Brian Kardell: Hi, I am Brian Kardell and I am a developer advocate at Igalia.
Eric Meyer: I'm Eric Meyer, also a developer advocate at Igalia. And today we have a very special guest, Stephanie Stimac. Welcome, Stephanie.
Stephanie Stimac: Hello. Thank you.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Stephanie Stimac: Yes. So I joined Igalia six months ago now in March of 2024. And I am on the support team at Igalia, which means I basically provide project supports. I'm a project manager for the web platform team, but on top of that I get to do lots of other cool things. So I do a little bit of social media marketing for developers for some of our projects, and I even get to do some design stuff. So all sorts of different stuff that I love to do
Brian Kardell: And give some talks.
Stephanie Stimac: Yes, and give talks, so many different things. Again, my ideal job.
Eric Meyer: Nice. What are some of those talks?
Stephanie Stimac: I've been giving two talks this year. One is not related to what I do at Igalia, but the one that I've been giving that's related to what I do at Igalia has been about funding the web ecosystem, sort of diving into how fragile browsers and web engines are and how much of our infrastructure is held up by open source and how poorly it is funded. And just been looking at the numbers and how much money is generated in that space, but how little of it actually gets funneled back into ensuring it's sustainable and sort of future proof. So
Brian Kardell: I guess it's interesting because historically you, not directly immediately from Microsoft, but in your fairly recent past, you came from Microsoft to Igalia, and I'm wondering, we have not actually had a chance to even talk personally about this, so I don't know the answer. Could you compare and contrast? What's that like? Because Igalia is pretty different, I imagine, than Microsoft.
Stephanie Stimac: Yes.
Brian Kardell: Having never worked at Microsoft myself, but I can imagine,
Stephanie Stimac: Well, it's a little bit funny to me because when I was at Microsoft, I was hired in as a designer, but my title was program manager, and then it was later changed to product manager, but I was still doing design, I was doing developer advocacy and then I was actually doing actual product management on top of that. So it's very similar. And obviously I was on the browser at Microsoft, I worked on the web platform and then later developer experiences. And so that whole space is similar, but in terms of the way the company is structured, obviously very, very different because Igalia is a consultancy and or a co-op. So getting used to the flat structure is again, very, very different from Microsoft where you have so many layers of leadership that you need to go through for just planning purposes and approval to do things. So even though the roles and what I'm working on are similar, I have much more agency to go do what I would like to do without being told no because of whatever restrictions.
Eric Meyer: We see that sometimes in calls where there are representatives from a bunch of different companies including us, and someone will say, I know we all agreed to do this thing, but could we modify it slightly? And Brian and I are literally able to just say yes or no. And almost everyone else has a response of, let me run that by my management or my team, or whatever.
Stephanie Stimac: My favorite, I guess you could call it a symptom of corporate culture is the responses to email chains. And it'll just be like adding this person and this person and then all of a sudden you have three more email replies and it's just adding. so-and-so for visibility,
Eric Meyer: Yeah, I mean sometimes obviously we have to come back. If someone said, I know that we all agreed to put in this amount of money, what would people think about tripling it? Yes, we would have to come back to the collective to get that approval, but changing the date of an announcement, we could just be completely flexible.
Brian Kardell: It takes a little getting used to, honestly, if you switch in my experience, I came from big corporation before and it took me probably six months to get comfortable just in that part of the role to just be like, oh, yeah, I see I am empowered within reason and things like that. I'm empowered and encouraged actually to just go do it.
Eric Meyer: Yeah. Very cool. So you used to work on a browser that had enormous corporate backing essentially, right? Like Microsoft, they have a browser, and at one point they had an engine of their own. They do not do that anymore, but they did. And now you work for this scrappy that has at least two engines, actually, sorry, three engines. But
Brian Kardell: Hold on, I would like to clarify something. When you say three engines, what do you mean?
Eric Meyer: So there's Wolvic, which is based on, well, it is based around Gecko and now Chromium.
Brian Kardell: Okay.
Eric Meyer: So there's kind of two engines there, and then there's Servo, which is Servo, which we're working on a lot. And then WPE WebKit, which is a fork of WebKit. So I guess in a way there's four.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, that's interesting. When you said engines, I think Chromium, WebKit and Gecko, right? Those are the three engines, and then now we mix in Servo.
