Shoutout to Chromium, Ungoogled-Chromium, Sovrin, Hyperledger, IPFS, Brave and Firefox teams
It’s a proud moment for us, designing and developing qikfox Safe Browser has been a labor of love for last 1 year plus. In this moment of joy and accomplishment, we have to call out all those giants whose body of work has been instrumental in helping us get to the finish line and deliver a relatively mature product with a small team. There was no way we could have accomplished all that we did without direct or indirect help from the amazing engineering these teams have put in place.
Chromium Team: Well, whatever praise we shower on Google Chromium team is less. They have worked hard for over a decade to unshackle the web from lousy protocols, lame renderers, process related vulnerabilities, and advancing web technologies and managing to drive de-facto standards at W3C. Finally, open sourcing all this goodness with minimal to no restrictions. Without their hard work, none of the modern browsers would have been possible, almost none. Our only beef with them comes from ads, tracking, Floc, and Fledge but in my heart I am convinced that if it were left to the engineers in the Chromium team, all these anomalies would have been long gone but then they serve the grand-poobahs of Google Search. It is funny to see privacy folks at Google huff and puff and be the scapegoats of all the ire directed towards floc and fledge. I would not envy anyone in that role.
Brave Team: Brave is a privacy oriented browser and at qikfox we have a very similar vision. Both teams agree that Privacy, Safety and Security is the key to a pleasant and trustworthy web browsing experience. It would be unfair if we did not thank them for all the good work they have done around privacy. We have learnt a lot from Brave team — from their continuous integration pipeline to ad and privacy blockers, we have consumed a number of open source artifacts from their body of work. In some areas, they are amazing and in others, trailblazers. Yet, we think our approach is distinct and more rounded when it comes to safeguarding the consumers on web. Let the best team win. Regardless, we have tremendous respect for the work they have put in, especially Peter Snyder. Way to go, keep going friends, your work truly makes this world a better place. And thank you — we learnt a lot from your CI pipeline, your team made our life easy in more ways than one. Your rust code is not that rusty after all. Thumbs up for the privacy guard, greaselioning and injecting scripts into web pages for a noble cause. That's how it all starts, isn’t it?
Sovrin Team: Decentralized Identity, in our view, is the cornerstone of next generation peer-to-peer Internet and Sovrin team has been a leader in the space and has helped refine Decentralized Identity Specs, DID foundation and related projects. We have learnt much from them. While implementing our own DID Network, their body of work acted as an early guide. Though we have a distinct (and in our view more robust) implementation of DID, we have learnt much from Sovrin team. Thank you for that. A piece of unsolicited advice for Sovrin team — Get rid of the token and the gas, else Microsoft and IBM will eat the lunch that you prepared.
Hyperledger Team: Well, with the power of blockchain and experience of IBM behind them, Hyperledger is one of the more serious blockchain ecosystems today. Our Identity Chain will be based on Indy and we will always be indebted to the Hyperledger community for all the trailblazing work they have done towards creation of serious permissioned-chains (not littered with Vitalik leaks — for the uninitiated; a Vitalik leak happens when a bunch of young engineers innovate without enterprise enablement imperatives in mind — the resultant software is littered with Vitalik leaks which take years to fix, if not decades). Yeah, its recursive, you need to use a Vitalik leak to explain a Vitalik leak. Jokes apart, shoutout to Hyperledger community — thank you for all the good work. We are rooting for you.
IPFS Team: Thank you for evangelizing content based addressing. Though it has been around for a while, but IPFS team has done a great job bringing spotlight on content based addressing with IPFS CIDs. We have learnt much from the IPFS project — what to do and what not to do as well! Regardless of how content based addressing and decentralized storage+hosting will evolve, IPFS team deserves much credit for a decisive push towards decentralized storage (file system). When Cloudflare type hosting providers start to host IPFS gateways, it makes you think — What did IPFS do right? and What did they do wrong? Tim-Berner-Lee thought exactly the same thing when he was thinking about independent web servers hosting content. A globally distributed digital kumbaya. Good luck to IPFS team — hopefully they are working towards controlling spam on decentralized nodes. We learnt much from the IPFS team and we will always be thankful for all the learnings. Smart Stacks (our answer to IPFS) is in the making and we don’t think of IPFS as a competition, the real competition comes from the reliability of the cloud and enterprise hosting. The team that solves that first, will win.
Ungoogled-Chromium Team: Last but not the least, ungoogled team led the way in ripping out intrusive analytics and making sure that web community can be saved from the perils of being tracked by the big tech. Their tweaks, rip-outs and patches have been really helpful in ensuring that consumer’s privacy can be safeguarded. We researched and learnt much from their work. qikfox Safe browser incorporates some of their patches.
Once again, a heartfelt thanks to the open source community and these amazing teams, qikfox would not have been possible without them. We are indebted and hopefully the credits will reflect that. We hope to contribute back sooner than later as soon as our stack matures.
/tarungaur
CEO, qikfox, Inc.
