IPFS IPFS Camp 2022 - Browsers & Platforms, 2 Nov 2022

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From YouTube: Making Brave an InterPlanetary browser - Anirudha Bose

Description

Brave is building a privacy-first internet stack with a private browser, search, web3 wallet, and more. In this session, we'll look at the state of IPFS and Filecoin integrations in Brave, and learn about some of the lesser known features in Brave that makes it an interplanetary browser.

A

um So uh I'm Ani I'm a wallet engineer at Brave and today I'll be talking about what makes Brave and interplanetary browser so uh I'm, pretty sure a lot of you are using Brave as your default browser. But for those who don't know um Brave is the popular privacy focused browser where you are not the product.

A

um It is used by close to 60 million uh users worldwide, uh mostly privacy focused uh individuals or people who just don't like ads on YouTube, um but it's not just a browser company. It's rather an internet company.

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We have a search engine that doesn't track you and has its own uh index so head over to search.grave.com, and uh let us know uh if, if that works for you and there's um ad economy right in the browser where you get rewarded for your attention, so by default, all the uh ads you see normally on web pages are blocked and instead you would see ads.

A

If you opt in as notifications and uh of course you have the option to get paid uh in a an erc20 token- and uh this is my personal favorite- uh there's a powerful multi-chain uh crypto wallet in Brave, so the implications for that are huge. It means pretty much anyone who has a brave browser has one of these wallets uh baked right and natively I'll be talking a bit more about that. So um I think there is a marriage of values between Brave and ipfs.

A

Apart from the mission of world domination, maybe uh pushing decentralization, uh making content highly available and just bringing resilience to the internet. That's that's really the shared goals of ipfs and brave, which is why we have a host of ipfs and file coin. Integration features uh right in your browser, and this is what I want to talk about.

A

So I'll give you eight features um it's it's kind of surprising that not many people know about this, but it's so uh beautifully crafted in the browser that often you don't notice it, but we are going to talk about that so number one. This is the obvious one.

A

If you have an ipfs URI, uh so maybe uh paintings by Versa Van Gogh is uh you may have tomato soup on them, but it's permanent on ipfs and if you paste your link, the ipfs link on the URL, you can see that uh it just loads in like an HTTP website.

A

One thing I do like is how Native it feels like when you click on this ipfs badge. uh It shows you exactly like uh how it's for any other website like http.

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It's not just ipfs Uris. uh If you have a website hosted with uh ipns, for example, lip P2P it just loads uh uh beautifully just like that too, you can have so by default, uh like most people, probably uh they open ipfs links with some public Gateway because they don't want to run a node uh on their computer. So you can customize this Gateway. Maybe you want to run a Gateway on your own machine, a home, PC and Route it through uh so go to the settings and Route it through this address.

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uh You can see that I have chosen Gateway as the method resolve. Ipfs resources and I can change it to something other than the web link, which it seems that sometimes it's a bit slow for me, DNS link. Anyone knows what this is, so this is awesome.

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I actually saw it on Twitter I have noticed this since forever, but it just came to my attention, maybe a few days back, that if you visit websites for which a DNS record has been configured to uh to point to an ipfs URI, you would see that little ipfs badge to open the ipfs link uh right in the URL section, and uh you can see that it's uh if I click on that the URL changes to a local host a locally served blog article, that that's that's crazy.

A

This is even crazier, um like I'm, a personal fan of running nodes on your own machine. I have uh Bitcoin and ethereum Rose nodes running on my computer right now, uh uh and also an ipfs note. So the way it works is when you first load an ipfs URL Brave will ask you if you want a local node or you want to use a public Gateway. There are many reasons for using a local node.

A

Some of them I would outline in the next couple of points, but one of them is that you contribute to the network. It's not resource intensive. It runs a go ipfs instance. As a component behind the scenes. You really have nothing to manage there and it gives you a lot of features for free that we are going to see so next time uh or maybe just go to your settings. If you're, a brave user just select, Brave local, ipfs, node and you'll have access to those features for free.

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This is an internals page that shows the status of the running node a bunch of stuff.

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But the thing to note is you can start and stop your node anytime get the info and you can also do a rubbish collection uh so next time you clear all your private Windows sessions. It's also going to clear the local cache in your ipfs node. This is also great I. I love this feature um and since you have a node running, you also get a node manager for free.

