7 ms·

Support for the IPFS Protocol – Firefox Bugzilla

217 points by fossislife 6y ago

dleslie 6y ago
There hasn't been a comment or status change to this bug in three years. I've been giving Brave a shot due to their recent addition of first-class support for IPFS, and the numerous positive HN comments. It's... So much faster. However, it does a poor job of blocking advertisements and trackers. I'll be going back to Firefox for that reason, I can suffer the slowness. One common response regarding performance woes on Firefox is that common addons, particularly uBlock, process a large amount of data through complex rules during page load. What I haven't heard is any plans on the part of Mozilla to support that level of ad-blocking and privacy protection at the product level, rather than the extension level, which may provide much needed performance enhancements. uBlock Origin, HTTPS Everwhere, Decentraleyes, Privacy Badger, au-revoir-utm et al should be native features at this point.
- pixxel 6y ago
  For those of us that haven’t heard of au-revoir-utm: > How annoying are those "utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss" in URLs ? Right! > So this extension removes them and prevents you from being tracked. > Source code at https://github.com/Rik/au-revoir-utm https://github.com/Rik/au-revoir-utm
  - KozmoNau7 6y ago
    I prefer CleaURLs, it also removes UTM parameters plus a number of other tracking parameters: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clearurls/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clearurls/
    - dleslie 6y ago
      That's a good one, thank-you.
- Funes- 6y ago
  >It's... So much faster. However, it does a poor job of blocking advertisements and trackers. I'll be going back to Firefox for that reason, I can suffer the slowness. You can block ads just by editing your hosts file. There's no need to depend on any browser's particular functionality in order to get rid of them. Nor on extra hardware (Pi-hole), for that matter. I have a cron job download a prefilled copy from a popular github repository [1] daily. [1] https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts
  - dleslie 6y ago
    That doesn't scrub all advertisements without also going full-nuclear on certain social media sites and video services.
  - pythux 6y ago
    Blocking by hostnames is a big part of adblocking, but if you want to really block all ads and also not break the Web, you need an in-browser tech to do things like element hiding, scriptlet injections, etc. Which cannot be done via host files.
    - rangoon626 6y ago
      The other thing is that hosts file records appear to not hold in Firefox by default because of the https everywhere and the secure dns features they added. Drives me bonkers sometimes when I forget to turn off
  - arduinomancer 6y ago
    That doesn't work if the website serves the ads from the same domain as the content. For example YouTube ads.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - GoblinSlayer 6y ago
      0.0.0.0 youtube.com
- pea 6y ago
  Out of interest, why not use uBlock on brave? That's my setup.
  - anderber 6y ago
    You can also customize Brave's adblock in brave://adblock/
  - drak0n1c 6y ago
    AdGuard with Brave is another solid option (extension and Mac app).
    - lmedinas 6y ago
      with Safari is pretty terrible.
  - webmobdev 6y ago
    Brave is based on Chrome (Chromium / Blink) and Google has deliberaely crippled ad-blocking extensions for it: - https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-still-plans-to-cripple-ad-blocking-in-chrome-but-enterprises-will-be-exempt/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-still-plans-to-cripple-... - https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338 https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338 So you will get a sub-par ad-blocking / anti-tracking experience on Chrome or any of its clones like Brave or Vivaldi.
- eznzt 6y ago
  All those extensions are also available on Brave (and all Chromium derivatives), and the browser themselves are always faster than Firefox.
- gcblkjaidfj 6y ago
  Let me tell you the future of using brave: you give chrome engine total rule of the law for web "standards". Google can mold the web to their desires. If you use firefox, google have to at least play nice. What's the point of using a browser frontend (used to be called chrome, but i guess google stole even the words) if tomorrow all the content depend on google-owned DRM? You will only be able to use your fancy ipfs or whatever transport if you have the google blessed keys or whatnot.
  - RedComet 6y ago
    It sounds good in theory, but it just isn't true. Mozilla is null factor these days, and most of their income has actually been from Google. Google is most likely keeping them afloat just to ward off a stray monopoly charge at this point.
    - pygy_ 6y ago
      It became clear to me with the recent layoffs. Their strategy to grow their user share seemed twofold: better tech (through Servo/Rust) and dev-oriented features (their market share among devs was much higher than among the general population). They cut deeply into both of these.
      - pygy_ 6y ago
        Adding to this: Getting back dev mindshare was IMO critical for their success. 90% of https://webcompat.com/ https://webcompat.com/ is sites that are broken in Firefox, not necessarily because FF isn't standard compliant, but because many Web devs just dont bother testing their sites/apps with it anymore. As for better tech I suppose they chose a 80/20 approach, but I'm not sure it will suffice.
    - gcblkjaidfj 6y ago
      Well, to be honest, nowadays I think that the sooner mozilla dies, the better for firefox :( But anything will only happens if there's a user base as contributors are a (small) ratio from that number.
