They could ship with IPFS/DAP/I2P/Tor native in Firefox right now, without any requirement of running external software, but choose not to. Instead, we get limited support for IPFS from a desktop-only addon that simply interfaces with an IPFS service already running on the host machine.
Take it a step further: Firefox could allow websites to open sockets and toss arbitrary packets around, and choose not to. If that capacity were available then Javascript could be harnessed to support all sorts of protocols and services. They could even provide Javascript access to monitoring network access point availability and connectivity management.
Imagine then a single page app you could share as an attachment through $messageService and it has all the stuff built in to create ad-hoc real networks in large gatherings that provide data resiliency against the dropping of nodes. You could have the cellular network shut down, protestors arrested, their phones taken, and the data they gathered still retained so long as any node managed to exit the area or the network itself expanded beyond the area of contention.
You have it backwards, stuff like Websockets are built by design to be incompatible with existing implementations. This is because Javascript code is untrusted/untrustworthy, and we already had a plethora of attacks due to foreign JS doing nasty things with what little they had, here's a couple examples:
> Web extensions should allow you to do normal sockets
Not since 2017 or whenever it was that Firefox dropped XUL extensions and replaced them with WebExtensions. The legacy XUL extensions could do much, much more and there was correspondingly much, much more malware in browser extensions.
The problem with that is that regular people (not super-techies) have a much better chance of understanding the implications of agreeing to microphone and webcam use than something called "socket access" - or any other more friendly term that tries to explain what's going on, because it's such a long way away from the level of abstraction that they are likely to understand.
Also not knowing if disabling it will break the page, something even technically inclined people can't know ahead of time. It's not like push notifications where you would have to try hard to build pages that could break without the feature enabled. I could easily see people abusing this to serve pages over alternate protocols and making people expect to need to click "allow."
That makes sense. Google wants users to be easily identified and tracked; elsewise their primary revenue model, surveillance capitalism, would be under threat.
>They could ship with IPFS/DAP/I2P/Tor native in Firefox right now
A bit of a tangent, but I really cannot stress enough that if you're using Tor to be private/anonymous that you should never use anything other than the official Tor browser, you will stand out like a sore thumb.
Take it a step further: Firefox could allow websites to open sockets and toss arbitrary packets around, and choose not to. If that capacity were available then Javascript could be harnessed to support all sorts of protocols and services. They could even provide Javascript access to monitoring network access point availability and connectivity management.
Imagine then a single page app you could share as an attachment through $messageService and it has all the stuff built in to create ad-hoc real networks in large gatherings that provide data resiliency against the dropping of nodes. You could have the cellular network shut down, protestors arrested, their phones taken, and the data they gathered still retained so long as any node managed to exit the area or the network itself expanded beyond the area of contention.