Opera Embedding BitTorrent Client

Opera Watch writes "The next version of Opera, 8.02, will have an embedded BitTorrent client. Opera has released today a Technical Preview of this new version on its FTP directory, though they have made no official announcement as of yet."

Comments

Fine, but...

[Heliologue]

That's all good and fine, but do I really _want_ a bittorrent client embedded in my browser?

Apache

[Rei]

Now we just need apache with an embedded torrent generation/serving (or at least just serving; it'd be simpler to configure, that's for sure) for bulk static content. :)

Re:Apache

[sfcat]

Now we just need apache with an embedded torrent generation/serving (or at least just serving; it'd be simpler to configure, that's for sure) for bulk static content. :)

Actually I had this same good idea a couple of years ago. It could effectly wipe out the slashdot effect. What if, each time server load went over a preset amount, it served a torrrent containing the HTML and image files instead of the HTML file itself. When the browser sees the torrent with special HTTP headers, it automagically unpacks the torrent after completing the download and displays the HTML locally. An apache plugin for this was started and never completed. The problem was getting the browser/torrent client to do the right thing once it got the HTML so the fact that you downloaded a torrent instead of the HTML directly was transparent to the user. Once torrent clients are embedded into the browser, competition will force the other browsers to include this feature. Then no more slashdot effect, yea!!!

Re:Apache

[notNeilCasey]

One thing I hacked together for a friend's site serving out a lot of video was an automatic redirector to the Coral Cache (not as neat as a torrent plugin would be, but cool enough, I thought) which he could activate when his bandwidth was approaching his monthly limit.

I just used mod_rewrite to parse the URL and append .nyud.net:8090 to the hostname and send a redirect to the client. If this were made into a plugin which would combine detecting some bandwidth threshold with the option to fall back on the Coral Cache before throwing out error codes, I think it would benefit a lot of admins staring down the business end of the /. effect.

OT: The site is a video project called Channel 102 based in New York City where people make 5 minute video "pilots" which are screened at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater for an audience who then votes on which ones they want to see return next month. Many of them have some serious geek appeal.

Re:Apache

[Rei]

I agree. I hardly claim any particular genius for this idea, I doubt that I was the first, and know that I accomplish little by just mentioning it. I like how Michael Abrash ("inventor" of Mode X, and Quake co-developer) put it (also applicable to the discussion of software patents):

Our world is changing, and I?m concerned. By way of explanation, three anecdotes.

Anecdote the first: In one of his books, Frank Herbert, author of Dune, told me how he had once been approached by a friend who claimed he (the friend) had a killer idea for a SF story, and offered to tell it to Herbert. In return, Herbert had to agree that if he used the idea in a story, he'd split the money from the story with this fellow. Herbert's response was that ideas were a dime a dozen; he had more story ideas than he could ever write in a lifetime. The hard part was the writing, not the ideas.

Anecdote the second: I've been programming micros for 15 years, and been writing about tyhem for more than a decade and, until about a year ago, I had never-not once!- had anyone offer to sell me a technical idea. In the last year, it?s happened multiple times, generally via unsolicited email along the lines of Herbert?s tale.

This trend toward selling ideas is one symptom of an attitude that I?ve noticed more and more among programmers over the past few years-an attitude of which software patents are the most obvious manifestation-a desire to think something up without breaking a sweat, then let someone else?s hard work make you money. Its an attitude that says, ?I?m so smart that my ideas alone set me apart.? Sorry, it doesn't work that way in the real world. Ideas are a dime a dozen in programming, too; I have a lifetime?s worth of article and software ideas written neatly in a notebook, and I know several truly original thinkers who have far more yet. Folks, it?s not the ideas; it?s design, implementation, and especially hard work that make the difference.

Virtually every idea I?ve encountered in 3-D graphics was invented decades ago. You think you have a clever graphics idea? Sutherland, Sproull, Schumacker, Catmull,
Smith, Blinn, Glassner, Kajiya, Heckbert, or Teller probably thought of your idea
years ago. (I?m serious-spend a few weeks reading through the literature on 3-D
graphics, and you?ll be amazed at what?s already been invented and published.) If
they thought it was important enough, they wrote a paper about it, or tried to commercialize it, but what they didn?t do was try to charge people for the idea itself.

A closely related point is the astonishing lack of gratitude some programmers show for the hard work and sense of community that went into building the knowledge base with which they work. How about this? Anyone who thinks they have a unique idea that they want to?own?and milk for money can do so-but first they have to track down and appropriately compensate all the people who made possible the compilers, algorithms, programming courses, books, hardware, and so forth that put them in a position to have their brainstorm.

