Spore

A browser inside the browser. Sites live in torrents, so reading one helps host it. No server and no account: your files go to readers, not to a host.

Visit a site

Paste a magnet link or an infohash somebody shared with you. It is fetched from whoever has it, not from a web host.

Publish your own

A folder, a .zip of one, or a page and its files. Relative links, and an index.html if you have one. It is hashed here in your browser, and this tab becomes its first seed.

You will be asked whether to sign it before it goes out. Signing is what lets you release a new version later, and lets readers check it really came from you.

Spore resists takedowns, not observation: peers in a swarm can see each other's IP addresses. It is not an anonymity tool.

Sign this site?

Who published this

Your name for this key, stored only in this browser and never published. Two people can call themselves the same thing; the key is the part that cannot be copied. Naming one you have reason to trust is how you tell them apart later.

A signature proves the key, not the person. It shows this site was published by whoever holds that key, and that it has not been altered since. It says nothing about who they are, and the name= a site declares is their own claim about themselves.

This browser cannot isolate sites the usual way

Spore normally shows a site inside a sandboxed frame. This browser refuses to serve one: the page would arrive from the network instead of from the swarm, which is why nothing renders. Every browser on iOS behaves this way, because they all use the same engine.

Sites can still be shown, without that frame. Most of the protection does not come from it:

Scripts
still impossible, and the per-site switch is withdrawn here
Images, fonts, requests
still confined to the site's own torrent
A site navigating itself away
still blocked
Reading another site's files
still refused
A link you click
can open an outside tab, and that site sees your IP address

That last line is the whole difference, and it needs a deliberate click. Nothing happens on its own. Spore does not hide your IP from the peers you download from either, so this is a smaller change than it sounds — but it is a real one, and it is yours to make.

There is no page to open

There is no index.html at the top of this, and no single page that could become one, so Spore cannot tell where a visitor should land.

Published as it is, this becomes a browsable list of files rather than a site: readers see the names below and open them one at a time. That is a real thing to publish. It is just rarely what someone means by a website.

A file list cannot be signed, so this one will go out unsigned and can never be offered a newer version: a reader's check reads the signature from beside the entry page, and there is no entry page.

To get a page instead: name the one readers should land on index.html, or publish only that page — a single page is published as index.html whatever it is called.

Diagnostics

Reset unregisters Spore's service worker and deletes everything it has stored in this browser, including sites kept offline. It does not touch anything else, and it is the cure for a Spore left in a bad state by an older version.