David Vorick Expressed:  Quick update on the Skynet browser extension. Initially the goal was to create a trustless gateway to access Skynet. But as we started poking around, we made some discoveries.

This is the first time in my professional life that I’ve taken a serious look at web browser development. And I am surprised to be reporting that it is an incredibly powerful toolkit, powerful in ways I’ve never seen anyone talk about before.

The web browser is a battle hardened app environment. It is a place where a user in the course of a single day can end up running 100 different untrusted, often malicious applications, all running right next to each other, trying to steal data, add tracking, and inject malware.

Because of this, the web browser has been forced to add robust sandboxing and communication protocols. The sandboxing between applications in Firefox and Chrome is better than anything you can find in Windows or Linux, or those other guys (*BSDs, etc)

It also happens to be entirely ubiquitous. I would say that anything smarter than a toaster can run a web browser, but there are actually toasters today that can run web browsers too.

When you add Skynet to the mix, you have this thing that has better application isolation than a linux server, is fully ubiquitous across all devices (iphone, android, mac, linux, windows, and even things like the Nintendo Switch), and has a means to share state across devices.

This is what made the cloud so powerful in the first place. Your experience on Twitter, Coinbase, Youtube, etc is the same regardless of which device you are using. It’s the same even on your friend’s device. There’s nothing to install, it all just works. It’s all convenient.

Skynet browser extension. I’ve spent the last month diving into browser code and having conversations with some of the best web engineers in the world, including some of the people who worked on Javascript itself.

And so we’ve switched gears. All the derpy ‘does it even work’ PoC code is being re-written as high grade professional code as we prepare to push out the first version of the browser extension alongside the first version of the Skynet kernel.

One of the cooler things we’ve figured out is how to bootstrap the OS from a static piece of code. If all goes well, the first version of the browser extension we publish will also be the last. Users should never need to upgrade their extension after the first install.

This is also good for browsers that want to support Skynet natively. The burden on browser maintainers is to audit and install a single extension that amounts to around 1000 lines of code. And then it should be set-and-forget.

The other great thing we’ve figured out is how to accomplish all of this **without** a browser extension. Users don’t need to install anything to use a Skynet OS that works on every device.

The _only_ thing that the browser extension does is verify that the bootstrap code being served from Siasky is correct. If you can verify the bootstrap code, you step into a pure-web world that is fully trustless.

If you don’t have the extension, you are trusting Siasky to serve the correct code, but nothing more.

So the work is continuing. Can’t promise any deadlines yet, as we are a small, resource constrained team (we’ve raised a total of less than $10 million in the 8 years we’ve been building) that’s also running a high reliability, high speed CDN for webapps, but it’s coming.

And honestly, it’s quite a rush. The future is crypto. The future is the web browser. The future is Skynet. All working together to create an experience that will make web2 feel like using the telegraph. This is ground zero for the biggest tech explosion in human history.

Community Response:  So David, SkynetOS – with Linux micro image booting from non-rewritable burnt memory and operating ram, with all re-writable storage on Skynet, and all applications through browser and app stores?

Especially if the OS image boots through fixed revision, checksum and signature checked, secure memory chip – and the only application access is through browser, I don’t think we can get more secure (and truly distributed) than this. Absolutely brilliant I must say.

So surprising to hear of the opportunities you are finding! Indicative of the problem: They pillaged and plundered to build a web for profit, And, left the gems for the right people. They never pay attention, to that, which really matters. There’s no doubt you’ll succeed.

This was much easier when I just had to pick between Netscape and AOL.

Should we buy SiaCoin for investment purposes? Can Home screen be ported to a native app?