eric Meyer: Yeah.
Brian Kardell: Choosing to prioritize something is-
Eric Meyer: Choosing not to prioritize-
Brian Kardell: ... also choosing to not prioritize the other things.
Eric Meyer: Other things, yeah. I mean there are some things that will be just explicitly picked to not be on the list because they're not ready or whatever. Last year we didn't include Masonry because the spec wasn't done. So, we explicitly picked that will not go on the list because it's not ready for Interop. There will be things like that this year. Then there will also be, yeah, once we finally picked the things that go on the list, all the things that were not picked to go on the list are not on the list.
Brian Kardell: Right? Yeah, exactly.
Eric Meyer: The last I checked, we had well over 100 proposals and we're not doing well over 100.
Brian Kardell: We're not doing 100.
Eric Meyer: No, we're not.
Brian Kardell: I think it would be safe to say we're not doing most of them.
Eric Meyer: Yeah. Well, I would say if we're lucky, we'll get to do about 10% of them, depending.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, there's not enough pie.
Eric Meyer: There isn't. I feel that this is a fundamental problem with the world, that there's just not enough pie.
Brian Kardell: It is. I gave a talk in 2019 or 2020 that used this pie metaphor, it always makes me hungry.
Eric Meyer: Yes. Okay. Well, let's both go get pie.
Eric Meyer
Brian Kardell