Show HN: We launched a new web browser

I had a bit of a disappointing moment recently when I found out that only top level domains are uncensorable in handshake. Such a let down.

Congrats on your accomplishment!

However, I will never use it because a browser is one of those really important information gateways that I want to be very sure is not compromised.

DANE is a really big deal. It removes the dependency on TLS certificate authorities so self signed certificates can be used and verified via records, published in DNS and signed with DNSSEC.

Though I have greater concerns regarding privacy of the new browser. Is it like ungoogled-chromium? DANE should really be merged into upstream chromium.

The first thing I would think of is not having to trust random certificate authorities, which would avoid incidents like this [0].

Another problem with the current state of the web was explained in an article I read a few days ago [1].

[0]: https://slate.com/technology/2016/12/how-the-2011-hack-of-di...

[1]: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/09/website-domain-more...

No, the selling point of DNS is mainly that everybody knows how to work with this bit of technology from the 1970s. Mostly it's fast because modern implementations do a lot of caching and only occasionally query parents in their hierarchy. You can use the same strategy to make pretty much any alternative implementation fast as well. And of course slapping some sort of DNS compatible facade on that is not rocket science either. So, you don't even lose the backwards compatibility. Better still, you can fall back to existing DNS too.

The key challenge with DNS is that it is hierarchical and that there's a root with an owner. That owner is an entity that we just have to trust to do the right things in terms of certificates, security, not censoring entries, implementing fair policies for allocating names, etc. Whether you trust the current owners is of course a bit political. Mostly I have no big issues with that myself but it is annoying to have to bribe certain companies for the privilege of using our registered trademark as a domain name. Literally the only service these companies deliver is 'maintaining' a record of that.

A blockchain can replace this with distributed ownership of a tamper proof ledger of ownership of domain names. Building an index of these names is not that hard. Any old search engine or database can do that. But the key part is administering ownership in a fair and transparent way.

It's one of those use cases where using a blockchain actually makes sense without devolving into some pyramid scheme for creating lots of wealth for some. When you think about it, existing DNS works exactly like a pyramid scheme (by design even). Millions of people are paying in the order of 10$ a year for a cheap database record in an ancient hierarchical database. The only value these companies deliver is monopolizing ownership of common endings like .com, .io, etc. And the only reason we need those is because it's an ancient hierarchical database.

With a blockchain, we get rid of those companies and potentially also the top level domains. I see no reason why google, twitter, etc. could not be top level domains.