Polypane has hired Igalia to work on a number of bugs and features in Chromium directly. This work will enable improvements and new features to Polypane, as well as the wider Chromium community.
What's Polypane? Polypane is the web browser for ambitious web developers. It's a stand-alone browser that shows sites in multiple fully synced panes and helps you make your site more responsive, more accessible and faster.
Why we're doing this
As a developer browser that sticks close to the latest Chromium version and also provides tooling for newly available features, Polypane has a vested interest in improving Chromium. Over the past six years we've often been some of the first to implement support for new features and the first to report issues for new features and new debugging capabilities.
Getting the attention of developers working on Chromium for these issues has often times been a challenge as each team and company understandably has their own priorities and backlogs.
In the past that has meant that even though we've reported issues, they might not get fixed for months or even years (or at all). Usually we work around these issues, but there are also a number of features that we can't launch because of them.
Polypane is a small company and we don't have the resources or knowledge to work on Chromium ourselves. We've been looking for a way to get more of our issues fixed, and we're excited to be able to work with Igalia to make that happen.
About Igalia
Igalia is a software consultancy that specializes in open source development, and has a long history of working on the Chromium project.
In the past they have worked on big features like CSS Grid, and CSS :has(). They have a team of developers that are familiar with the Chromium codebase and can work on a wide range of issues.
We've known about Igalia's work on the web for many years, and Kilian was on the Igalia podcast a few years ago to talk about Polypane. We're excited to be working with them on this project!
We spend a lot of time trying to explain how many of the limits on the current system — whether that is developing standards, working on implementations, or fixing bugs — are ultimately rooted in the fact that resources are finite and generally directed by a few who actually pay for the prioritization. We're always delighted to help expand the investment in these things that ultimately underlie so much of modern society at this point. We're very happy that Polypane is helping improve the commons, and that Igalia is able to help them do so.
Brian Kardell, Developer Advocate at Igalia
What we're hoping to achieve
Igalia will be working on improving the emulation of devices in Chromium as well as the handling of web contents in different contexts (which is something Polypane does a lot of) - We're also hoping to sneak in a few smaller bug fixes.
All of these will directly benefit Polypane, but will also improve Chromium for everyone regardless of the browser you use.
Once these fixes and improvements start you land in Chromium, we'll be able to implement significant new features in Polypane that will help developers build websites that are even better adapted to the wide range of devices and contexts they're viewed in.
Between the work that's to be done, the release cycles of Chromium and Electron and Polypane's own release cycle, it might take a while before you see the results of this work in Polypane, but we're excited to get started.
What's next
Igalia will be investigating and working on the issues we've identified, and we'll be working closely with them to make sure the work they do is in line with what we need for Polypane.
We're excited to see the results of this collaboration and to be able to share them with you in the future!