- hiimtroymclure 6y ago
  how does brave do a poor job of blocking advertisements and trackers? Its the main reason I use it and _I think_ it works well but never done any kind of analysis (nor would I even know how to). Could you elaborate on this for the uninformed?
- Isthatablackgsd 6y ago
  > Decentraleyes I would recommend LocalCDN over Decentraleyes. They covers CDNs (more than Decentraleyes) and various libraries such as javascripts (like jQuery) and frameworks.
  - dleslie 6y ago
    Thanks, I'll try that.
- DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
  > uBlock Origin, HTTPS Everwhere, Decentraleyes, Privacy Badger, au-revoir-utm et al should be native features at this point. these constant debacles of add-ons and extensions being sold to adversarial maintainers, it's a good time to do integrate this if they are serious about security and privacy. I understand blocklists are a massively sensitive topic for mozilla however.
- mbaye 6y ago
  Firefox recently added HTTPS-Only Mode setting, basically equivalent to HTTPS Everywhere.
  - ffpip 6y ago
    HTTPS only mode displays a warning every time the HTTPS version is not available. HTTPS Everywhere/Brave tries to upgrade connections to https, if not falls back without throwing up annoying warnings.
- mp3geek 6y ago
  > So much faster. However, it does a poor job of blocking advertisements and trackers. I'll be going back to Firefox for that reason, I can suffer the slowness. What issues are you having with the blocking? /Disclaimer, Brave webcompat support
  - nonbirithm 6y ago
    Not OP, but it doesn't block Twitter sponsored posts for me.
    - mp3geek 6y ago
      Clear cookies/cache, re-login. Check ads/trackers = Aggressive. We mostly fixed the twitter ads a while back.
  - dleslie 6y ago
    Reddit, Twitter and other social media sponsored posts and ads are not blocked; and I saw a YouTube ad for the first time in ages. Generally, I run uBlock with all-but-regional block lists enabled. Oh, and Brave has its own ads.
    - haha_lul 6y ago
      I don't like BAT and wish it could be removed like any other extension, but it's opt in? Also, what's stopping you from installing uBlock on Brave? Considering Chrome doesn't ship with any adblocker, is it not beneficial (given your preference for adblocking) to provide an adblocker out of the box, given you still have the ability to use any extensions you would use with any other browser?
      - dleslie 6y ago
        I suppose I opted in as a result of just clicking through some dialogues during install. The only strong reason I have to keep using Firefox is to support ongoing development of an alternative to chrome's rendering engine on PC.
isaacimagine 6y ago
There are lots of very interesting and useful protocols, from ipfs to gopher, hyper to i2p, from freenet to zeronet, etc. - I think it would be cool if browsers added an extensible framework for adding new protocols.
- 6510 6y ago
  The argument against protocols use to be that they do not want to promote anything. This in turn prevented adoption. lets hope we get to see ipfs
- bawolff 6y ago
  Isn't that what extensions are?
  - hda2 6y ago
    they used to be, but not anymore. webextensions are usually not capable enough to support most of these protocols unless said protocols were designed to support the "web"
madushan1000 6y ago
Mozilla gave up on distributed web a long time ago, Just look at the libdweb[0] project. No update in years, nobody even to get almost complete patchset to firefox reviewed and merged. [0]: https://github.com/mozilla/libdweb https://github.com/mozilla/libdweb
rishav_sharan 6y ago
on a similar note, here is the uservoice for dat protocol support in MS Edge. https://microsoftedge.uservoice.com/forums/928828-developer/suggestions/40304497-native-support-for-dat-protocol https://microsoftedge.uservoice.com/forums/928828-developer/... if you folks are interested, maybe you can vote it up. it might get funded.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
kmeisthax 6y ago
Does anyone know how well IPFS protects the privacy of individual users, given that any sort of P2P protocol is going to shift copyright liability for what they read or watch onto them?
- beardog 6y ago
  It basically doesn't, I found a few years ago that it also makes your browser more fingerprintable (though in recent time browsers are getting more resistant to this) https://chaoswebs.net/blog/tracking-ipfs-users-via-cache-probing.html https://chaoswebs.net/blog/tracking-ipfs-users-via-cache-pro... So even if you use a VPN with it, if you are logged into a website that knows you, it could scan what you have saved from ipfs (among known IDs anyways)
waynesonfire 6y ago
build a plugin, nothing to see here. thanks for the downvotes.
miohtama 6y ago
Is there any reason IPFS wizards could not implement IPFS or equivalents over WebRTC peer-to-peer, as in-page JavaScript application? Even if this were not the real thing, it would bring it closer to the mainstream more quickly.
- toomim 6y ago
  It's technically feasible. IPFS not so different from Bittorrent, and Bittorrent can run over WebRTC: https://webtorrent.io/ https://webtorrent.io/ In fact, webtorrent happens to be my favorite bittorrent client. In general, I wish that more decentralized web tech didn't go about creating incompatible protocols. (Context: I'm working on Braid (https://braid.news https://braid.news) which is adding decentralized tech into today's WWW.)
- j-james 6y ago
  It's so technically feasible that it already exists. Admittedly still in alpha, but rather feature-complete. There's even a nice demo built into the landing page. https://js.ipfs.io/ https://js.ipfs.io/

