This is old news but I have lingering browser tabs about it, so I guess that means it gets a post!

After many months without updates the Beaker browser has been officially archived.

I had a lot of hopes for this kind of “no-backend” peer-to-peer web app tool, but never felt like I was quite ready to jump in. To my (subjective) reading from the outside, Beaker was always not-quite-stable, with pivots happening from major feature to major feature. I recall that “solving multi-writer” was always a critical missing feature, and it was always over one horizon or the next.

I recognize that many core bits of Beaker live on. A lot of the good decentralized-plumbing stuff continues to improve in the hyper ecosystem. I also have high hopes for Agregore as a spiritual successor - a browser for “local-first” decentralized web apps that takes the extremely cool step of mapping the complexity of several decentralized protocols to well understood HTTP methods via fetch APIs.

Still, with the loss of Beaker I feel like we’re now missing a complete tool that allows hacking on something locally (even with media), and be able to share and collaborate on it simply by sharing a link.

I wonder what will be the next home of something like Duxtape (source). Or Paperize, but without Google Drive on the backend.