Because DNS over HTTPS (DoH) is browser based instead of OS bound, it is actually much easier to have browser instances that point to a different DNS root (or multiple DNS root services).
A lot of people have been very negative about browsers adding DoH but they're missing the big picture: We now have a real opportunity to create competitive roots/new DNS.
Browsers really need to look at allowing multiple DoH connections concurrently that resolve different namespaces. I'm legitimately surprised this hasn't happened already.
"Because DNS over HTTPS (DoH) is browser based..."
Is DoH browser-based. Optically, yes. Technically, no. I use it outside the browser every day.
No disagreement with rest of comment. FWIW, I have run own custom root for decades, creating new "TLDs" and "domainnames" as I please, but also I have experimented with a non-DNS naming system just using a proxy. Maybe this sounds too simple, but the thing is, it is just as fast as DNS, maybe even faster. If everyone runs the same proxy software, and we share the list of names, it just works. This is 100% outside the browser. No reliance on ICANN and no reliance on Google/Apple/Mozila/Microsoft/Brave.
> Is DoH browser-based. Optically, yes. Technically, no. I use it outside the browser every day.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. Firefox and Chrome have an individual setting for DoH that doesn't depend on the underlying OS's DNS configuration/resolver.
Therefore, you can run multiple instances of either browser (using profiles) that point to different DoH resolvers or are different from the underlying OS.
This is very similar to using TOR in a browser instance but with even lower friction. Currently, the biggest friction is that one profile cannot point to two or more DoH resolvers at the same time, and instead you need two browser profiles for two browser instances that resolve to different endpoints.
What I mean is it looks to the observer that DoH is browser-based. But actually it is more flexible, it's HTTP-based, so any HTTP client, not just web browsers, will work. I wrote a simple HTTP client for this and it works well with most DoH servers. One limitation of all DNS implementations (cf. protocol) is that only one answer can be returned per request. You cannot put two queries in one request and get two answers. You must query one name at a time. With DoH, you can send multiple queries in a stream of HTTP requests (HTTP/1.1 pipelining) and receive all the answers over the same connection. curl, wget, etc., cannot do this thus I wrote a client that can. Currently, I can use over 40 different DoH servers.
I do understand your point, anyone can run a DoH server and could serve "alternate DNS" names. I just wanted to make clear that DoH is not limited to use with the popular browsers. It can be useful outside the browser.
A lot of people have been very negative about browsers adding DoH but they're missing the big picture: We now have a real opportunity to create competitive roots/new DNS.
Browsers really need to look at allowing multiple DoH connections concurrently that resolve different namespaces. I'm legitimately surprised this hasn't happened already.