On February 28, four estimable figures from the world of browser development and frontend engineering took the stage at Yahoo! for an event entitled "Browser Wars Episode II: Attack of the DOMs." The goal was to get representatives from the IE team, Mozilla, Opera, and Apple's Safari team together to talk about the reawakening of browser development after the long slumber of the IE6 era — a slumber that came to an end with the ascendance of Firefox from the ashes of Netscape, the birth of Safari on the open-source foundation of KHTML, and the increasing interestingness of Opera as a fast, robust browser running on myriad platforms. The Safari team declined to participate, but Yahoo!'s Douglas Crockford served as the moderator for a lively discussion between Chris Wilson of Microsoft, CTO Håkon Lie of Opera, and Mozilla's Mike Shaver. The event was organized by the Silicon Valley WebBuilder group; attendendees filled our biggest presentation venue to standing-room-only capacity.

The YUI Theater team was there with cameras and we're happy to be able to share with you the opening statements from all four participants.

Note: A downloadable and iPod-compatible MPEG version of the video will be up on YUI Theater later today. The .m4v file format we've used for this video (and many others) signifies that it is an MPEG-4 file with video; if you're not downloading to view on an iPod, and/or are using a system that doesn't recognize the .m4v extension, try renaming the file to .mp4.

Dion at Ajaxian has a nice writeup of some of the highlights from the video.