This session is part of the mainters track.

Recently it became possible to run Python and the scientific Python packages in the browser thanks to WebAssembly and Emscripten. This is done in particular in the Pyodide and emscripten-forge projects. It allows for a scientific Python application, or a compute environment such as JupyterLite, to be seamlessly accessible to a large number of users with very little effort or infrastructure requirements.

At the same time, the scientific Python ecosystem did not evolve with the web in mind. We will discuss some of the challenges package maintainers may face when trying to run their package in the browser, and what could be done to overcome these.

In this talk, we will look at the growing Python in the browser ecosystem, with a focus on the Pyodide project. We will discuss the remaining challenges as well as new possibilities it offers for scientific computing, education, and research.