# Ethereum Mist - Progress and Challenges Ahead (Devcon4)

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2019-10-09
- Duration: 17:37
- Topics: blockchain, smart contracts, distributed ledger, Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-rKoaiYYoNs4
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKoaiYYoNs4

## Description

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https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/4/ethereum-mist-progress-and-challenges-ahead

In this talk, the Mist team shows the year in recap, with milestones and interesting challenges ahead.

Speaker(s): Everton Fraga, Alex Van de Sande, Marc Garreau, Philipp Langhans, Ryan Ghods
Skill level: Intermediate
Track: UX & Design
Keywords: mist, developers

Follow us: https://twitter.com/efdevcon, https://twitter.com/ethereum
Learn more about devcon: https://www.devcon.org/
Learn more about ethereum: https://ethereum.org/ 

Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers. 
Devcon 4 was held in Prague, Czech Republic on Oct 30 - Nov 2, 2018.
Devcon is organized and presented by the Ethereum Foundation, with the support of our sponsors. To find out more, please visit https://ethereum.foundation/

## Transcript

very kind of a diverse team people from you know all around and I speak for mist itself and that and the theme community as a whole so let's you know move with a web 3 echo system and let's talk a little bit about the current landscape of it so we've got mist which is a concept browser I can tell you more about this later of course we've got the amazing meta mask which is a it's not only an extension they are much more than that more they talk more about some other new projects on the second the same room we also have a brave browser that joined this deco system you know two years ago opera which recently launched the betta which has web 3 access you know opera is still the fifth major browser worldwide and this is actually pretty big so we have wallets and some mobile experiences well mobiletrans browsers ciphers that is of course coinbase and the list is growing can I have this all right maybe that's too far oh yeah so let's talk about miss history and updates actually actually this is our fifth Def Con we've heard here since the start Alex which is there he presented the vision and and Alex presented a vision and then inspired lots of developers all around the community to build other things on it and around it we good oh yeah so that's Gavin and Alex you know several years ago they've gone zero and then they've gone one can we have it oh yeah DEFCON one and then while miss was a better you know structured concept we got you know lots of wireframes and all and then came the few mullet oh yeah DEFCON two three that's me and four so I like to you know make a little bit of advertising here there are some interesting talks from our former and current team members so there's universal logins by Alex later today this room introducing formality by Victor maíam browser web 3.0 how to be secured by three clients that's actually a missed thing and here's our current team we got Phillip myself mark Alex and Ryan we managed to grow the team actually we were you know some dark you know times where we had you know two developers now we thanks to the foundation we've got plenty of them let's talk about things that we've done this year so there comes a time where a user executes a transaction so that's actually one thing that should be really carefully thought about so we've put lots of thought into that because executing transactions is actually the biggest emotion of picking the user experience picture that you're you know three 100,000 ether well I'm pretty sure that your hands would be sweaty you know you're deploying a mood to sig wallet that can be dangerous sometimes so in order to know to to design and oh thank you guys in order to design a pretty and useful and transaction window we had to you know the user has to know at a glance what's happening it has to be around crafted interface with pretty clear instructions this is not it this is how it used to be but we were pretty you know by the time we did that we were pretty happy with that but now we're changing this just something you know more clear more you know straightforward but it doesn't end that of course you can transfer you know tokens you can execute functions and we are you know growing a bit further than that well the user types password execuse transaction then we can have you know this kind of description thanks to nice back roads back also you know thanks to ENS we can have these kind of more description descriptive information about addresses so yeah this is all new transaction window we we gather and makes lots of information together so we've got gas estimation pricey currency feat function API signatures at spec and in yet Yanis lookup address lookup well syncing that's a major issue back back in time back then we one could sink the blockchain in a matter of minutes so we know how it is the state of its of this nowadays and we used to have this loading screen it was actually needed because otherwise all the taps that subscribe it to block new blocks without being bombarded by you know events from from the node so in order to cope with that and to meet user expectations we could have you know make the bass loader screen in the world I'm pretty sure that no one would stare at it for you know more than five minutes so we had to be creative and we devised that a mechanism to to have two syncing mechanisms one with a remote node you can see in food over there and a background sync using go with you my client or has sync and when this node was up to date it would take over the connection as a main one so ideally the user to wait a little time to see and interact with the bar chain when the node takes over it would be you know in a totally secure environment totally a centralized fashion oh yeah hi Peter that's responsible for the light client and agree with you so we've got this which we call their notes instantly connected to the barge a via remote provider like line syncing in the background and well when it up today it just takes over