This still requires external software to operate, and isn't available on mobile. It's effectively dead in the water by not being available to use without additional configuration, by default.

I'd argue this is worse than doing nothing. This gave Firefox the ability to say they care, and yet not deliver something meaningful.

I agree. It just leads to "Oh, IPFS? I tried that years ago, it was terrible. I don't recommend trying it."

What do you think firefox could have done to improve things?

And, as someone not well versed, is there any "killer demo" that uses IPFS currently?

I'm working on a collaborative photogrammetry solution (think async/distributed 3d mapping from overlapping pictures) that shares data via IPFS. Flattering myself heavily, I believe this sort of public-data consuming application fits like nothing else.

You where going to contact me end of this week (morphle at ziggo dot nl) for the plant/species identification software: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31537487.

Your collaborative photogrammetry can be combined with the open and free species identification API and my custom OpenStreetMap data extensions and KartaView/OpenStreetCam/OpenStreetView to get more photogrammetry location integration and more free crowdsourced open data to add to photogrammetry. A demo of Seadragon/Photosynth [1] inspired me to work on this.

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_how_photosyn...

That sounds fascinating! Can you elaborate or point me to more information on it? I would love to hear your perspective on it from a real use case.

With pleasure, drop me a mail and I'll get back to you next week (last three letters of my username here @ rest of my username dot artificial intelligence). I haven't put anything online yet though sorry!