Releases: beakerbrowser/beaker
Beaker 0.7.1
A few quick fixes and feature additions
- Added a new intro video for new users (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2B9mwRFE8U)
- Added the "Swarm debugger" to help people diagnose failed P2P connectivity (#467)
- Fix a corruption event in Dat which occurred on deletions (mafintosh/append-tree@da83f68)
- Improved reliability of P2P swarming (894362b)
- Fixed an issue where the library file-listing header would duplicate itself (329420c)
- Fixed a bug that caused the browser UI to zoom (e2eee2f)
- Fixed an exception that was caused by deleted files/folders in Dats (#463)
Beaker 0.7.0
» New Dat protocol
Thanks to the Dat Project, a new version of the Dat protocol has been added to Beaker, with:
- huge performance gains,
- file deletion now supported,
- and versioned URLs.
This update was not backwards compatible, so you’ll need to recreate any old Dats in the new version of Beaker.
» Upgraded publishing experience
Beaker now makes it extremely easy to create peer-to-peer sites with your preferred editors and build tools. Each site is given a staging folder where you can freely make changes, then publish when ready. Live-reloading is still built in.
» Updated docs site
We completely overhauled the docs on beakerbrowser.com, to include tutorials, information about the Dat protocol, better API docs, and more. Here are some of our favorite pages from the new docs:
Major changes:
- Upgraded browser shell UIs, including more clear indicators for when a site is secure/insecure.
- New dropdown menu with links to your history, bookmarks, library, and more.
- Better
beaker://library, with tools for managing your sites, a staging area to review your changes, and a view to monitor network traffic. - A new Dat protocol version, which has major performance improvements and a more featured protocol (versions, file deletion).
- A new DatArchive Web API for reading and writing Dats from the web.
- New publishing experience: you now put saved/created dats in folders on your OS, and have a git-like staging area for doing work and publishing.
- Basic P2P analytics: track the number of peers, and see peer history for the past hour.
- Native support for markdown sites.
Minor changes
- More Web Platform support (
window.prompt,onbeforeunload, custom context menus) - A “View source” view for Dat sites
- You can now set a background for your start page in beaker://settings
- The error pages for TLS errors more clearly indicate what went wrong
- Too many bugfixes to count!
Deprecations:
- Deprecated:
bkrcommand line tool. With the improved builtin publishing experience, we felt it would be better to reduce the amount of software users need to install and learn. - Deprecated: IPFS support. We’ve decided to use Dat exclusively.
NOTE: This release changed the internal data model of Beaker. Unfortunately that means your old Dats and bookmarks will be lost.
Beaker 0.6.1
Hey folks! Got a few fresh updates for you today. First, a few handy links:
» Dathttpd web server - Host sites over dat and https
» bkr - Beaker's commandline tool
» New Docs Site
Dat DNS
You can now give Dat sites a DNS shortname. You can use the new dathttpd web server to host your sites from the cloud, and take advantage of this new feature. (Read the spec here.)
Some sites to try out:
- dat://hostless.website
- dat://paulfrazee.com
- dat://taravancil.com
- dat://www.datprotocol.com
DatHTTPD
The dathttpd web server lets people visit your site over dat with a DNS shortname in Beaker, and over HTTPS in other browsers. Automatic TLS provision with LetsEncrypt, support for multiple Dat sites and for reverse proxying, and easy-to-setup analytics. Check it out!
Improved bkr command-line
There were too many improvements to list for bkr, so I'll just show my favorite new command:
$ bkr clone dat://paulfrazee.com ./paulfrazeeYou'll find bkr is now much more usable and intuitive.
New start page
We split out the builtin views (history, sites library, downloads, and etc) into individual pages, so that your new-tab interface would load faster. Then we put in a new new tab page:
New docs site
We took a couple minutes to bedazzle our docs site, so check it out. You can find a lot more information about Beaker as a whole, plus we've improved our guides for creating sites and hosting.
beakerbrowser.com/docs
Fixes and smaller updates
- Icon now looks good in Windows (#297) Thanks @pmario !
- UTF8 now renders correctly in Dat file listings (#295)
- Bumped internal Chromium to 54. Web Components v1!
- Added help menu for non-OSX operating systems (545c2c5) Thanks @pmario !
- Fixed some tab-rendering issues (330609f)
- Tab dragging now works better (a643300)
- Autofocused elements now get focus on page load (e8110c1)
Beaker 0.6.0
Excited for a new release, folks!
A big part of this release was about improving the UX. We're thinking very specifically about how we want Beaker, as a product, to work. We took inspiration from a lot of different products, including CodePen, GitHub, and even iTunes.
The other major half of this release was making fixes to the Dat protocol. We've improved our debugging techniques, and found some key issues that we've patched.
New Navbar
When you're on a Dat site, you now will see a bunch of new buttons in the URL bar. Most of these functions already existed, but they were hidden away behind two clicks (or more). We realized, despite the UI clutter, it's much better to have these tools easy to access and discover.