the connection we implemented a transaction history window which will gather all transactions made in the browser which is pretty convenient for the app developers because they wouldn't have to implement that themselves within the their websites using our web 31.0 with WebSockets implemented and there are some breaking changes to to how we connect with the web sites actually this is coordinated effort so misuse it to inject web 3j as within the Dom so we don't do that anymore that subsidy that developers to to choose which versions they reuse and then we would only provide the web 3 that current provider this is now changing to window dot ëthere only for simplicity sake so here we can have the method that will request accounts and then in mist this window will pop up which we can you can you know have or create a new account or select one or multiple accounts you want to provide 2d to the website right yeah so in order to implement the change will be simple we have to instance to make by three with this kind of connection pretty simple change and this is convenient way to access blockchain resources this is actually a collaboration effort madam asked and lots of other players are on this same boat you guys can point your devices to this QR code to see more you know in-depth documentation we are about to roll out in the next week's and while of course there's a PR for that we are also making some deep architecture changes this is how miss looks at the moment okay we've got a browser shell which we use electron we've got the back end mating nodejs and the front end meteor those are all tightly coupled that makes quite difficult for us to to experiment new technologies to you know especially when there are you know some security concerns which in our industry is fairly common so we're changing too this kind of model so we have totally isolated a really thin browser shell still using electron at this moment but the main process will be separated and the front end will being react and that will allow us to make such changes we can have lots of updates frequent ones dislike continues delivery mechanisms in the web development so you can have you know lots of updates the user world you can subscribe to those kind of updates and of course with the user constant we will it will be as simple as a browser reload but you're using an a desktop application then we can update all the main process and eventually when we've got new browser shell versions you'll update only that again but hey why are you still using electron if you're building a browser that is so true we agree with that and this is a tweet from young from brave browser they just got rid of electrum altogether and we're playing to do so as well but we came you know with a different solution we're using chromium embedded framework in a project called Tao which I highly recommend you guys to watch Phillip talk would be on day which day and time you guys hear that tomorrow at 2:00 I think we'd be here in that same room right okay so regarding these deep architecture changes I think in practice what can bring us to instead of a eight a megabyte update at least you'd be like you know less than five megabyte updates for the UI no that's less than a wide image and you can do that you know frequently we can put our continuous delivery server to work for you so increase it cross OS testing effort today is actually a pain for us so we can get rid of this altogether making those frequent releases for the interface and today we put this creative burden of validating the checksums to the users I think that is not really fair because you know sometimes it requires some tooling additional tooling you know command line instructions and we can make it better with automatic checksum validation module level a bit more about transparency we got some feedback saying that well a road map wasn't quite public people sometimes would know exactly what we were working on so yeah we now have medium publications we've got this one public polls there we've got three more you know just about to be published so if you guys can follow that as there you see our road map would moved from close an application to github projects and well today I created if you're miss from Twitter so you know it has zero followers but you can can be the first no formal guys so how to contribute to this project and to this web a consistent well we have such an amazing community we can see from from protocol design studies research and how they interact with each other really using I guess if the research website and some forums and chats but here about web protocols and changes in discussions we mainly use the use Ethier Magicians the org website and the EIP is which you're probably familiar with already also we have well a pool requests are pretty welcome we can guide you in your own adventure and I have you know this is something that should be you know exposed at least from every oh yeah yeah that's it if we don't stop relying on put any centralized service not just in forever because we're loving foot it but you know that's I think that's too much on their shoulders the vision of a few failed is like defeating the Purple's so I think we should you know give more attention and and to those new projects like line sensation in cubed that note Vinod denote there's madam asked project which I can't pronounce maybe's was that color maybe well of course universal logins and meta transactions which you know can remove the burden off of the user interfaces altogether so remember guys d stands for decentralized so that that's you know for your own website where you you know is about to to publish it is about you which kind of services you connect to this is exactly what we're here for yeah so you know there's a bit yeah a bit more about our features missed really wants you to have any real with your node in your computer even it's like line for ultralight client in a possible future use of swarm communication layer and yes we can read ens content hosted also arm so that's pretty much it guys so the web through progress is so exciting and this is so proud to be part of it mm-hmm so thank you so much have fun [Applause] you