Beaker Browser is a peer-to-peer (P2P) web browser with tools for creating and hosting websites. It is based on the Chromium project but allows anyone to create and host their own website using the P2P network. This means that you won’t need any web servers for running your own website.
Obviously, there are some limitations to running a website over P2P network – firstly you cannot use server side scripts like PHP, ASPX etc., and then you cannot run CMS like WordPress or Joomla because that would require database management system such as mySQL. Finally, P2P networks might not be as robust as the powerful and resilient servers offered by web hosting companies like BlueHost or Godaddy.
Anyway, for running HTML based websites containing CSS and JavaScript, you can use Beaker Browser in the following manner:
- Create a folder on your hard drive and place your website files inside it. It should have “index.html” at the minimum.
- Launch Beaker browser, click on the menu and select Create New and then From Folder. Then select the folder containing your website files.
- After a few seconds, Beaker browser will display settings for your new website. You have to enter a title of the new website, and then click on the Review Changes button.
- It will show a list of all the newly added files. Click on the Publish All button.
- Your website is now online – you can click on the Open Site button to launch the newly published website in Beaker browser. This website uses a special dat:// based URL which works only in Beaker browser.
You have created a P2P website in a few seconds and you did not have to pay anything to any web-hosting companies. You can share your new website’s URL with other people and they will have to use the Beaker browser to visit your website.
You can download Beaker Browser from https://beakerbrowser.com/.