Browser IPFS to desktop IPFS communication can happen via websockets or webrtc right now, since those are the transports the browser currently offers us.
The stack we're using for networking is libp2p, a peer-to-peer framework, which has bunch of implementations for different transports. You can see the full list of those here: https://libp2p.io/implementations/#transports
Currently, most browser-apps using IPFS prefers websockets as it's using a lot less resources compared to webrtc, but once webrtc-quic[0] is ready for prime-time, it would be easy to write a transport for that and hopefully will be a lot more efficient than the current webrtc implementations.
The stack we're using for networking is libp2p, a peer-to-peer framework, which has bunch of implementations for different transports. You can see the full list of those here: https://libp2p.io/implementations/#transports
Currently, most browser-apps using IPFS prefers websockets as it's using a lot less resources compared to webrtc, but once webrtc-quic[0] is ready for prime-time, it would be easy to write a transport for that and hopefully will be a lot more efficient than the current webrtc implementations.
Disclaimer: I work on IPFS/libp2p fulltime
- [0] https://w3c.github.io/webrtc-quic/