Opera Unite tried decentralizing the web ten years ago
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more recently, there was Foreign Fetch[1]. i forget what particular sad pathetic excuse of a demise axed this brilliant follow up, but again, another total game changer re-decentralizer that even more alas, is left on the chopping room floor. actually wait, i do remember: Google wanted to use it for hosting fonts, but then Host Cache Partitioning came along, and it's champion's star use case became uninterested in it & it collapsed overnight.
Foreign Fetch made all the sense in the world. if Service Workers can render resources for a origin, why not let it render resources for other origins? that's still within a single browser though. Unite is next level bold: why not let a client render resources for other clients? i still think Foreign Fetch is one of the alltime easiest/clearest/best wins the web could have had, would have radically re-enabled offline first, and set forth the idea that a origin loaded on user-agent/browser deserves real presence.
some day i really want to make a web page where components can have ipv6 addresses, and then just internetwork components across network tunnels[2].
[1] https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/09/foreign-fe...
They were more a micro-app store model than web pages that could be appified, but they had much more creative control over themselves. They arrived in 9.5, a year before the launch of the Palm Pre, a first & second star in the constellation of web-based applications.
It was the centrepiece in the battle between visionaries and the money makers at a very decisive moment for Opera
A battle the visionaries lost.
The world would probably have been more interesting if they had chosen the blue pill instead of the red pill.
Not certain the shareholders would have been happier though. It is easy to root for the visionaries, but the choice is never that simple.
Nice, this sentence actually seems to explain pretty well why after more than 10 years for most of cryptocurrency tokens adoption and usability for common people is really minuscule. It looks like trying to design something with intention to "monetize" first and then invent purpose as an afterthought could be not easy endeavor.