Beaker is a discontinued
free and open-source web browser
A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used o ...
developed by Blue Link Labs. Beaker Browser
peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network. They are said to form a peer-to-peer ...
technology allows users to
self-publish
Self-publishing is the publication of media by its author at their own cost, without the involvement of a publisher. The term usually refers to written media, such as books and magazines, either as an ebook or as a physical copy using POD (pri ...
websites and
web app
A web application (or web app) is application software that is accessed using a web browser. Web applications are delivered on the World Wide Web to users with an active network connection.
History
In earlier computing models like client-serve ...
s directly from the browser, without the need to set up and administrate a separate
web server or host their content on a third-party server. All files and websites are transferred using
Dat, a hypermedia peer-to-peer protocol, which allows files to be shared and hosted by several users. The browser also supports the
HTTP protocol to connect to traditional servers.
Beaker is built using the
Electron
The electron ( or ) is a subatomic particle with a negative one elementary electric charge. Electrons belong to the first generation of the lepton particle family,
and are generally thought to be elementary particles because they have no ...
framework and therefore uses the
Chromium browser as a renderer for webpages.
Content sharing
Files stored in a local folder can be published as a Dat website and made accessible to other users through the peer-to-peer protocol.
The files are
seeded from the local folder while the browser is active. To make them also available while the browser is closed, the user may use several alternative options to host the content:
* Ask other users of the browser to share a copy. The content will be accessible as long as any of the users are using the Beaker browser.
* Publish the content through a third-party server.
* Create a permanent self-hosted ''homebase'' server
for the Dat protocol, and publish the content in it.
See also
*
Dat (software)
Dat () is a data distribution tool with a version control feature for tracking changes and publishing data sets. It is primarily used for data-driven science, but it can be used to keep track of changes in any data set. As a distributed rev ...
*
Comparison of web browsers
*
Peer-to-peer web hosting
Peer-to-peer web hosting is using peer-to-peer networking to distribute access to webpages. This is differentiated from the client–server model which involves the distribution of web data between dedicated web servers and user-end client comput ...
*
Distributed computing
A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed computing is a field of computer sci ...
References
{{Portal bar, Internet
2017 software
Peer-to-peer software
Cross-platform web browsers
Free web browsers
MacOS web browsers
Linux web browsers
Windows web browsers