Open web

Microsoft is winding down Internet Explorer mode in its Edge browser, retiring the compatibility feature that allowed businesses and users to open legacy websites built for the old Internet Explorer engine. The move pushes organisations still relying on aging internal sites to modernise their web applications or seek alternative solutions.

Nvidia has released an open-source platform designed to prevent AI agents from hacking or compromising other websites and systems. The tooling aims to add safety guardrails to autonomous agents as they browse and interact with the web. The move positions Nvidia to shape security standards for the fast-growing agentic AI field, and it is likely to draw attention from developers and security researchers assessing how well it works.

Truecaller is bringing its scam-fighting intelligence to the open web, TechCrunch reports, marking a strategic move beyond its core caller ID business. The Swedish company, best known for identifying spam calls, appears to be repositioning itself as a broader fraud-protection service as scam attempts increasingly shift to websites, messages and other online channels.

Automattic has confirmed that Matt Mullenweg is back as chief executive of the company behind WordPress, following an attempted removal by the board. The news fuels ongoing debate in tech circles about the leadership disputes surrounding WordPress and what they mean for the open-source project's future. Commenters remain divided over whether the turmoil damages trust in the platform or marks a consolidation of Mullenweg's control.

Truecaller is extending its scam-detection technology beyond its caller ID app to the open web, the company announced. The move signals an effort to grow beyond phone-call screening and apply its fraud intelligence more broadly online. It comes as scammers increasingly target users across websites, messages and other channels, pushing security firms to broaden their defenses.

Open-source clones of the Jev AI assistant have been released, with developers saying they can run entirely inside a web browser without dedicated servers or paid subscriptions. The projects aim to replicate the assistant's behavior locally, and interest centers on how closely they match the original and what a browser-based version means for access to the tool.

The open-source BitTorrent client qBittorrent has released version 5.2.4, bringing improvements to its web-based user interface alongside routine maintenance fixes. The free, cross-platform torrent app remains a popular alternative to commercial clients, and the update is being reported across Linux and open-source news outlets.

Amazon Web Services has introduced CloudWatch Omni, an observability tool aimed at answering why AI agents took the actions they did. The product targets explainability and auditability in agentic AI systems, one of the hardest open problems for enterprises deploying autonomous agents, and is drawing attention as a step toward making agent behavior traceable.

A user reports that Mastodon's web interface, used on a 10-inch Android tablet through the Vivaldi browser, began misbehaving. Tapping the favourite star on a post with an image opens the image instead of liking it, and scrolling gestures have also stopped working correctly. The complaint highlights how web-based social clients can break on mobile browsers after changes.

Blanc, a new open-source, cross-platform web browser built on Electron, is drawing attention for its unusual design. Instead of a tab strip or address bar, it uses a 'dynamic island' element that doubles as a command palette, and its developers claim it uses less memory than Chrome or Vivaldi.

Caddy, the open-source web server written in Go, is trending among developers this week. The project, developed under the Caddy Server organisation, offers a fast and extensible HTTP/1, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 server that runs across multiple platforms and configures automatic HTTPS by default. Its built-in certificate handling removes much of the manual TLS setup required by other servers, making it a popular choice for developers who want secure deployments with minimal configuration.

Amazon Web Services has released open source tools that let customers deploy regional availability checks inside their own virtual private cloud. The tools help teams determine which AWS services and instance types are available in specific regions without leaving their environment, giving developers faster feedback when provisioning infrastructure and planning multi-region architectures.

Stremio, the open-source media streaming app billed as 'Freedom to Stream', is seeing renewed attention around its stremio-web repository, the JavaScript codebase powering its browser client. The project lets users organize and watch video content from multiple sources in one interface, and its active development community continues to track updates and contributions to the web platform.

Chapter 2 of the Spanish-language story 'El Caballero Maquiavélico' has been published, titled 'El primer contacto'. Set in Durango, Mexico, the chapter opens with a 15-year-old boy playing football when a portal of light opens and a man-sized crystalline mantis leaps out. The fiction is being promoted on social media and tagged under books.

Hey, an open-source HTTP load generator written in Go by engineer rakyll, is drawing attention as a modern replacement for the classic ApacheBench (ab) benchmarking tool. The tool lets developers stress-test web servers with concurrent requests from the command line, and its simplicity compared to older alternatives is resonating with the developer community.

A new open-source project called Bez has appeared, taking the approach of generating a browser engine directly from web specifications and their test suites rather than writing rendering code by hand. The project is hosted on tangled.org and is drawing attention among developers interested in browser internals, spec-driven development, and alternatives to the small set of existing engine implementations.

Amazon Web Services has introduced Strands Decider 2B, an open-source AI model designed for building agents, dated 2026. The release fits into AWS's Strands agent framework work, offering developers a small, freely available model for decision-making tasks. Details on benchmarks, licensing and availability remain sparse, and there is little independent reaction so far.

Cloudflare argues that the internet now serves a second audience beyond human readers: automated systems such as AI crawlers and agents that consume web content at scale. The piece discusses what this shift means for publishers and the open web, as machine traffic grows and content is increasingly read by software rather than people.

Amazon Web Services has released Strands Decider 2B, a small open model built for AI agents, reportedly reaching around 100-millisecond decision latency. The compact two-billion-parameter design targets fast routing and tool-selection inside agent pipelines, where response time matters more than raw capability. The release signals AWS's continued push into the open agentic AI tooling space alongside rivals like Google and Meta.

A blog essay by Chris Siebenmann argues that one possible future for the open web is one in which pervasive gatekeepers control access to websites, whether through platforms, crawlers, or intermediaries. The piece is being shared and discussed on decentralized social networks, where users are debating how much control intermediaries should have over who reaches independent sites.

A new open-source project called Bez is drawing attention for its approach to building a browser engine: rather than hand-writing the code, it generates an engine directly from web specifications and their test suites. The project is published on the Tangled code platform and has surfaced on Hacker News, where early reactions are just starting to come in. The idea of deriving implementations from standards documents and conformance tests is prompting discussion about whether such automation could realistically produce a usable browser engine.

Blogger Jason Kottke published a new post on kottke.org arguing that anyone can destroy his site, or any other website, highlighting how fragile independent web publishing has become. The item is drawing attention in web and internet culture circles, with readers sharing concerns about the vulnerability of long-running independent sites to takedowns, hosting disputes or platform pressure.

A French-language essay argues that RSS feeds are essential to digital sovereignty, positioning the open web standard as a way to follow publications without depending on large platforms. The piece, shared with hashtags critical of Big Tech, frames RSS as a simple tool for reclaiming control over how people read the web, resonating with audiences concerned about digital independence.