217 points by fossislife 6y ago

There hasn't been a comment or status change to this bug in three years. I've been giving Brave a shot due to their recent addition of first-class support for IPFS, and the numerous positive HN comments. It's... So much faster. However, it does a poor job of blocking advertisements and trackers. I'll be going back to Firefox for that reason, I can suffer the slowness. One common response regarding performance woes on Firefox is that common addons, particularly uBlock, process a large amount of data through complex rules during page load. What I haven't heard is any plans on the part of Mozilla to support that level of ad-blocking and privacy protection at the product level, rather than the extension level, which may provide much needed performance enhancements. uBlock Origin, HTTPS Everwhere, Decentraleyes, Privacy Badger, au-revoir-utm et al should be native features at this point.

pixxel 6y ago
For those of us that haven’t heard of au-revoir-utm: > How annoying are those "utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss" in URLs ? Right! > So this extension removes them and prevents you from being tracked. > Source code at https://github.com/Rik/au-revoir-utm https://github.com/Rik/au-revoir-utm
- KozmoNau7 6y ago
  I prefer CleaURLs, it also removes UTM parameters plus a number of other tracking parameters: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clearurls/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clearurls/
  - dleslie 6y ago
    That's a good one, thank-you.
Funes- 6y ago
>It's... So much faster. However, it does a poor job of blocking advertisements and trackers. I'll be going back to Firefox for that reason, I can suffer the slowness. You can block ads just by editing your hosts file. There's no need to depend on any browser's particular functionality in order to get rid of them. Nor on extra hardware (Pi-hole), for that matter. I have a cron job download a prefilled copy from a popular github repository [1] daily. [1] https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts
- dleslie 6y ago
  That doesn't scrub all advertisements without also going full-nuclear on certain social media sites and video services.
- pythux 6y ago
  Blocking by hostnames is a big part of adblocking, but if you want to really block all ads and also not break the Web, you need an in-browser tech to do things like element hiding, scriptlet injections, etc. Which cannot be done via host files.
  - rangoon626 6y ago
    The other thing is that hosts file records appear to not hold in Firefox by default because of the https everywhere and the secure dns features they added. Drives me bonkers sometimes when I forget to turn off
- arduinomancer 6y ago
  That doesn't work if the website serves the ads from the same domain as the content. For example YouTube ads.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - GoblinSlayer 6y ago
    0.0.0.0 youtube.com
pea 6y ago
Out of interest, why not use uBlock on brave? That's my setup.
- anderber 6y ago
  You can also customize Brave's adblock in brave://adblock/
- drak0n1c 6y ago
  AdGuard with Brave is another solid option (extension and Mac app).
  - lmedinas 6y ago
    with Safari is pretty terrible.
- webmobdev 6y ago
  Brave is based on Chrome (Chromium / Blink) and Google has deliberaely crippled ad-blocking extensions for it: - https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-still-plans-to-cripple-ad-blocking-in-chrome-but-enterprises-will-be-exempt/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-still-plans-to-cripple-... - https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338 https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338 So you will get a sub-par ad-blocking / anti-tracking experience on Chrome or any of its clones like Brave or Vivaldi.
eznzt 6y ago
All those extensions are also available on Brave (and all Chromium derivatives), and the browser themselves are always faster than Firefox.
gcblkjaidfj 6y ago
