Late last year, BitTorrent announced its latest ambitious project for making the web more open: a browser that can access websites that are hosted through the BitTorrent protocol rather than on centralized servers. The Chromium-based Project Maelstrom browser started life in a closed alpha, but as of today BitTorrent is releasing it as an open beta. The only catch right now is that it's for Windows users only, though BitTorrent says future versions of the browser will be available for Mac and Linux users, as well.

BitTorrent also shared a few notes on how the platform has grown since the alpha began last December. The company has enlisted more than 10,000 developers (those BitTorrent described as building Maelstrom-compatible apps and programs) and 3,500 publishers (those specifically building web pages or BitTorrent content bundles) working to build sites that'll work with Project Maelstrom. However, until now, only some of those developers and publishers have actually been able to begin work on Maelstrom-compatible projects.

That's changing today, as BitTorrent has gone ahead and released its full set of developer publishing tools for Project Maelstrom. Anyone can now grab these tools and start building sites over on GitHub. It's still very much the early days for Project Maelstrom, but now with the beta browser and development tools open to everyone, BitTorrent is hoping we'll start seeing examples of how its latest idea for the open web starts manifesting itself.