Eric Meyer: So yeah, I miscounted twice. What does it feel like the support and your role in relation to those engines, how is that different?
Stephanie Stimac: It kind of goes back to what I was saying about the red tape of corporations and when I was working at Microsoft, even after we switched to Chromium, there is an inherent need for everything to tie back to a business need or business impact, basically. How is this going to make you money? And that's really, really hard with the web platform and especially because I was so focused on developers. I see all these things that developers want and need to do their jobs. And it's not that Microsoft doesn't care about developers. Of course they care about developers and so does Chrome and Safari, but when you get into the nitty gritty of business planning to find funding for web platform features is really difficult. And making a case for features that benefit developers as a subgroup as opposed to the general consumer audience Was really difficult. And so saying that developers want anchor positioning, for example, it's great that they want that, but at the end of the day it was like, okay, how can that benefit the company as a whole? What is that going to bring us? And working on Servo, even Wolvic, even though Wolvic is based on chromium, well, it's a lot different. One because the team is so much smaller, but I wouldn't say we're necessarily gated by business impact. We can say, we're going to go do this thing because the engine needs that and go build it.
Eric Meyer: A Microsoft engineer, many, many years ago, so this is probably late nineties, early two thousands once told me that when they were developing features or adding features to the web browser, the question they always had to answer was, will this make the office team happy?
Stephanie Stimac: Yes. I mean that was still true up until I left in 2022.
Eric Meyer: And if the office team didn't want a thing, it didn't happen. We don't have that restriction because I mean for us, yes, some of the things we work on are because a client wants a thing, some a client hire us to add a feature. I mean, that's what Bloomberg did for CSS grid. That's how we got CSS grid in browsers. Basically it was Bloomberg said, we really want grid in browsers. We're going to hire AgIgalia to do it. But we can also say, like you said, it would be really great if we could add this to the developer tools and if that can be internally justified, essentially it doesn't have the same sort of what money will this make? It's more of a here is how this would be helpful both for us, but for the ecosystem as a whole, that often is a winning argument.
Stephanie Stimac: Yes.
Brian Kardell: I think that there are some examples of this that are really obvious to point to that Igalia has been involved with. Like math Mel, we did some grant work in 2019 and we got a few sponsors, but they were relatively small comparatively. And now we have a collective which allows for individual funding.
Eric Meyer: And that actually brings us back around to your talk about the browser ecosystem and funding the browser ecosystem. Tell us more about the talk.
Stephanie Stimac: So I will be speaking at state of the browser, which is in London, a lovely, lovely event that's focused on web standards. So if you are in the general Wolvicinity of London on the 14th, I think there are still tickets available
Eric Meyer: The 14th of September.
Stephanie Stimac: September, yes. So the talk I'm giving is called Sustainable Futures funding the web ecosystem, and it's basically a quick dive into the economics of the current state of things and how browsers generate money and the cycle of where that money kind of goes. And it's not all back into the ecosystem. And we're talking about billions and billions of dollars that are being generated from search engines and ads. And the way that it is being funneled back into the ecosystem is not in an equitable or sustainable way. And I think looking at what's happening with Google right now, I know you just talked about this in your last Igalia Chats episode, but what's happening right now with Google and the antitrust lawsuit in regards to a search and ads, that is actually really, really scary in my opinion. When you take a step back and look at the state of the ecosystem, we're in a state where most of the browsers that are out there right now are on chromium, and Google continues to be the main contributor to Chromium. And so if we're looking at Google losing 65% of their revenue, if they can't pay Apple for that premium search placement, that I think will have more shock waves across tech than people might realize. When you think about infrastructure and how we operate every day, I certainly can't go throughout the day without accessing the internet or needing to access it to get to my bank statements or my bills or whatever. And so maybe my view is a little bit too doomsday, but I tend to be a worst case scenario person, but I think it's an important thing to plan for and we really need to start thinking about what happens. Is big tech too big to fail? Is Google too big to fail? Do we really want to perpetuate that? So lots of, I think philosophical questions too that arise from this.
Eric Meyer: I mean, you said this actually is scary. What's happening with Google? What is it that scares you about that?
Stephanie Stimac: Again, the internet and accessing the internet is such a huge part of our modern life, and I think we don't know what's going to happen with Google in this lawsuit, but I imagine if they lose 65% of their revenue, they're going to have to do something that involves layoffs, that involves reducing the size of teams. I don't know how many engineers they have contributing to Chromium, but again, with Chromium being the most prominent engine right now, I fear for the web and how it will stagnate if we lose that amount of support for the engine.