Let me tell you the future of using brave: you give chrome engine total rule of the law for web "standards". Google can mold the web to their desires. If you use firefox, google have to at least play nice. What's the point of using a browser frontend (used to be called chrome, but i guess google stole even the words) if tomorrow all the content depend on google-owned DRM? You will only be able to use your fancy ipfs or whatever transport if you have the google blessed keys or whatnot.
- RedComet 6y ago
  It sounds good in theory, but it just isn't true. Mozilla is null factor these days, and most of their income has actually been from Google. Google is most likely keeping them afloat just to ward off a stray monopoly charge at this point.
  - pygy_ 6y ago
    It became clear to me with the recent layoffs. Their strategy to grow their user share seemed twofold: better tech (through Servo/Rust) and dev-oriented features (their market share among devs was much higher than among the general population). They cut deeply into both of these.
    - pygy_ 6y ago
      Adding to this: Getting back dev mindshare was IMO critical for their success. 90% of https://webcompat.com/ https://webcompat.com/ is sites that are broken in Firefox, not necessarily because FF isn't standard compliant, but because many Web devs just dont bother testing their sites/apps with it anymore. As for better tech I suppose they chose a 80/20 approach, but I'm not sure it will suffice.
  - gcblkjaidfj 6y ago
    Well, to be honest, nowadays I think that the sooner mozilla dies, the better for firefox :( But anything will only happens if there's a user base as contributors are a (small) ratio from that number.
hiimtroymclure 6y ago
how does brave do a poor job of blocking advertisements and trackers? Its the main reason I use it and _I think_ it works well but never done any kind of analysis (nor would I even know how to). Could you elaborate on this for the uninformed?
Isthatablackgsd 6y ago
> Decentraleyes I would recommend LocalCDN over Decentraleyes. They covers CDNs (more than Decentraleyes) and various libraries such as javascripts (like jQuery) and frameworks.
- dleslie 6y ago
  Thanks, I'll try that.
DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
> uBlock Origin, HTTPS Everwhere, Decentraleyes, Privacy Badger, au-revoir-utm et al should be native features at this point. these constant debacles of add-ons and extensions being sold to adversarial maintainers, it's a good time to do integrate this if they are serious about security and privacy. I understand blocklists are a massively sensitive topic for mozilla however.
mbaye 6y ago
Firefox recently added HTTPS-Only Mode setting, basically equivalent to HTTPS Everywhere.
- ffpip 6y ago
  HTTPS only mode displays a warning every time the HTTPS version is not available. HTTPS Everywhere/Brave tries to upgrade connections to https, if not falls back without throwing up annoying warnings.
mp3geek 6y ago
> So much faster. However, it does a poor job of blocking advertisements and trackers. I'll be going back to Firefox for that reason, I can suffer the slowness. What issues are you having with the blocking? /Disclaimer, Brave webcompat support
- nonbirithm 6y ago
  Not OP, but it doesn't block Twitter sponsored posts for me.
  - mp3geek 6y ago
    Clear cookies/cache, re-login. Check ads/trackers = Aggressive. We mostly fixed the twitter ads a while back.
- dleslie 6y ago
  Reddit, Twitter and other social media sponsored posts and ads are not blocked; and I saw a YouTube ad for the first time in ages. Generally, I run uBlock with all-but-regional block lists enabled. Oh, and Brave has its own ads.
  - haha_lul 6y ago
    I don't like BAT and wish it could be removed like any other extension, but it's opt in? Also, what's stopping you from installing uBlock on Brave? Considering Chrome doesn't ship with any adblocker, is it not beneficial (given your preference for adblocking) to provide an adblocker out of the box, given you still have the ability to use any extensions you would use with any other browser?
    - dleslie 6y ago
      I suppose I opted in as a result of just clicking through some dialogues during install. The only strong reason I have to keep using Firefox is to support ongoing development of an alternative to chrome's rendering engine on PC.

