The alternative web browser, Brave, has announced that it has added InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) support in the latest Brave 1.19 update. Brave’s 24 million users will now be able to resolve ipfs:// URLs directly from their browser to access peer-to-peer content available on IPFS nodes.
The firm, which is no stranger to innovation, said that the addition of IPFS will greatly enhance the browsing experience, increase the available content, help offload server costs for publishers and increase the resilience of the internet as content on IPFS is hosted in a distributed fashion rather than centrally.
Commenting on the integration, Brave’s CTO and co-founder Brian Bondy said:
“IPFS gives users a solution to the problem of centralized servers creating a central point of failure for content access. IPFS’ innovative content addressing uses Content Identifiers (CIDs) to form an address based on the content itself as opposed to locating data based on the address of a server. Integrating the IPFS open-source network is a key milestone in making the Web more transparent, decentralized, and resilient.”
The firm said that today’s announcement only marks the initial implementation of IPFS on Brave. In future updates, the browser will automatically redirect from DNSLink websites to the native IPFS version, users will be able to co-host a website, and publishing to IPFS will be made easy.
The addition of IPFS to Brave marks one more step towards Web 3.0 or the dWeb (Distributed Web). Alongside Brave, Opera is the other main browser that is innovating in this space. As Web 3.0 becomes more defined, it’ll be nice to see bigger browsers such as Chrome and Safari begin to implement these features too.