Brian Kardell: Well, that's just chromium because then you have a hundred percent nearly of Firefox's Mozilla's funding comes from the search deal. There's a huge, huge check going into Apple from that deal, and a fraction of that pays for the browser. So if you interrupt that funding, yeah, it's like we say ecosystem, but I think it's the right analogy, right?
Eric Meyer: Yeah, I was just thinking every one of the dollars that Google sends to Mozilla and Apple and to their own browser teams, each dollar is one plankton sell and the entire ecosystem rests on that plankton beast. And if that suffers a huge population crash or dies entirely, what happens to that ecosystem,
Brian Kardell: Right?
Eric Meyer: Yep.
Brian Kardell: I wanted to make a note about something that Stephanie said about how much chromium contributes because I know that we are constantly saying like, oh, Igalia is the number whatever contributor to this engine and this engine and this engine, and we talk about other contributors will pretty soon we'll be at Blink on it. We'll be talking about the diversity of contributions, who's pulling weight and everything. But I also like to keep that in perspective that of all the contributions to Chromium in 2024, I got the number in front of me. I just pulled it up while you were talking. 94.7 of them are from Google, and the remaining roughly 5% is the entire rest of the chromium ecosystem. So that's Intel, Samsung, Igalia, opera, Microsoft, all of those put together are contributing about 5% and Google is contributing 94.7% of commits to Chromium and less. We think just chromium has that. WebKit is not dissimilar in that almost 80% comes from Apple in Firefox, it's about 90% comes from Mozilla. So yeah, between 75 and 90% come from the Steward orgs directly.
Eric Meyer: And if they lose all that funding, do those commits continue? I mean, yes, all of those engines are open source and so hypothetically they could be continued without their steward organizations contributing those commits. But like you said, Stephanie, it's a stagnation. You can't take 95% of the commits away and even five years later be anywhere close to the kind of advancement rates that we've been seeing recently.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, I mean another thing that I think, I don't think that everybody realizes, but browsers have security patches and bit rot with changes to operating systems and drivers and things like that. So just keeping a secure browser safe and secure and running with your operating system changes and everything costs a non-trivial amount of money without adding anything.
Eric Meyer: And we do have some experience with moving an engine forward. A servo, you've actually been doing something really cool, I think, which is sort of a servo weekly notes of the here's what got added to Servo or what changed in Servo this week. How has that felt? I'm just curious.
Stephanie Stimac: So it's been good. I do want to give a shout out to Zach. Why can't I remember his full name
Eric Meyer: Leatherman
Stephanie Stimac: Yeah. I saw him doing this for 11 tea and I was like, oh, I thought, you know what? That might be cool to do for Servo. The only thing is I'm only capturing a very, very small portion of what is actually happening weekly because the team at Igalia that is working on Servo is very, a huge part of pushing the engine forward, but there is quite a bit of community involvement. And so it's actually been really cool to go through and see not just the layout work that's happening. They just turned on Flexbox by default and Servo, which is huge, but there's someone in the community who has been working on WebEx R and slowly enabling WebEx R and servo. And this has been really interesting for me to witness too, because I work on Wolvic, which is our XR browser. And so I've had sort of three different projects intersect because I have another client in the IFPS space who saw the servo WebEx XR work happening and then was like, oh, well, what if we created an XR browser based on Servo and then had this other specific requirement with something called web tiles. And so it was kind of a neat moment to see these organic conversations about three projects that I'm involved with just evolve in Discord. And then you have people in the WebEx R Discord saying, oh, well what if we put Wolvic on Servo? This is completely unprompted by anyone at a Gallup, but actual community folks talking about what if this happened or what if we did this? And it's been really cool and I think the highlights have been a really good way to sort of bubble up the other work that's happening that isn't just Igalia.
Brian Kardell: Shout out to Daniel Adams from Hawaii, who is the one who did that M sub two on GitHub. So yeah, that's really cool. And it is a little bit harder for me to classify the commits in Sero, but it looks to me like around 45 to 50% of commits to servo are coming from Igalia, so that's much more diverse. I mean, it's a smaller engine, much smaller team, so it's easier to get 50% of that I guess. But yeah, it's more diverse and also I think it's still not a ton of money, but the collective has a couple hundred regular contributors, which is an interesting thing on its own, and it leads me to want to talk about what your talk is about the funding and describing the problem is half of it, but what to do about the problem is the kind of other half. And we could talk about, okay, we have to agree that climate change is happening. That's only half of it though. Then well, what do we do about it? It's the other half and arguably the more important half in a way.
