IPFS is probably the best contender for Web3 right now and I hope it'll see more use before the crypto bros take over the term completely
Take it a step further: Firefox could allow websites to open sockets and toss arbitrary packets around, and choose not to. If that capacity were available then Javascript could be harnessed to support all sorts of protocols and services. They could even provide Javascript access to monitoring network access point availability and connectivity management.
Imagine then a single page app you could share as an attachment through $messageService and it has all the stuff built in to create ad-hoc real networks in large gatherings that provide data resiliency against the dropping of nodes. You could have the cellular network shut down, protestors arrested, their phones taken, and the data they gathered still retained so long as any node managed to exit the area or the network itself expanded beyond the area of contention.
- SMTP/IRC spamming using Web requests (Cross-protocol scripting, 2002) - https://www.eyeonsecurity.org/papers/Extended%20HTML%20Form%...
- Webpages that detect your router and leak your SSID (or worse) - Samy Kamkar "How I met your girlfriend" (2010), excerpt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRJMIMBVqFI
Web extensions should allow you to do normal sockets, many years ago I had a Chrome app (I still miss them) as my IRC client.
Not since 2017 or whenever it was that Firefox dropped XUL extensions and replaced them with WebExtensions. The legacy XUL extensions could do much, much more and there was correspondingly much, much more malware in browser extensions.
Unless everyone is ok going back to running random .exe files from emails, I guess.
There are very good security and privacy reasons that all browsers (not just Firefox) work extremely hard to prevent this from being possible.
Seems no more or less confusing or understandable than allowing access to microphone or camera.
A sizable portion of internet users think that the internet is what you get when you click the Facebook icon on your phone.
But they do at least understand what a microphone and webcam are for.
As Firefox does with self signed certificates and similar.
A bit of a tangent, but I really cannot stress enough that if you're using Tor to be private/anonymous that you should never use anything other than the official Tor browser, you will stand out like a sore thumb.
Brave just took the step of forcing you to always have the extension installed instead of making it optional, basically
I've tried IPFS a time or two and always found it to be INCREDIBLY slow (even worse than tor) with ZERO content discoverability.
I'd argue this is worse than doing nothing. This gave Firefox the ability to say they care, and yet not deliver something meaningful.
What do you think firefox could have done to improve things?
And, as someone not well versed, is there any "killer demo" that uses IPFS currently?
Your collaborative photogrammetry can be combined with the open and free species identification API and my custom OpenStreetMap data extensions and KartaView/OpenStreetCam/OpenStreetView to get more photogrammetry location integration and more free crowdsourced open data to add to photogrammetry. A demo of Seadragon/Photosynth [1] inspired me to work on this.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_how_photosyn...
As for IPFS, the crypto-bros seem to already be winning for taking over that term and melding it as part of a layer in web3, just like they did for 'crypto' which that has become too late and that ship has long sailed.
Perhaps the reason why they are winning is because they keep building stuff like this [0] and existing companies are jumping on board with the term already? [1][2]
[1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/web3
[2] https://stripe.com/blog/expanding-global-payouts-with-crypto
Reader view, tools for the visually impaired, and browser automation are actually useful and commonly used, so that definition win the title for me.
There are certainly useful distributed web tools (e.g. email, TOR, IRC, Matrix, self-hosting, bittorrent), but they're the opposite of recent trends towards monopoly.
The distributed meaning is absolutely poisoned by blockchain at this point.
Like, if we compare this to RESTful servers, there's no set definition but nearly everyone agrees it's verbs and paths over a hierarchical API sending JSON back and forth over HTTP[S].
It seems like most people can't agree on anything except using etherium as a backbone.
So calling something web3 doesn't seem to do a good job describing things like REST or like something like you wrote above.
It's not a technical spec.