IPFS Virtual Meetups, 15 Dec 2020

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From YouTube: Web and GUI Working Group 2020 Recap

Description

Marcin “Lidel” Rataj and Jessica Schilling joined us to give a thorough update on the many things the web team shipped in 2020.

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A

The work here happened across 2020, it's been under different working groups, but we clustered them together and I'll give a quick overview of ipfs on the web first. So the most important thing that happened to ipfs ecosystem browser-wise, in my opinion, is subdomain support on our gateways, working by default on our canonical public gateway on a local host gateway.

A

It's important because now we are fully compatible with the security model on the web. Each content route identified by a cid gets its own secure, sandbox in a browser out of the box without any third party extensions. It's just how the web already works and we now aligned our security policy on the web with how browsers work. So each content route gets on cookie store. Permissions are scoped to the specifics content root storage uh that solves also a huge developer.

A

Experience pain that people had with static website generators and using relative paths. All those problems go away and the cool thing about subdomain gateways is that it's a drop in replacement, so you can use them as a path based once and you will get redirected to the proper subdomain in the web. Browser context, additional pain point was resource usage. People have had problem when they wanted to use js ipfs in their website for multiple context, maybe across the tabs, or maybe they across different apps within the same origin.

A

It's now possible to reuse the single ipfs instance across different browser contexts, mostly that will be within single origin across tabs. However, you may use those npm modules for passing uh and delegating ipfs commands from different browser contexts other than the regular browser.

A

We've also improved browser import over http api. It's important because a variety of http based deployments exist in production right now, and there was a ceiling on how big of a file you are able to import over http api.

A

Now that ceiling is gone, you can import huge files, four gigabytes or more on a devices with a little memory without any double buffering, uh and additional perk of that is of that work. That happened this year is that you get a real-time progress on those uploads when you do ipfs ad over http api, when you use uh ipfs, http client and that already shipped so feel free to play with it.

A

um That will be a bunch of important first for ipfs in web browsers. uh So the the first time the ipfs uri was resolved by a mainstream browser happened this year, oprah mobile, shipped support for ipfs uri. You could enter it in the address bar and it would resolve to a public gateway. It's a mobile client, so it was backed by public gateway.

A

Nevertheless, it's a huge milestone to have out of the box support for our uri uh in a mainstream browser, and shortly around that time, brave was the first browser to include one click, install of our browser extension and a part of that work was also blessing. Our browser extension with access to tcp and udp sockets, which meant brave, was the first browser to have a full ipfs node running in a browser process.

A

It had a built-in http gateway was pretty exciting. Unfortunately, google deprecated some of the apis that we've used for this experiment, uh so we switched gears and for the second half of the year we looked into a way to provide native support in brave.

A

That does not require running any browser extension. So brave is the first browser that has uri support, that's backed by a full ipfs node. So the first time you load ipfs uri in brave nightly. uh It will ask you, hey: do you want to run uh ipfs node? Or do you want to resolve this ipfs resource using a third-party public gateway um and it works? So it's super exciting because it's landed in brave nightly. Just like uh folks on the previous uh talks mentioned uh this month and you can play with it.

A

uh It will be, probably be refined, so it's not the best ux right now, but it will be much better when it ships in hopefully january huge, milestone, uri and full ipfs note in a web browser, and we did not stop on with that. We want to make it useful across all vendors, so we started a partnership with igalia who igaria are a dev shop responsible for such useful web platform features as a css grid, so we've been working with them um on known problems that are protocol.

A

Agnostic that would be fixed would benefit everyone, but also would remove any roadblocks for ipfs presence or in the web platform, and we focused around our first collaboration around protocol handler api and identified a bunch of roadblocks towards adoption of our uri schemes and now at the end of 2020, uris are officially recognized by international standards. Bodies are safe, listed in chromium, so you can register them with a web plus prefix and we also unified behavior of localhost gateways across vendors and browser context.

