Most browsers have great support via the IPFS Companion ( https://docs.ipfs.io/install/ipfs-companion/ ) and that is better since it is easy to have an IPFS node running locally since it is quite efficient.
Seconding this. Unless something's changed, my experience with the default Go daemon they provide was shock at how much resources it consumed in the background. It was something like 12% CPU usage while doing nothing at all for hours on end - I wasn't even accessing any ipfs content.
Yeah I just tried downloading the latest version and it looks much better now. I remember I tried ~3 years ago or so and it was horribly inefficient, so I deleted it, then gave it another shot around a year ago and came to the same conclusion.
But yes, from running it ~10 minutes just now, it looks quite reasonable.
Yeah, they did improve it recently (within the past year or so). I see that Brave uses a gateway by default, I guess that's good for adoption but bad for decentralization. Then again, users don't care about decentralization as much as they care about convenience, so that's a good first step.