Stephanie Stimac: So I want to circle back for a minute, and this relates to funding, but I think people would be surprised to hear that even at Microsoft, which is a company with billions of dollars working on the web engine and the web platform, there has a similarity that I see in Servo and Wolvic in that it was actually really hard to get funding for work on the web platform and the engine side of things, which is absolutely baffling to me because I feel like without the web engine, you don't have the browser and without the browser you don't have Bing, which is where all that money's coming in. The difference, however, between that situation and then Servo and Wolvic is both of these projects need stable funding to keep existing. So that puts more pressure on those projects and making sure that they are solving needs for people. Whereas at Microsoft, it's like they're not going to let the browser die. They just switched engines to make it easier to maintain, and it is honestly more cost effective to switch to chromium for them. But it is fascinating to me on that base level of just why is it so hard to fund a web engine?
Brian Kardell: I think that 2004 is the culprit. I believe that that's when the initial, so the plan originally was to sell a browser, so to give it away for free, but then you sell it with some extras to corporations who saw licensing. Everything was shrink wrapped up to that point and pretty much that was the idea. But then Microsoft saw that it was getting away from them and they went all in on developing their own internet explorer and it killed Netscape business model. So this was the birth of open source and it got its initial funding through some generous grants initially, I think from just a few individuals who had a really lot of money, and this is also the time that Google search was being born and this, it's kind of a marriage made in heaven for it seemed at the time, right? We'll give you money to send search requests our way and to begin this whole integrated search default home screen default search deal. So once that happened, that's the way we fund things and to consumers to average everyday person, it appears to have no cost. So I compare this a lot. I don't know, maybe people who listen to this podcast are tired of hearing the same couple of stories from me, but I compare this to my grandmother who grew up with just broadcast TV and a million commercials, and when we started paying for cable when I was a kid, she said, why are you crazy? Television is free, why would you pay for it? And then we had pay channels like HBO or whatever, and we thought that was great. There was like, Hey, there's no commercials at all. It's amazing. She thought that was just bonkers. Why would you do such a thing? That's where we're at right now with the web, I think is like we need to explore other malls of funding because by and large, the public thinks it's free, but it's not. You have an advertising tax and actually the tax is quite high in my opinion. You get just absolutely inundated and tracked and there's so many problems with the current model, the way the money is coming in, it's like the broken bits of the crumbs that weren't swept up by the vacuum cleaner that fell off the ad table that funds everything. It's such a tiny fraction that funds everything and we need other ways to do that. I guess so mean it doesn't surprise me because everybody thinks it's free, but it's not, and it's all a matter of perspective. On the one hand, we have the Apple, Google, Mozilla and Microsoft. Historically, I think of them like the Avengers, you know what I mean? To champion the web and save the web and everything, but also are they?
Stephanie Stimac: Yeah, I think the problem of funding is interesting and I've been thinking about it the last week as I get ready to update this talk for state of the browser, just thinking about different ways to get people thinking about it and encourage maybe even companies that they work for to establish some sort of grant or fund or even where's the government funding for this if the internet is such critical infrastructure and browsers are such critical infrastructure, where's the government funding?
Brian Kardell: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's been a point that I've had for a while is that there are grants and things. This is actually in the past couple of years, governments around the world have started to do some things like there's NL net, I think it gets their Funding through government things. And we have a few things that we've submitted and got grants from NL net, but also the White House recently made a statement about the future of computing needs to be safe and built in memory safe languages, and I think servo is that so great. Here's where you can send the check. We could use the funding, honestly, and I don't think it needs to be any, well, I don't know what it needs to be, but I think the point is that there is a levy that needs to be paid by everybody somehow and every other kind of levy isn't everyone. We need to find a way to spread it across so that the people who can afford pay in a way that probably at the end of the day feels similarly free, but ultimately isn't. Like the roads. We think they're free, but they're not. Right?
