THE WORLD COMPUTER BROWSER

Here’s a list of past efforts toward creating a web3 browser from the Swarm team, with Purity being the closest to achieving this goal. While Swarm Network can assist in retrieving mutable content, it alone cannot provide the full functionality required for a true web3 browser. Additional components, such as efficient Ethereum clients, are needed to realize a complete web3 browsing experience.

Swarm Desktop

https://github.com/ethersphere/swarm-desktop

The Swarm desktop app, rather than functioning as a browser, is better described as a packaging project designed to facilitate the downloading and running of the Bee Dashboard, which is available at https://github.com/ethersphere/bee-dashboard. This distinction is critical because it emphasizes the need for Swarm to avoid the challenges faced by Mist, focusing instead on providing a streamlined, user-friendly experience for accessing Swarm Network.

It can be seamlessly tied into web3 browsers due to its simplicity as a JavaScript application.

Swarm Chromium Extension

https://github.com/ethersphere/swarm-extension

It leveraged web3 security concepts offering users decentralized access without needing to leave their familiar browsing environment. However, the project was ultimately stopped due to the introduction of Google's Manifest V3 for Chrome extensions: stricter security policies plus significant changes in how extensions interact with web pages, made it difficult for decentralized services like Swarm to function within the browser environment.

Purity Browser

https://github.com/nugaon/purity

Purity was a web3 browser aimed at enabling decentralized web applications (dApps) on IPFS by rendering content directly from the network. It focused on utilizing a distributed content delivery model where applications and data are stored and retrieved from IPFS and Ethereum. The primary idea behind Purity was to offer a seamless experience for interacting with dApps without relying on centralized servers in a new web security environment.

It faced significant technical challenges, including:

• Lack of Efficient Ethereum Light Client: The absence of a lightweight, fast Ethereum client meant that users experienced delays, a significan flaw from a UX perspective.
• Mutable Content Retrieval: Another obstacle was retrieving mutable content quickly from IPNS (InterPlanetary Name System), which required central services or constant user online presence. Due to these hurdles, the Purity project was discontinued.

Moving Forward

Recently, Swarm has developed various mutable content logic with proper retrieval speed and it has worked out a storage incentive system allows that to "upload and disappear".

Ideally, for any Mist2 broswer, if the chain state could be fetched from Swarm and shouldn't wait for sync from active Ethereum nodes, would solve many of the technical hurdles. There was a thread written in Ethresear.ch in this regard.