An article to understand the Web3 browser

An article on understanding the Web3 browser These days, it only takes a few minutes on the Internet to hear about Web3. These days, it only takes a few minutes on the Internet to hear about Web3. 　　However, it is not as easy to get or as ubiquitous as it sounds. Some Web3 properties and services require you to understand the moving parts involved, such as cryptocurrency wallets, dApps (decentralized applications like the OpenSea NFT marketplace), and the blockchains they run on. 　　While this may sound complicated (and some are), most Web3 experiences are still built on open web technologies that you can access through a decent old browser. 　　In today's world (we're not exactly a Web3 society), when we type in the address of a website, we rely on our browser to handle all the complex backend stuff and take us to our destination in cyberspace. 　　While we still use the same applications to access Web3, we have to do a lot of preparation (from having a wallet to accessing the right protocols) to experience the decentralized world. Ideally, all of this should be handled by these browsers, but that's not the case yet. 　　Before discussing all of these issues in detail, we'll revert to some of the terminology in this article. It may take you a while to get familiar with them, so I've included a brief (and probably over-simplified) explanation of some of these terms here. 　Some basic Web3 concepts Wallet. A cryptocurrency wallet that stores different tokens, such as Bitcoin, Ether, and Matic. The wallet shows you the tokens you have, and you can send them to other people. dApps. decentralized applications that run on blockchain protocols. 　　Blockchain. decentralized protocol of the Web3 project. It can be thought of as a public ledger that records all transactions. Nowadays there are many different blockchain technologies and various projects and applications can run on it. 　　Smart Contracts. Slices of programs on the blockchain that are executed when the terms of the agreement specified therein are met. For example, in the analog world, a document between the buyer and the seller of a house. In the Web3 world, it is not a lawyer, but a program that checks whether all conditions of the contract are met. 　　IPFS: Interplanetary File System is a network of peer-to-peer storage protocols. It works in a decentralized way, so you don't have to worry about whether a server is working or not. When you try to access a file, IPFS tries to access its contents directly, not the location of the contents. 　　Non-hosted wallets. The service provider/browser does not store the key to your wallet. You must remember your 12-character secret phrase in order to recover your wallet on another device. 　　For hosted services like Gmail or Twitter, you can simply click "Forget Password" to generate a new password to access your account. For unhosted wallets like MetaMask, if you forget the phrase, you will never be able to access your account. 　A brief history of the browser and Web3 If you browse a website on the browser, it is the result of the software processing various functions, from resolving the website address to extracting the content from the server where the website is located. 　　The idea is that the browser is just a window to the Internet. This means that you only need to store the least amount of data on your computer and do the least amount of processing to access websites and applications. 　　The Web3 browser is more than that. Ideally, it's just an empty shell, with all the other necessary tools pulled from a decentralized network. 　　Fabian Vogelsteller, founder of blockchain infrastructure company Lukso, said in 2015 that the team at the Ether Foundation was trying to build a true blue Web3 browser called Mist. it was just an empty shell based on Electron development. 　　The idea of a real dApp is to run the code on your local machine and then use a hash reference (such as IPFS) to extract data from a decentralized store. You can download the source code from a trusted source and run the program locally. Its backend is composed of smart contracts. 　　But the problem with this approach is that it runs a complete node in the block chain, so when you start the browser, it needs to synchronize all the block data created in the chain when you go offline. This process can be very slow. As an end-user, you certainly don't want to wait for this process just to visit a website. What the old Mist browser looked like Problems like this, combined with the insecure nature of the Electron platform, prompted the team to shut down the browser project in 2019. This raises the question of how existing browsers handle the decentralized web. 　Current browsers In their current form, modern browsers can handle Web3 applications, but you may need to make some preparations to access them. 　　For example, if you use Chrome, you must install a wallet extension like Metamask to connect to dApps, and in order to access some Web3 domains, you need to modify your DNS settings. 　　There are some browsers, such as Opera and Brave, that offer some native Web3 experience with built-in wallet and Web3-based domain support. In addition