Stephanie Stimac: So speaking of things that we think are free but aren't free, I came across a search engine that you can pay for and basically you don't get overwhelmed with ads and whatnot. I think it was like $10 a month. I didn't look that much further into it, but I thought that was interesting and I wonder how many people would actually be interested in doing that. I feel like a lot of general consumers, I'm just thinking of my mother. I'm like, if I told her she had to pay to search the internet, she'd probably be like, why?
Brian Kardell: Yeah. I mean, she would have the same reaction as my grandmother. Why would you pay for television? Why would you pay for a search engine? Why would you pay for a browser Or I think the thing that has been difficult for us to fight, and part of why we started our open prioritization experiment where we did was because I know for me, okay, the idea that I could or that other smaller companies could somehow even begin to discuss how can we either fund a feature directly or pool our money to fund a feature was like, that's messed up. Google and Apple and Microsoft, they're like the stewards of the web and they have all the money in the world. They're at the top of all the economic scales. Why shouldn't they pay? They should pay. And it's like, well, but why? I get that, but I don't know. Amazon makes all the money in the world too, and they don't currently pay really anything into this comparatively. It's peanuts that they pay compared to Google, then Microsoft is peanuts compared to Google. We just said it's a tiny, tiny fraction now of what they commit to chromium. It's not a judgment, but you can see that the way that we've set up the model, it encourages taking more than giving, and ultimately we're coalescing all of the giving into basically Google at the end of the day and something I have been claiming for some time, we will eventually disrupt that. And so the purpose of our initial open prioritization experiment was just to start this conversation because I think traditionally we think just like you said, yeah, they should pay. Why should I pay? I shouldn't pay. And I still think I couldn't pay viscerally, But I do. I actually have several of these collectives that I give money to every month and I don't notice it. But there have been a number of experiments like this search thing that you mentioned that maybe also will help turn the conversation. And I'm just curious, can we talk about some of them? I don't know how many you know about, but the search one was big on Hacker News for a little while. I don't know what happened with it. I don't use it. Do you remember what it was called?
Stephanie Stimac: I don't.
Brian Kardell: But we had, what's his name from Poly Pain?
Stephanie Stimac: Killian.
Brian Kardell: Killian, right? Killian. We had him on, and I think Poly Pain is Ask for Money kind of browser, four developers and he needs to get paid. So that's a model. I don't know how scalable it is, but poly pain is just the browser part and it's really pretty much a one person effort. So it's like you definitely shouldn't use it as your daily driver because probably security wise and stuff like that, it's not great. It doesn't get updates like Edge or Chrome or Safari, stuff like that in the same way. But it's an interesting model. I don't know how much it brings in, I don't know how popular it is, but you can see a reason like that. I think the interesting thing about that experiment is that KELLYANN observed, well, maybe if I do something really interesting and novel for developers, developers would pay for that. And developers typically make an okay living, so they could afford to give you some money and maybe they would be willing to. So that's interesting, the target a niche thing. But I have to wonder, even when we talk to him, if those things are really super useful, will Chromium put them in dev tools and then people won't pay for them? What are the incentives and disincentives like maybe if you could get money in that way, which I don't think you probably can get enough money in that way, but if you could get money in that way and somehow funnel it back to chromium or a good portion of it, the trick is we need to get money to move downstream, I think is the real issue here. Because at the end of the day, the engine has no business model.
Stephanie Stimac: Talking about getting paid by a browser edge pays me to search. And a lot of people I don't think know that because that came up in our breakout session at Web Engines Hack Fest in June, and every time I search on Bing, I get a certain amount of points and then I can then redeem that for gift cards or I could even donate to a charity with it. But Edge has also had this push recently to be a shopping browser, and as much as I want to hate it, I've gotten $70 cash back from using Microsoft Edge, which is bonkers to me.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, I mean I think that that's another thing that Brave experimented with. I early on got Brave and I hooked it up and their thing was like, we'll pay you now paid in their own it. It's like your points. It's interesting that they're basically very similar. Microsoft's points are like a fictional kind of money that exist in Microsoft browser land And Braves are too, but Braves are BAT and they're crypto. And I personally have a yuck for that, but they're the same in a way. But anyway, brave also did that and yeah, I earned, I dunno, $150 from using Brave, weird. It's weird, but that is exactly the kind of thing that shows you how the money, what the money is worth. The interesting thing about, the interesting thing about that is with Brave, I was able to put it back into a cycle. So I could say, okay, so take at least $5 a month of whatever I'm earning or whatever, use that to pay creators. So take that a portion of that money every month and put it toward creators. And so I could create a closed loop and my browsing is ultimately worth five or $10 a month, whatever it's worth. And I can just say, yeah, that's fine, put it and use it to pay creators. And then it's like this weird, very efficient cycle. It's kind of a cool idea.
