The protocol has several advantages over HTTP. One of the big ones is that it promises to make web browsing faster, as you can access sites through nearby nodes, instead of servers in distant locations. This can also reduce operating costs for publishers, as they won’t have to invest so much in expensive server hosting. However, by far the most significant way in which IPFS could change the internet is that it would make it more difficult for governments to censor specific websites.
“Today, web users worldwide are unable to access restricted content, including, for example, parts of Wikipedia in Thailand, more than 100,000 blocked sites in Turkey and critical access to COVID-19 information in China,” said Molly Mackinlay, IPFS lead project. “Now, anyone with an Internet connection can access this critical information through IPFS in the Brave browser.”
Likewise, IPFS would also make sites more resistant to the type of enforcement action that we saw Amazon take against Parler earlier this month. Of course, more browsers will need to adopt and implement the protocol before this is a realistic possibility. With 24 million active users per month, Brave is a growing player in the browser space, but it is far from the biggest. It would take a giant like Chrome, which has had 1 billion users since 2016, to make the decentralized web a real possibility.
You can start accessing IPFS content by installing version 1.19 of Brave, which is available for download starting today.