A

So it's ongoing work, but patches already landed in firefox, and you can see here when you load dns link website from a local gateway. It's marked as a secure context. It's a huge deal, which means uh dns, link websites loaded from your local ipfs node behave the same as you would load them uh from the old school https server and you got access to all web apis.

A

So that's a huge deal and we'll be continuing collaboration with you guys going forward pinning services, api, spec, landed and uh just like mentioned by the core implementations working group. um This is a step towards enabling people to easily delegate data persistence to a third party.

A

We, we are working with pinning services existing pinning services and we hope to see more of them to implement this api support. For this api will also land. You know, go ipfs 0.8 and in the future, uh hopefully in the beginning of 2021, it will land in a web ui and iphone's desktop out of the box, so uh be sure to play with it. When you see it's landing somewhere um and during the year we've improved our end-to-end uh testing, a really some donation, I'll just keep it brief.

A

So uh web ui is now tested against, go ipfs and js ipfs in the ci process, so we catch any regressions early and ipfs desktop, including signing for mac, os and windows and notarization. All that stuff got automated. So you may see our team be able to deliver more features, because uh all this stuff got automated and no longer will take our time, and I believe now it's time to talk about iphone speaking.

B

Speaking of ipfs kiwis, um we could talk about the changes that we made to ipvs gooeys over the last year, but it would take about 45 hours, so we're just going to run through a couple of the highlights um revamped ipfs companion. We made so many changes to companion this year, which is awesome, reworked all of the preps that made a huge difference but added new menu items for shareable snapshot and ipfs path, links where those are appropriate. So those appear in the menu you'll see that in the animation really just streamline the ui everywhere.

B

There's a more useful welcome screen you can get to that by clicking the cube in your browser, drop down, menu, also add in manual opt-in and opt-out lists in prefs. um You can still do this on a per site basis with the toggle, but you can also do that straight from prefs.

B

If you just want to paste in a big old list, the preps get their own easier to use page, that's consistent across all browsers, and we also fixed uh the peculiar but extremely annoying case, where you had error, messaging and firefox, specifically, which forced lower cases cidv0s. When you paste them in, so we gave a companion a very specific era, message indicating when you might have done that uh next slide. Please and um really just onboarding improvements.

B

Galore I mean that sounds sort of glib, but for real we spent most of our focus in 2020 doing things that were going to make it easier to get started using ipfs, no matter what your intent was with ipfs, so that focused on a lot of onboarding enhancements too anything that was ipfs. That has a gui on it in particular web ui, and desktop lots of accessibility, improvements across the board.

B

uh Better map and table data on the pierce page and we've also got some more peers, page improvements that should be hidden early in the new year, just as soon as we wrap those up a cli tutor mode which was actually given to us by a wonderful community contributor.

B

So if you want to learn the cli through ipfs desktop, there's some shortcuts for that better breadcrumbs with drag and drop and all sorts of other good stuff and then just lots of other little bits of ui happiness, also improve the gateway directory pages that you'll, see anywhere and everywhere that you use ipfs through gateway, um dist dot. Ipfs.Io is easier to use, also works in your phone and, like so many more other things.

B

Next, please, and this is sort of boring, but it's actually really important. We started coordinating issue tracking across 13 gui related repos, which means that we've got both a better tactical response to things that break or or change, as well as a better strategic response. uh We had a 48-hour maximum response time on all new issues, a weekly triage for a synchronous triage that we made sure nothing fell through the cracks. uh But the really good thing about this is coordinating.

B

All of these rupees together at once gave us visibility into the most important work streams for 2021 such as the next slide. Please this is going to be so cool and it's coming very very soon is full pinning service support in desktop and web ui. So this is the pending services api baked into web ui and desktop. So you can add any pinning service that uses this pending services api. uh You can use web yarn desktop to pin files to your local node.

B

Your pinning services of choice, or both there are nice little indicators in the file screen so that you can know what is and isn't, pinned and uh future releases used. Soon tm will include some rules-based auto uplining, which is going to be super super convenient. um I could tell you so many other things, but I think I would get yanked off the stage. So just a big old shout out to everybody who helped us this year and look forward to.

B