Stephanie Stimac: I could do a whole other podcast, I think on the state of web content and social media just based on that comment about paying creators. I've been thinking a lot about the old internet lately, but that is a whole other conversation.
Brian Kardell: I mean, they're highly related, right? Yeah. So what makes the web very interesting is content. So we need people to create that content. And if you want to get really high quality content, you want people who can do it professionally and it costs money, so you have to pay them, but who's paying them? There are some examples of really successful people who did that who make mind boggling amounts of money to me. Wait, you're an influencer, how much you make, how money? Wow. But it's a very fringe number of people who are successful like that. And for everybody else, it's hard to make anything. Anyway, back to the, if I can pivot back to the experiments and things that are happening in this area, like we mentioned Poly pain. We also had on Andreas from Ladybird and they got money. They're getting money from some organizations to fund that work. That's kind of interesting. It's similar to Servo, don't you think?
Stephanie Stimac: Well, yeah. And this is something, because obviously I've been following what's going on with Lady Bird and looking at how much they're getting in sponsorships, and the eternal question that I keep coming back to is, is it just marketing? Is it because it's labeled as a browser and not a web rendering engine? Like Servo is what is the magic sauce that is funneling money towards that project? I'm pretty sure on their website too, it says they won't have a browser until 2026. And I look at Servo and I'm like, well, we've got a mini browser.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, I've had a few conversations even with Andreas just messages here and there about discussing this because it's not much more than a mini browser. I mean, I don't think that people give a lot of thought to that, right? I mean, some people who use maybe Vivaldi or something like that give a lot of thought to what's in their browser. I don't know. For a lot of people, everybody in my family, probably, how much more than a mini browser do you need to be called a browser? So the servo mini browser has tabs. It has a URL bar and it has a default page. And should you use it as your daily driver? No, should not. It's not ready for that. Can you use Ladybird? No, same. It's also not ready. And it's harder in fact to use than Servo because Servo provides binaries nightly, and you would have to get it and compile, at least at this point, Ladybird yourself. So yeah, I mean Servo was available on Windows, Linux, Mac, right? I dunno, is it on Android yet? I don't think it is.
Stephanie Stimac: No. There was still some work being done for Android.
Brian Kardell: Did you see? I'm sure you did see recently the Verso, somebody from the servo community created a repository and they got very close to a thousand I think, points on Hacker News. And I went and looked because Servo always is exciting in a way. It gets a lot of attention. Almost everything for Serbo has gotten not anywhere near that attention. There was only one thing that ever got more attention in relation to Serbo, only one in the entire history of Serbo. And this Verso was literally a GitHub repository. It was not more than the mini browser really. Infact, it was a little less than the mini browser, and it got all kinds of attention. And I think it is really because the distinction of, Hey, but it's a browser. And I wonder why. I wonder if people think, well, I can't. It is an interesting point. I can't just pick up and use the engine. I need to wait to use it, right? Yeah,
Stephanie Stimac: Bute, you can browse Hacker News while drinking your coffee on it. I know that.
Brian Kardell: Absolutely. Yeah. You can play on it and you can report bugs and you can find something that needs to be done and go, Hey, I'm going to do that. Even with the mini browser, you can say, you know what? This would make this so much better is a read later list or a reader mode. I miss reader mode. You can send a pull request for that or you can make a downstream browser or something. It's fun. I think
Stephanie Stimac: It is fun. And I wonder, well, first off, I should probably try and build servo on my machine. I have not tried to do that yet, but I know I am frequently on the browser subreddit perusing what people are talking about, and people are always asking for what's the best browser for this. But then there is a subgroup of users who post their browser projects that they've built, and there's someone on there who just built this browser called Zen and has generated quite a bit of discussion around their browser side project on that subreddit, and people are interested in downloading it and trying it. And I feel like there was a time when I used to want to try different browsers, and maybe it's because I started working on a browser and had every version of Canary and Dev and all the preview ones, and I just don't find myself switching between browsers that often anymore. But there is a subgroup of people who are, they just want to try all the different browsers, even if it's some indie project and they get really excited about it.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, I think we need a diversity of experiments and diversity of ways to fund things. I think there are lots of incentives for people to fund things upstream that they're not sort of paying attention to. I think that people have a lot more power than they realize. Like Igalia is working on SVGA whole SVG engine rewrite for Web K. We've been working on it for a long time and lots of bugs would just disappear. We're also interested in getting that community moving again because there's more to do. It's not finished. SVG is not a done product. There's lots of wants and desires out of SVG, but nobody's funding the work. How many things use SVG? All those companies, if they pull their money and we come up with ways to collectively decide how to prioritize that money, that could be huge.
