Paul Frazee returns to discuss the evolution of Beaker - the peer-to-peer browser for web hackers. Just released as a public beta, Beaker has gone through a lot of changes since October when we last chatted. Paul tells us about what Beaker is and some of the important concepts, such as feeds, the file system, and starting to create things on top of them.
On the surface, Beaker looks like a standard web browser with some unusual buttons, but just below the UI there’s a lot of peer-to-peer technology, a serverless model of the web where you can just as easily edit, add, and remix as you can browse.
Beaker feels like a tool to make the web open and easily editable - something anyone can pick up and start hacking on without strange hurdles of server setups, package management, hosting fees, and build scripts.
We also talk about the very iterative and open development process of Beaker, and the high value of user testing. Paul talks about some of the many interesting problems left to solve, and the reasons why they’re better solved later.
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Links
Paul Frazee
The last episode
Beaker browser
Bittorrent
The hypercore protocol
Decentralized web summit
Electron
Chromium
IPFS
RSS
peersockets
Documentation for Beaker
Codepen
Web components
Hyperdrive
Markdown
Iframe
Globbing patterns
JSON-LD - JSON standard for linking data
RDF
Microformats
Append-only log
Secure scuttlebutt
Mathias Buus
Andrew Osheroff
Devops
Eventual consistency
Hashbase
Unwalled.garden spec
Ink & switch
Gateway browser - mobile browser for building the P2P web. Alpha coming soon!
Titles
A peer-to-peer browser for web hackers
Bittorrent 2.0
No servers involved
Almost an IDE in itself
Open up the creative side of web development
Lowering the barrier to hackcess
Standards all the way down
Empower userland
That’s what we’re trying to do: give developers new problems
New problems of their own choosing
Pulling it from Denmark
You don’t need a server for it
Only superficially like other browsers
The answer is “maybe”
Your personal anchor
Plane wifi is getting pretty good
What you choose to put in front of people
Lots of auditability
