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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

Web-IPFS gateways are not part of the IPFS infrastructure, nor are they essential.

They are, however, essential for the transition to it; at least as long as they continue the goal of becoming the new web.

If you want to use IPFS without using a public gateway, it is very easy to install and use a local gateway.

If you also use a browser extension like "IPFS Companion", it can automatically redirect all IPFS-looking URLs to your local gateway.

I agree this doesn't help for casual users who have never heard of it, but it's at least better than "everyone has to use a public gateway all the time".

Neither of these things you mention are very easy on my primary computer, an iPad Pro.

You don't have a general-purpose computer, you have a locked down browser.

(But point taken, a lot of people aren't using general-purpose computers.)

Without major players joining - browser vendors, it will be like IPv6 transition.

Firefox has partly added support recently. They recognise ipfs:// as a valid protocol and allow extensions to implement it.

Extensions can't implement the raw IPFS protocol though, they need a companion application running the actual gateway, or can maybe use the WebRTC transport.

No, js-ipfs can run a full ipfs node right in a web page. It'll peer with other nodes over websockets, and do relaying if neccessary.

Does js-ipfs work yet? Around the time I first wrote hardbin people were saying you could use js-ipfs, but it just didn't work. My non-javascript node couldn't access content published by js-ipfs, which seems like a major flaw.

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