Stephanie Stimac: And that's one thing that I love about working on Servo too, is typically there is a collective decision that happens around how they're going to spend the money that is donated via Open Collective. So they meet with the technical steering committee and folks join that call. It's open, it's typically once a month, and they collectively decide what they're going to spend that money on. And I am not sure if it's landed yet, I have to check, but the most recent thing that the money was used for was Windows CI runners. In case anyone's wondering, well, how does that collective bit work? It can happen and does happen and is effective in deciding how money gets spent.
Brian Kardell: I like the diversity of investment in Servo. There's hundreds of people contributing to that individually, not much on the businesses. We could use more of that Because you need a really lot of people giving small amounts of money. It works with something like a browser or search because it's just wild amounts of users. But if you have maybe 200, 300 people donating small amounts of money, it's not enough. And what we saw was one company came in and said, okay, we'll match $10,000. And somebody else came in and said, okay, we'll give $10,000 to whichever one wins. And those two contributions were more than all the other ones combined. So we need some business support in there, I think. And I think there are good reasons to do it. All kinds of interesting things that you can do with it. Maybe that's a way we can get some businesses interested. If you're building an embedded system, maybe it's worth making sure that it has the things that you need. So sponsor it
Stephanie Stimac: Absolutely
Brian Kardell: Seems like a good plan.
Stephanie Stimac: Obviously when it comes to funding, servo and Wolvic and everything that I work on at Igalia, I'm the PM for fml. I think about where the money's coming from, how can we get more money? And I didn't go to school for marketing, and I think one of the things that I struggle with is seeing so much money spent. This is really, really stupid, but I saw an article recently and it was like someone profiling Tom Brady and this NFT company that he either founded or invested in. And well, there's a part of me that just sort of dies when I see that because I'm like, I fear that so much of tech is backed by investors who are looking for a return on their investment. Like
Brian Kardell: A giant return too, right?
Stephanie Stimac: Yeah. And so when we talk about funding the platform or funding these projects, I fear that a lot of people are turned off because I won't get a return on investment for themselves. And I just find it frustrating, and I wish people could see the bigger picture in that you may not get a monetary return on investment or get thousands of dollars back or millions, whatever, but the end of the day you are investing in a way that ensures that technology can continue to evolve and potentially lead to other things that can bring you money. But there's this base level of the platform and tech and the web that is incredibly fragile. And I wish more people, more businesses especially, would invest and hire people like Igalia to continue to ensure that the platform is stable and sustainable. Because if not, in true worst case scenario sense, one day that platform will collapse. And I fear for the absolute chaos that will cause.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, definitely. With all of these things, I think that is, I think that actually the thing that started the web ecosystem health was a comment by Jeremy Keith when he was talking about political parties. I think the same thing is relevant here. So how many web engines should you have? Zero is the wrong answer, one is a better answer, but it's still a bad answer. Two is a better answer, three, but we need ways to fund these things. So it's tricky. How do we do this? So yeah, I think it's super important to have the diversity, super important that it is there at all. Because moving to a completely new paradigm, it's entirely possible that people would try to change the paradigm and be like, you know what? That web thing was good, but not anymore. Eric, do you want to throw anything out there or
Eric Meyer: No, I think it's been a really good conversation and really appreciate that you joined us. Thanks, Stephanie.
Stephanie Stimac: Yeah, I actually, a quick funny story before we close out. I have an email from 2022, so right when I left Microsoft, y'all invited me onto Igalia chats, and I don't think it happened because my life got super chaotic two years later.
Brian Kardell: Here we are. So glad that we could finally have you on. Thanks Stephanie.
Brian Kardell
Eric Meyer
Stephanie Stimac