isaacimagine 6y ago

There are lots of very interesting and useful protocols, from ipfs to gopher, hyper to i2p, from freenet to zeronet, etc. - I think it would be cool if browsers added an extensible framework for adding new protocols.

6510 6y ago
The argument against protocols use to be that they do not want to promote anything. This in turn prevented adoption. lets hope we get to see ipfs
bawolff 6y ago
Isn't that what extensions are?
- hda2 6y ago
  they used to be, but not anymore. webextensions are usually not capable enough to support most of these protocols unless said protocols were designed to support the "web"

madushan1000 6y ago

Mozilla gave up on distributed web a long time ago, Just look at the libdweb[0] project. No update in years, nobody even to get almost complete patchset to firefox reviewed and merged. [0]: https://github.com/mozilla/libdweb https://github.com/mozilla/libdweb

rishav_sharan 6y ago

on a similar note, here is the uservoice for dat protocol support in MS Edge. https://microsoftedge.uservoice.com/forums/928828-developer/suggestions/40304497-native-support-for-dat-protocol https://microsoftedge.uservoice.com/forums/928828-developer/... if you folks are interested, maybe you can vote it up. it might get funded.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

kmeisthax 6y ago

Does anyone know how well IPFS protects the privacy of individual users, given that any sort of P2P protocol is going to shift copyright liability for what they read or watch onto them?

beardog 6y ago
It basically doesn't, I found a few years ago that it also makes your browser more fingerprintable (though in recent time browsers are getting more resistant to this) https://chaoswebs.net/blog/tracking-ipfs-users-via-cache-probing.html https://chaoswebs.net/blog/tracking-ipfs-users-via-cache-pro... So even if you use a VPN with it, if you are logged into a website that knows you, it could scan what you have saved from ipfs (among known IDs anyways)

waynesonfire 6y ago

build a plugin, nothing to see here. thanks for the downvotes.

miohtama 6y ago

Is there any reason IPFS wizards could not implement IPFS or equivalents over WebRTC peer-to-peer, as in-page JavaScript application? Even if this were not the real thing, it would bring it closer to the mainstream more quickly.

toomim 6y ago
It's technically feasible. IPFS not so different from Bittorrent, and Bittorrent can run over WebRTC: https://webtorrent.io/ https://webtorrent.io/ In fact, webtorrent happens to be my favorite bittorrent client. In general, I wish that more decentralized web tech didn't go about creating incompatible protocols. (Context: I'm working on Braid (https://braid.news https://braid.news) which is adding decentralized tech into today's WWW.)
j-james 6y ago
It's so technically feasible that it already exists. Admittedly still in alpha, but rather feature-complete. There's even a nice demo built into the landing page. https://js.ipfs.io/ https://js.ipfs.io/