Create Check Page for Distributed Web

ipfs / in-web-browsers

Tracking the endeavor towards getting web browsers to natively support IPFS and content-addressing

https://docs.ipfs.tech/how-to/address-ipfs-on-web/

MIT License

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Create Check Page for Distributed Web #61

Open lidel opened 6 years ago

lidel commented 6 years ago

The Tor project has a simple page that can be used to reliably determine if one is using Tor network or not: https://check.torproject.org

I think we should have a similar page (at check.ipfs.io or safer check.dweb.link). I imagine it as a static HTML + JS with heuristic tests that reliably determine if the page itself was loaded over HTTP or IPFS (be it web extension, HTTP gateway etc)

Rationale:

it would make it easier for non-technical people to test connectivity
IPFS-enabled browsers could have it as a default staring page
browser extension could have "test connectivity" button on Preferences screen that opens it for a quick test
having a well known, neutral connectivity test simplifies making various demos and decreases cognitive load on the audience

lidel commented 6 years ago

Idea 1) Perhaps we could reuse designs made by @nunofmn for https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs-companion/issues/324 here ? This "Check Page" would serve similar purpose to the post-install Landing Page in browser extension: connectivity check + next steps / learning materials.

Idea 2) What if we keep wording/design generic enough to use original "Check Page" in extension?

olizilla commented 6 years ago

I'm happy to build a page for this. Any ideas how to test for it? I feel like "how did i get here?" isn't the sort of info that the rendered page has access to.

Would we settle for checking the address bar for one of the ipfs address formats?

URL - ipfs://QmHash
URI - dweb:/ipfs/QmHash
NURI - /ipfs/QmHash

It feels along way from reliable, but I can't think of anything else, without having something injected into the response. There is work underway to have window.ipfs be available on all pages when ipfs-companion is running, so that could be part of it, but that's much more specific.

I'm using http://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmP2yCrvuL89kgCxtt5vXfPMt89PtidxQ8yKTr86gtYZd4 for testing the brave integration work... so i do see the need for some kind of simple test page.

lidel commented 6 years ago

I think we will end up with a set of tests that work together.

Some ideas:

window.location.href (crude test: if it is different than hard-coded domain, we can guess that someone is using ipfs-companion and redirect loaded it from a custom gateway)
Address bar (is there a dedicated API for accessing it in Brave? or is via window.location ?)
To remove false-positives from gateway detection, we can send a XHR to /api/v0/version – it should be available on every HTTP gateway: http://127.0.0.1:8080/api/v0/version (we probably need to exclude public one at https://ipfs.io/api/v0/version 🙂 )
Is window.ipfs present?

olizilla commented 6 years ago

Some prior art from @VictorBjelkholm

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmcVc8eQiWkR23wMKiQjipLRSjCxR1FEj4TL99aY89J83d

Via https://github.com/ipfs/in-web-browsers/issues/42#issuecomment-281382909

singpolyma commented 6 years ago

Just serve a page over HTTP that says "No" and add a page to IPFS with dnslink on that domain that says "Yes" -- no javascript needed :)