IPFS Companion 2.2.0 brings window.ipfs to your Browser • Hacker News Board

Re: IPFS Companion 2.2.0 brings window.ipfs to your Browser

#11

Post by carussell » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 7:17 PM UTC

StavrosK wrote: post #8

fogzen wrote: post #3

Dat+Beaker is way ahead of IPFS in tooling, developer mindshare, consumer friendly UI, etc. With $250 million it's pretty shocking they don't seem more worried/focused on that.

Can dat be accessed without that browser? I haven't found something like the IPFS node, and that's what made me not want to run dat. Also, ZeroNet seems more advanced than both in terms of things that actually work today.

Hashbase exists, and in theory most Dat web apps could do a read-only version for legacy browsers, but since the tooling isn't there, you'd have to work out something by hand. The Dat ecosystem has pretty bad support for polyfills and bridging to the HTTP web right now. Many Dat demos I see today just fail hard over HTTP, maybe with a best-viewed-in message if the dev took some effort, but in principle it doesn't need to be that way.

Re: IPFS Companion 2.2.0 brings window.ipfs to your Browser

#12

Post by Matheus28 » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 7:24 PM UTC

johnhenry wrote: post #2

I'd really love to see something like this show up as a proposal with the W3C (or the WHATWG -- I'm not entirely sure who's the authority on this?).

It would be truly amazing to have ipfs built into browsers, it'd very quickly expand into other areas.

Re: IPFS Companion 2.2.0 brings window.ipfs to your Browser

#13

Post by braderhart » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 7:24 PM UTC

_qxjp wrote: post #6

sosuke wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly I've heard of IPFS many many times and this is the first I've heard of Dat+Beaker. Do you have a starting point you suggest to get an idea of what it is or does?

Here are the official websites of the Dat Project and Beaker Browser: https://datproject.org https://beakerbrowser.com And a short video for Beaker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2B9mwRFE8U

So you have to install a custom web browser? Why don't they offer an extension as well? Also, IPFS is built in Go and pretty fast this way. From what I can see, most of Dat is built in JavaScript.

Re: IPFS Companion 2.2.0 brings window.ipfs to your Browser

#14

Post by stringer » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 7:51 PM UTC

StavrosK wrote: post #8

fogzen wrote: post #3

Dat+Beaker is way ahead of IPFS in tooling, developer mindshare, consumer friendly UI, etc. With $250 million it's pretty shocking they don't seem more worried/focused on that.

Can dat be accessed without that browser? I haven't found something like the IPFS node, and that's what made me not want to run dat. Also, ZeroNet seems more advanced than both in terms of things that actually work today.

Sure, here you go https://www.npmjs.com/package/dat

Re: IPFS Companion 2.2.0 brings window.ipfs to your Browser

#15

Post by gpdpocketer » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 7:52 PM UTC

fogzen wrote: post #3

Dat+Beaker is way ahead of IPFS in tooling, developer mindshare, consumer friendly UI, etc. With $250 million it's pretty shocking they don't seem more worried/focused on that.

Neither of these services are going to work to solve our current dilemna until we can drop a .framework in and use it from a mobile app.. this is really the space that needs adoption strategies.

Re: IPFS Companion 2.2.0 brings window.ipfs to your Browser

#16

Post by asymmetric » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 8:48 PM UTC

Is it possible to completely/selectively prevent websites from knowing I have IPFS running in my browser?

Or does this extensions have the same issues as Metamask[0], which means there's no way to hide the fact that one has the extension installed?

This is a pretty important privacy feature, because I'm pretty sure the presence of such an extension massively increases the accuracy of targeting.

Re: IPFS Companion 2.2.0 brings window.ipfs to your Browser

#17

Post by donttrack » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 8:59 PM UTC

_qxjp wrote: post #6

sosuke wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly I've heard of IPFS many many times and this is the first I've heard of Dat+Beaker. Do you have a starting point you suggest to get an idea of what it is or does?

Here are the official websites of the Dat Project and Beaker Browser: https://datproject.org https://beakerbrowser.com And a short video for Beaker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2B9mwRFE8U

I might have visited those sites before, but thought it was some kind of new token bullshit.

Got a white paper link up at the top and some graphics of some decentralized nodes, so probably hit the back button faster than I delete spam from my inbox.

Re: IPFS Companion 2.2.0 brings window.ipfs to your Browser

#18

Post by kybernetikos » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 10:59 PM UTC

asymmetric wrote: post #16

Is it possible to completely/selectively prevent websites from knowing I have IPFS running in my browser? Or does this extensions have the same issues as Metamask[0], which means there's no way to hide the fact that one has the extension installed? This is a pretty important privacy feature, because I'm pretty sure the presence of such an extension massively increases the accuracy of targeting.

I agree, and looking at their site, they don't seem to have taken steps to avoid this problem.

I wonder if we could have a standard api, like window.requestAPI('ipfs' or 'eth' or whatever) returns a Promise, and the user gets a 'page is requesting' bar like we do with location requests.

That way, you wouldn't be leaking information about your browser capabilities to pages that you don't wish to use those capabilities on.

Re: IPFS Companion 2.2.0 brings window.ipfs to your Browser

#19

Post by johnhenry » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 11:04 PM UTC

fogzen wrote: post #3

Dat+Beaker is way ahead of IPFS in tooling, developer mindshare, consumer friendly UI, etc. With $250 million it's pretty shocking they don't seem more worried/focused on that.

It's interesting to point out that in addition to Dat support, Beaker initially had support for IPFS as well, but dropped it.

Currently Dat's browser integration model requires the use of a specific browser (Beaker). Not that Beaker isn't awesome; I think Dat would garner more mindshare if it moved to browser-extension-based model like IPFS and didn't require a full installation of a new browser.

Re: IPFS Companion 2.2.0 brings window.ipfs to your Browser

#20

Post by diggan » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 4:50 AM UTC

asymmetric wrote: post #16

Is it possible to completely/selectively prevent websites from knowing I have IPFS running in my browser? Or does this extensions have the same issues as Metamask[0], which means there's no way to hide the fact that one has the extension installed? This is a pretty important privacy feature, because I'm pretty sure the presence of such an extension massively increases the accuracy of targeting.

This is a interesting point and I agree, pretty important privacy feature that we should discuss more.

Off the top of my head, there could be some things we could do to help this, but the async/sync nature of `window.ipfs` makes it harder. If variable access was async, we could prompt before exposing it, but since we want to enable the browser extension to be a migration path to having native IPFS support in the browser, it becomes harder.

lide went ahead and opened a issue (https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/ipfs-companion/issues/451), so if you're reading this and have ideas, we'd love to hear from you! We care deeply about this issue but was not required for the initial prototype we have now.

(Disclaimer: I work on IPFS)