Puma News

Puma Newsletter #01 📰

Toby Nelson

April 19, 2021

Greetings web browsers, privacy aficionados, and micropayment enthusiasts! We'd like to welcome you to the debut edition🥇of the Puma Newsletter 📰! Here we will be providing regular updates to our users on new features, changes in the greater Web Browser / Web Monetization / Coil ecosystem, links to important news articles, blog posts, tweets, and more. We are excited to kick this brand new newsletter off and we are grateful to have you follow along with us. 🎉

New Puma Features

Some exciting new Puma Browser features shipped between the end of 2020 and today! Let’s begin by introducing a few of them.

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HNS Support

We are excited to announce a preview of HNS support in Puma Browser!

HNS, or “Handshake”, is a new decentralized, permissionless naming protocol that is an alternative to several key aspects of the traditional DNS-based naming system. The benefits of Handshake are numerous, such as ownership, lower costs, security, and censorship resistance among others.

To resolve a Handshake name in Puma, simply open a new tab, and enter the Handshake name like you would any URL. Be sure to include the trailing slash “/” at the end of the name, as this is how Puma differentiates between Handshake names and regular search terms.

With Handshake names, you can also enjoy decentralized profiles via dLinks, powered by Handshake, Namebase, and Sia Tech. Get a decentralized profile up in minutes that is owned by you and resistant to censorship and takedowns.

See The Namebase Learning Center for more info on Handshake, Namebase, dLinks and more.

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Default Browser Setting

You can now set Puma as your default browser in iOS!

Navigate to Settings->Puma Browser and choose the “Default Browser App” item. Select “Puma Browser” from the list and you’re done! Now any web link will automatically open in Puma Browser, keeping your browsing private and secure!

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Netscape Theme

After you set Puma as your default browser, consider a dive into Puma’s settings to customize your new browsing experience. We recently added a fun throwback to the early days of the web with our new “Netscape” theme. To enable, open Puma Browser and tap the hamburger menu on the bottom of your browser. From here, navigate to Settings->Theme and choose “Netscape”.

Feel free to play around with other options while you’re here and get your browsing experience just the way you like it!

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IPFS Support

Back in September, we debuted IPFS support for iOS. IPFS (short for InterPlanetary File System) is, according to ipfs.io, “a distributed system for storing and accessing files, websites, applications, and data.” IPFS allows users to access information not by its address, but instead by its contents. Information served by IPFS is distributed, which supports a resilient internet, combats censorship, and leads to faster load times amongst many other benefits.

Learn more about IPFS at https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/what-is-ipfs/

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Introducing Our Brand New Blog!

We are excited to announce the launch of our new blog! There you can find long and short-form posts on topics related to browsers, tech, web monetization, and many other topics.

A few weeks before the new year we debuted this new section of our website, kicking things off with a post recapping The Future of Micropayments Conference. This conference was the first on the topic of Web Monetization - the technology behind Coil and Puma Browser. Web Monetization or “micropayments”, as some of you already know, is your way of making continual, small payments to sites as you browse the web, either with Puma Browser or with the Coil extension in another browser.

Our founder, Yuriy Dybskiy spoke at the conference, giving a brief overview of Puma Browser, along with an intro to some exciting new features. Watch his presentation here and check the playlist of the rest of the conference talks here.

Next we announced the newest addition to the Puma Browser team. You may know Amber Case as an author, calm tech advocate, or conference speaker among many other roles she takes on. We are proud to announce that Case has joined Puma as a strategic advisor! Read about her background, how she met Puma’s founder, and her decision to join the team here!

And more recently we expanded the blog even further with another long-form piece on the greater web monetization ecosystem and its changes over the past year. There were a lot of major events and happenings, both big and small in 2020 and we touched on everything we felt was relevant to our users.

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Ecosystem News and Updates

W3C Receives Grant from Grant for the Web

W3C was a recent grantee from Grant for the Web, receiving a $268,700 prize! The prize is an effort to “help ensure that the Grant for the Web program, grantees, and community shape an emerging Web Monetization ecosystem favorable to open standardization.” We at Puma share their enthusiasm for W3C and are excited to see how this affects the micropayments ecosystem in the year ahead.

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Mozilla Welcomes New Fellows

Mozilla, along with Coil, has welcomed two new fellows: Amber Case and Matt Mankins! Per the announcement, Case and Mankins will “reimagine new models and approaches for sustaining web content that is not reliant on advertising.”

Congratulations to Case and Mankins! We hope to see them carry out their goal to envision new, sustainable web payment models and end reliance on advertising.
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Thank you! 🙏

Stay tuned for future updates and news related to Puma Browser and the greater web monetization ecosystem. Thanks for reading and supporting Puma Browser!

Sincerely,

The Puma Browser Team 🐾