Notes and Recommendations for Browser Implementers

[autonome]

There are a number of things that vendors implementing IPFS in browsers at any level MUST or SHOULD do, outside of the core address and protocol support.

This issue is to collect and document that set of things.

[lidel]

To kick this off, writing down a short list of relevant source material would be:

• native URIs and how they are mapped onto subdomains (from ADDRESSING.md we did for Brave/Opera a while ago)
• Web Gateways from https://specs.ipfs.tech/http-gateways/
  • Origin per root CID from subdomain gateway
  • _redirects file
• Web Pathing specs: Add specification for Web Pathing specs#432
  • (once we have web pathing spec we have a good entry point which can link to lower level specs)
  • UnixFS specs: Initial UnixFS specification specs#331
  • DAG-CBOR
    • https://ipld.io/specs/codecs/dag-cbor/
    • Tag 42 https://github.com/ipld/cid-cbor/
• (optional) delegated routing API as a falback when no working provider is known (Leverage /https peers little-bear-labs/ipfs-chromium#66)

[autonome]

• Brave is going to hide traffic to local Kubo from installed extensions: Add security access header to local node requests brave/brave-browser#34000
• There's a whole of thinking around privacy/security UI and user communication, iirc we had a document about this during initial impl of local node feature
• Articulating the rationale behind deciding to not allow an automatic redirect from gateway URL to IPFS address when local node is enabled

[autonome]

brave/brave-browser#34000

traffic hiding landed, so there's example implementation now