Open Source Today

For years, the Web browser was a technology that seemed frozen in time. While the Web itself exploded with new types of content and virtual communities, the way users accessed that material changed hardly at all from 1997 to 2004 (not coincidentally, the years when Microsoft’s Internet Explorer had a chokehold on the browser market).

But now with a maturing base of open-source code for building Web tools, browser technology is thawing quickly — and upstart software engineers are bringing into question some long-dominant assumptions about the way browsers can and should work.