The Save button adds the site to your Library, where it stays for offline access and serves itself on the p2p network. If you like a site, and want to keep it forever, that's the button for you. For simplicity's sake, we've also decided that saving a site makes Beaker serve it too. (We'll keep evaluating that choice as we go.)
The Fork button lets you create a new copy of the site, under your control, which you can modify and share. That's the foundation of our goal for a more participatory Web, and we wanted it to be right there for you to use.
Live-reloading is insanely handy when you're doing site-development. I now author static sites by running bkr dev in a new directory to spawn a temporary, file-watching dat. Then I turn on live reloading and start writing the html/css/js. It's really nice. (You can get bkr via npm, https://www.npmjs.com/package/bkr.)
New Sites Library
We were never very happy with the old saved-sites interface, so when we decided to make some UX improvements, we took the opportunity to overhaul the interface entirely. Somewhere along the way we discovered whitespace and thin fonts, and the new Sites Library is the result of that.
Fixes to the Dat Protocol
We had a couple of sneaky issues that, I'm happy to say, have been solved.
The two most significant issues we discovered had to do with swarm-discovery, which I had mis-implemented in Beaker, and replication, which was failing due to an mistake in the protocol itself. The latter took some serious debugging, and resulted in a solution called "read-verification on replication."
Each of these commits include a long message explaining them, in detail:
- Read-verification on replication (1a8b345)
- Saved Dats are not autodownloaded (eaab8b2)
- Use individual swarms for dats (77e9f72)
- Saved archives are now hosted automatically (33fbb2e)
We'll keep working on Dat's reliability, and we should be releasing a self-deployable Dat hosting server soon to help with uptime.
Other Changes
- Added
beaker:internal-archivespage to provide information about the actively-swarmed Dats. This will help developers comprehend logs of dat traffic, which use a lot of different keys (6bcd28c) - Show logo in ubuntu startbar (b8647ef) Thanks @pmario !
- Support for ctrl+mousewheel to zoom in/out (9f6f137) Thanks @pmario !
Beaker 0.5.2
Beaker 0.5.1
Ok, for real this time, this is the Beaker release you can ignore. It's mostly bugfixes and API tweaks. It's really not that interesting.
Changes
- 👎 Added
bkr opencommand, andbkr devnow automatically opens the temporary site it created. (#214) - ❓ Some new default bookmarks, including the r/hashsites community (#213)
- 💩 IPFS hash URLs are now tolerant of leading or trailing slashes (#212)
- 💀 Added new dat api aliases: dat.createSite(), dat.deleteSite(), dat.listFiles(), and dat.exists()
Beaker 0.5.0
We let the schedule slip a week, because this release is SO GOOD that we had to build the suspense.
Here it is!
Command line tool: bkr
You can now command Beaker from the CLI with bkr.
This tool is super handy for developing and publishing sites on dat, so check it out.
Archive History View
@poga implemented a very handy history view on archives:
Updated Dat Web API
We simplified the Dat API.The serve() and unserve() methods are now gone, and the complicated (internal) claims system has been replaced.
We also added binary and timeout support to the APIs.
Changes
- 💻 Command line tool: bkr
- 🕐 Archive history view
- 🔩 Reliability improvements to the Dat network
- 📦 Improved Dat API
- 🌐 Improved IPFS support
Beaker 0.4.2
Not much to see here. You probably shouldn't bother updating.
.
.
.
SIKE! We've got some great updates in this release. It'll really help take your mind off your post-election blues.
Reworked Dat Management and Viewing
We gave the builtin Dat pages a total makeover. Check it out:
API for Dat sites to request Network Access
We updated the navigator.permissions API to include support for requesting network access. Now a Dat site can request permission to break the network sandbox:
navigator.permissions.request({ name: 'network', hostname: 'github.com' }).then(res => {
if (res.status === 'granted') window.location.reload() // have to reload to take effect
})
Read more in the API Docs
Changes
- 🖌 Totally reworked the builtin pages for managing and viewing Dats (#174)
- ✋ Added
navigator.permissionsAPIs for dat sites to request network access (#178) - 💩 Beaker's Web APIs now give nicer error objects (#173)
- 🚓 Better permission controls on internal RPC APIs (#177)
Fixes
Beaker 0.4.1
In 0.4.1, we expand the Dat Web API to include write methods, including writeFile and createArchive. Learn more in the documentation.
Permission Controls
Sites now retain their permission decisions:
Changes
Beaker 0.4.0
With the 0.4.x series, we begin work on Dat applications, starting with the dat Web API. We'll continue to add new APIs and application support over the coming months.
Changes
- 📕 Add
datAPI with two new methods, dat.readFile and dat.readDirectory - 📄 Dat directories without an index.html will now render a simple file-listing, instead of redirecting to the dat-viewer. Users can manually redirect using the navbar tools.