SAFEr Browser(s) Proposal

This project is to important not to fund. You will have my full contribution by the end of the day :smile:

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Is there a roadmap for this project and maybe an estimated time line?

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I’ll send some this weekend. Dunno yet how much because I don’t like to put my keys into the browser etc to send maid… I’ll probably buy some btc → maid and send them this way…

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The roadmap for the basic browser is still largely as OP (Initial Development Goals).

This part however:

Is looking more like, ‘enable API access via a browser global variable for SafeSite/Webapp access to the API’, probably via an updated version of safe-js at this juncture, though that could well change.

The stretch goals are somewhat harder to define, and have been pretty well debated in this thread. How much ‘launcher’ and ‘api’ access should sites have, and how to do it is to be decided still. But initial base ‘browser’ specs are as above.

As for timeline. I’d hope for to have testable beta implementations inside of a few weeks. (I won’t be able to go full time on this, but will be able to dedicate at least 2 full days a week, as stated in the OP). Other factors such as an upcoming holiday for a week might get in the way a bit.

Even with that holiday, I’m aiming to be well inside of the original (approx) timeframes set out in the (CEP announcement)[Community Engagement Program v0.3] (6 weeks), from when I fire in proper.

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Awesome :smile:

I do have one more question. Is the funding purely to pay for your labor or does it fund other things? I am OK either way :wink:

Just a heads up I will wait until after this mess to donate. Probably on Monday just to be safe.

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As mentioned by @PaulFrazee in this topic, “Beaker has a plugin system now. No more need to fork it for adding protocols or Web APIs.”


More info in this blog post: Beaker Browser 0.1 - Navigate sites on IPFS and Dat

See also this thread on Hacker News: Show HN: Beaker – A browser for IPFS and Dat


@joshuef: What do you think of the option of creating a SAFE-protocol plugin for Beaker? :slight_smile:

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Heh. I actually pulled beaker just yesterday and saw these changes :slight_smile:

Absolutely, that’ll be the way for getting our base safe functionality in. @PaulFrazee has done a great job there separating out the plugin functionality so it’ll be a much cleaner process I think.

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It’s pretty much just to pay for my time off work. I already work 4 days and do one day of freelance or personal stuff, but I’ll need to focus more so I’ll be taking another day off for the weeks while I’m working on this.

When I’m done, I suspect some might go towards a beer. :stuck_out_tongue: I live in Berlin, so I can probably pay in BTC direct somewhere. Who knows, maybe I’ll be able to convince Room77 to accept some MAID!

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I will make sure to donate some extra BTC for the beer fund :wink:

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Is there Beer Gardens where you are at?

All of their businesses now accept digital cash (BTC, DASH, all the stable coins, MAID…the list goes on forever)

It was very satisfying to pay for plain tickets on Baltic Air and buy drinks in Riga, Latvia last month…all with bitcoin. Very quickly I see developers getting paid in whatever project token and then instantly convert it into whatever digital cash denomination (bitEURO) the merchant wants to receive.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.bitsharesmunich.smartcoinswallet&hl=de

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Ha, cool! There are always beer gardens in Germany :slight_smile: Not sure if there are any here accepting digital cash on this scale, but I’d wager it’s coming!

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Hey I’m trying to get this installed and try it but it gives me this, tried a few things and thought I’d ask

really would like to test the current concept browser

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ah this thing! You need to run the rebuild after you’ve done npm install.

so: npm run rebuild should sort you out :thumbsup:

Let me know how you get on!

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Thanks very much! Will be on this tonight

Spent the afternoon wrangling with node versioning issues on my computer (nvm is a joy and a pain), but finally got a POC build working on OSX ( a simple dmg file, so no need to compile etc!).

Local testing is working well (aside from everything is written as .safenet links. So navigating is a pain. Some temporary parsing capability might be useful here… ). I’m keen to check it works for other users though!

Can’t upload anything on my home connection right now ( I still have effectively dead internet :expressionless: ) But should be able to get this somewhere useable at some juncture tomorrow.

Other builds will need to be built on windows / linux systems, so I can’t test that functionality yet. This will come though.

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It’s probably a bad idea to advertise the SAFEr Browser as the browser that pays out it’s users, but it could do that, if it’s shipped in combination with the SAFE vault.

Brave got a lot of media coverage, but a browser that pays out it’s users for providing computing resources is a different stab at it. Maybe it might help to attract a crowd, with dormant computing resources, but still wanting to see ads.

Maybe the browser shouldn’t be SAFE Network sites only, it sure would be a funny way to grow the SAFE Network.

Or maybe just pitch it as the browser that comes with something that can make you money, because it simply doesn’t help for our small community to only know about this browser. Brave implanted the idea of a browser paying people, so let’s get people on board to grow our SAFE Network garden.

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A Vault, Launcher, and Browser combination would make a killer app. :smile:

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@joshuef - I know you have done some significant work around the browser shell and Electron, but now that Beaker has hit 0.1 (ref: Redirecting…) might it be worth considering using that? The developer (@PaulFrazee) has put effort into the browser UI and now has a nice extension system where you could add the web API and the custom protocol with less effort and less to maintain.

The developer has also offered to fork Electron to handle some of the short comings in it (ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12271492) which might be duplicated effort if you have to do the same.

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Indeed!

Beaker is a muchhhh slimmer and nicer codebase the more I look around it. 0.1 is big step forward, and this is part of the reason I originally proposed to focus on beaker first and brave/others if possible.

Brave does not seem like it’s going to enable use of electron.protocol anytime soon, which is quite the blocker for a straight up safe protocol.

It also comes with a lot of baggage that might not be useful for safe (ad blocking/ad replacement etc). ( it is so much more polished and has a lot of things that might be useful in a SAFE browser, too though).

I think there’s a lot of pros and cons, but what is clear is that I’ll be able to move much faster in a beaker fork / via plugins as required. And @PaulFrazee has been welcoming about PRs and forks so far (Beaker Plugins. Scan 'app/node_modules', instead of using global modules? · Issue #56 · beakerbrowser/beaker · GitHub ) so that might well end up being something ‘bleeding edge’, that allows us to define how/what we want a SAFE browser experience to look like, which we then port to other browsers via extensions as we’re able.

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