A

um Maybe you want to appear nerdy to your friends that okay I have an ipfs node. You can just go to this link, localhost uh 45005 and among other things you can. You can do a lot of things in this node manager by the way, but you can also see the connected peers how geographically distributed it is and so on. So there's there's a screenshot for you, so this is not build by Brave. This is an ipfs node manager, but it's accessible right in your browser.

A

um So I even I, didn't know that there I had there were some features uh in Brave around importing content. So if, if you have enabled uh a local ipfs node, you will get these. So what are these I went to Wikipedia Bitcoin, page I, right click and I saw an import to ipfs and you can import this page and it will appear right in your node manager. It will be listed as a as a file uploaded to ipfs that you can share to your friends.

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It's not just pages. So once you, you get a notification like that, once the import is completed, the URL is already copied to your clipboard.

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I went to the to the image I right, clicked and I saw that you can also uh directly import any image to your uh to your to ipfs and it's not just image. It works for audios videos, pretty much any visual or audio content out there. A bunch of file formats supported- and this is also very useful right. If you do a Google search, let's say, and you have a link, you just don't want to open it, but you want to keep it for later.

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So it's like a read later app, so you can import to ipfs and select linked content and it will import it behind the scenes.

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You can also share content, which is a lot similar, think of it as a image bin I. Don't know why you would use image bin anymore, but if you go to the hamburger, icon and click on import and share a file, sorry it will uh you can you can select any file on your computer and it will upload. uh You have a shareable link copied and you can share it with your friends I think.

A

uh Maybe you should call it image bin uh replacer, something like that, and uh this is something that I'm personally very excited about. Is a file coin wallet. It's not just a file coin wallet! It's a multi-chain wallet like I mentioned earlier and filecoin is one of the key rings that we support.

A

um So this is what it looks like um quick show of hands. Has anyone used Brave wallet before okay, but some people not not bad. So if you go to your accounts, Tab and click on create account, it allows you to choose filecoin and right now this is on desktop. It allows you to buy and send fil on filecoin network, and it also allows you to connect to your Hardware wallet, which is just Ledger at this moment, but I don't know if other Hardware wallets support filecoin.

A

This is great uh so implications again. This browser is shaped to millions of people around the world around 60 million, and they all have the ability to buy store, send receive fil.

A

All they have to do is just open up settings wallet and create filecoin account, there's also a native implementation. So it's not like a JavaScript extension, so it's blazing fast written in C plus plus, doesn't have the overhead of our memory. Footprint of equivalence like metamask or any other extension wallet and generally has a lot better performance and I would even say security. But if you want more security, you can plug in your Ledger Hardware wallet, uh which, uh which is the other point, that you can verify and sign transactions right from your Ledger.

A

So that's it! Those are the eight features. um This is like a wish list. These are the features I want to be on Brave, related to ipfs and filecoin.

A

First of all, since I love, wallets, I would like to see uh better like a really good fvm support in Brave wallet so that you could uh play around with contracts, defy storage markets and so on, and this this is. uh This could be really powerful because uh you have ipfs and you have filecoin so and they are in the same browser. So it's uh it will be a very good user experience to tie them together.

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Mobile support this is currently Falcon is just on desktop, but Mobile support is coming soon to IOS and Android. Most users are using a mobile wallets these days anyway.

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I would love to see more of these uh fascinating ipfs Integrations, one of which uh Dietrich was uh talking about, uh is what, if you could uh query ipfs links with using the node.js fetch API. So this is this. Has uh this is crazy because you don't need an ipfs client to uh to read uh content IDs in the ipfs network. I think all browsers should have this, but it's just a wish list.

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uh I'm not saying this is coming out tomorrow, but it would be really interesting to have something like that and also there's nft, pinning that we're working on um uh the idea is to.

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If you want to truly own your nfts, you will Auto, pin your your monkey image to nft storage and this way you're sure that the image doesn't go away yeah.

A

So that's it from my side, so I I would I would like to request you all to send in your feedback on using these features that I mentioned. What would you like to have, in brief browser related to ipfs? What's the? What are the pain points, uh particularly about the wallet, let me know, and um you can reach out to me on Twitter.

A