Brave adds IPFS support

Developers of the privacy-focused Brave browser have integrated support for the IPFS protocol (‘the interplanetary file system’).

With today’s desktop browser update (v1.19), Brave is the first browser to offer a native @IPFS integration, enabling users to seamlessly browse the decentralized Web,
and increasing content availability and Internet resilience. https://t.co/t77ix0zzxo

— Brave Software (@brave) January 19, 2021

Thanks to the integration available in version 1.19, Brave users will access content directly from IPFS. To do so, they must either run a full node of the protocol or enable IPFS addresses such as ipfs:// through a gateway.

The protocol will grant access to blocked web pages, speed up their loading, and reduce hosting costs.

“Today in Thailand, access to certain parts of Wikipedia is blocked. In Turkey more than 100,000 websites are blocked. In China there is no access to important information about COVID-19. Now any Brave user via IPFS will be able to overcome these restrictions,” said Molly Mackinlay, project lead.

According to Brave’s CTO and co-founder, Brian Bondy, Brave was the first to offer built-in integration of the protocol.

“IPFS provided users with a remedy to the problem of centralized servers creating a single point of failure for content access,” he explained.

IPFS is a protocol by which peer-to-peer nodes store and distribute data in a single distributed file system, with addresses tied not to a server but to a unique cryptographic hash identifier.

Is IPFS, rather than HTTP, the future of the decentralized Internet?

Earlier in April, the IPFS developers released version 0.5, which improved the process of discovering content on the network.

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