UX parity with with boxo/gateway for GA

[lidel]

Scope

👉 TLDR: "provide no worse experience than boxo/gateway-based gateway at dweb.link and ipfs.io"

Rationale

2026 will be the year of change. This project is the best cushion we have for real, biological human users who actually use IPFS for sharing links with other biological humans.

Not everything can be handled in web browsers, but the shortcomings should be worked around with additional UI, explainers and quality of life improvements

TODO

✨ Feature/UX Parity

• Cloudflare Snippet management #985 (page load speed)
• Error pages UX: look and contain similar debug info as boxo/gateway #875
  • subquest: Error handling UX inconsistency #817
  • subquest: Bubble up errors better #816
• URI router for registerProtocolHandler #214 (for use in ipfs-companion and ipfs-desktop handlers)
• Implement Retrieval Timeout #901
• TODO: handling big files

🐛 Bugs

• "Save as" broken: saves SW bootstrap HTML instead of IPFS data #574
• bug: missing support for some hash functions #876
• bug: we need to retain some search params #865
• bug: long CIDs are not normalized before subdomain redirect #745
• bug: dag cbor html preview rendering object properties for CID helia-verified-fetch#257
• Load CID with truncated digests #894

🌟 UX Beyond What is Currently Possible

There are things we could pick up once everything else is addressed

• Do not lose information about HTTP provider if https:// URL is pasted #814
• Add IPNS and DNSLink Support ipfs-check#113
• ux: icon for landing page #916

🗄️ Spec improvements

Things discovered while implementing that need to be changed / clarified.

• IPIP-0524: Remove cross-codec conversion from HTTP Gateways specs#524
• IPIP-0523: Prefer format request param over Accept header specs#523
• IPIP-513: Delegated Routing V1 returns 200 for empty results specs#513
• IPIP-512: Limit Identity CID Size to 128 Bytes in UnixFS Contexts specs#512

🧪 Conformance test issues

Problems with the conformance test suite, some of which prevent running individual tests against the service worker gateway

• TestRedirectsFileWithIfNoneMatchHeader uses DNSLink gateway-conformance#270
• _redirects file test requires reporting unrelated errors gateway-conformance#269
• Empty weak etag is supposed to match? gateway-conformance#261
• Spec/test mismatch gateway-conformance#260
• GET requests include Content-Type header gateway-conformance#259
• Can't skip range request tests gateway-conformance#258
• dag-json test requires X-Content-Type-Options which is not part of the spec gateway-conformance#257
• Test specifies a format param but requires the server to ignore it? gateway-conformance#256
• Unclear error messages gateway-conformance#255
• Real time streaming output gateway-conformance#249
• Test suite failure hard to distinguish from test failure gateway-conformance#250