In-browser discovery of local-network IPFS nodes

ghost commented 7 years ago

FlyWeb provides mDNS-ish announcements and discovery in Firefox. This sounds ideal for WebRTC signaling. Instead of fixed signaling servers, ipfs in a browser tab can announce itself to the local network for signalling. @ipfs/javascript-team where's the caveat, this sounds too good to be true. :heart_eyes: And it would make for awesome browser demos. Here's how I cut my DSL cable, and Orbit still works.

My Firefox 51 here already seems to support it behind a feature flag.

dignifiedquire commented 7 years ago

We would still need signaling servers for more global connections though, right? But this sounds very intersting if we can use it.

ghost commented 7 years ago

Yeah this would be for local/offline cases

victorb commented 7 years ago

Another discussion about FlyWeb: https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs/issues/599

ghost commented 7 years ago

Here's a few words from one of the FlyWeb devs on why it stalled:

16:29 | djvj | well, the maintenance stopped because there were some fires to put out generally in other parts of the codebase. 16:29 | djvj | Basically we came to the conclusion that the best way to push this forward was to go with a simple standalone mobile app (wrapping a WebView) that implements the FlyWeb client functionalithy. 16:29 | djvj | and then grow from there. 16:30 | djvj | But the whole quantum and Firefox desktop browser performance and QA effort came up right about then. 16:30 | djvj | So short answer: other priorities, not enough time to keep it running. 16:30 | djvj | pacer: if you want to do something with it, I'd be stoked. 16:31 | djvj | pacer: the apps (both iOS and Android) are available on our github. 16:31 | djvj | pacer: if you want to talk about what we had planned and why and what the general strategy was, that's cool too 16:32 | djvj | I still think it's a project with great promise, it's just that between work and new fatherhood, I don't have a lot of time to put towards this.