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Requiring users to install another browser like Mist, is too much of a barrier for any kind of mainstream adoption.

What are potential solutions and how close are they in actual practicality?

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One solution is to use browser plugins like Metamask that acts as a gateway to a public node, along with client-side key management and transaction signing.

Once light clients are available, browser plugins could possibly be even more secure.

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  • There's an insightful presentation on Metamask, here. – Richard Horrocks Jan 21 '16 at 22:31
  • Isn't metamask putting decentralization in danger? – Afr Jan 22 '16 at 7:11
  • You can chose to connect to any node in Metamask. So if you feel endangered just point it to a node you trust. – digitaldonkey Jan 30 '17 at 1:17
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You can simply access DApps with your regular browser (crhome, firefox) as long as you have a working ethereum node running which allows rpc cors requests.

It is not the most secure way but it works and is good to introduce regular users to the topic. For testing, just browse to http://etherid.org/ and get started. Or check other available DApps.

If they dont want to run an ethereum node on their machine, you are probably not understanding the benefits of decentralization. But yeah, that's maybe why we need light clients.

In Microsoft Azure it's already possible to install a node with one click. I dont know why this should not be available for other environments soon, too?

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    If we're assuming that users won't install another browser, they certainly wont install a command line client that takes up 2 GB of hard drive space and needs to sync for hours before use. – Tjaden Hess Jan 21 '16 at 22:00
  • That's why we need light clients. – Afr Jan 22 '16 at 7:10

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