Put that way, it sounds like a silly idea, but the idea behind software patents is precisely that eventually everyone will own parts of our communal knowledge base, and that programming will become in large part a process of properly identifylng and compensating each and every owner of the techniques you use. All I can say is that if we do go down that path, I guarantee that it will be a poorer profession for all of us - except the patent attorneys, I guess.

Anecdote the third: A while back, I had the good fortune to have lunch down by Seattle?s waterfront with Neal Stephenson, the author of
Snow Crash and The Diamond Age (one of the best SF books I've come across in a long time). As he talked about the nature of networked technology and what he hoped to see emerge, he

Re:Apache

[AKAImBatman]

What? You're telling me that my ideas have no monetary value? The shock! The horror! ;-)

Actually, I tend to agree with Abrash on this. The usual pattern is:

1. CompSci invents concept.
2. 10 Years later, everyone uses it.

Situations like Google where the concept is taken directly to the market are very rare. As Honeywell (Multics) and Symbolics can tell you, being ahead of your time can really suck.

That being said, it's not that ideas have no value. The problem is that their value is ethereal and cannot translate directly into dollars. If your ideas are good enough for the market, then you can make money by using them as a form of entertainment and educations. (e.g. Books, Websites with ads, etc.) Alternatively, you can implement them and see if they give you a competitive advantage. (This is what patents are intended for. Things went downhill after the Patent Office stops requiring prototypes.) Either way you do have to do a smidge more than just think up ideas. You must create an actual product out of them and monetize *that*.

Good feature

[Dark Paladin]

This is something I'd also like to see built into the next version of iTunes or iPodderX for getting Podcasts and the like (so as to reduce the bandwidth on shows I'm interested in listening to).

Of course, to make sure that Opera doesn't get sued for having a P2P network built into their client that could be used for copyright infringements, they need to add a note into their EULA that says something akin to "Don't steal music, or movies, or - just don't steal, OK? If you do, don't blame us. Thanks." to that their intent in supplying the technology is clear.

A milestone for BT... and a green light.

[deft]

Well, "milestone" is lofty, but this certainly does lend legtimacy to the software as a real tool just like, say, winzip or anything else that just does a job, and people use it for good and "bad".

Should make Opera look good too.

The underlying thing here that looks great for BT is that Opera must have done some due diligence and decided they were on good legal ground to embed the software... which may be seen as a green light for others to do the same.

Another prediction

[CdBee]

I predict that networking sites will be swamped by Opera users asking why their routers are crashing and what port-forwarding is, and how to set up their "new oprah download thingy lolbbq"

Well I guess

[CSMastermind]

I see the advantages here and in other ways I see the disadvantages. In one way I'm excited at the thought of not having to run a seperate program to download a file using torrents. I even see that it might force other browsers to do the same (I'm betting we see a firefox addon in about a week). I could even picture a time when all webpages are sped up via torrents.

At the same time I'm worried about a browser doing too many things. I'm not going to start using opera just because it can handle torrents but if IE or Firefox starting doing it I would be rather happy. It's kinda like the various PlayStations playing Dvds when competing with a dreamcast or 64.

This also begs the question, will this help make torrents more mainstream? I know plenty of average people who have no idea what a "torrent" is. If more of the general public starts picking it up who knows what will happen with things like piracery.
Meh, just my thoughts.

Is this necessary?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm perfectly happy with Azureus. I doubt that the BitTorrent client integrated into Opera will be better.

This seems to be an unnecessary feature. I don't see myself using it over Azureus.

BitTorrent clients also tend to use up a lot of memory because of the nature of BitTorrent. Would this impact Opera's preformance as well?

Re:The new "vi vs emacs"?

[yincrash]

Only if they started sticking ads in vi and decided to also sell it ad-free.

Re:I'm not impressed

[hkmwbz]

BitTorrent is far from the only thing which sets Opera apart from Firefox. Speed, size, functionality, integration out of the box are some keywords. Of course, which one is better is a matter of taste, but some people prefer the way Opera works. No extension problems when upgrading, for one.

Firefox with BT support would be a good thing. For Opera too. It would move BT further into the mainstream, and that would benefit anyone who wants to use it. Opera probably has something in mind, such as distributing Opera through BitTorrent. Why else implement it?

html over torrent?

[wormuniverse]

this is just one step closer to the dream of webpages being served as torrents. Imagine the benefit to mid level, and non commercial websites. http://www.4chan.org/ comes to mind as a major benefactor.

Bittorrent and ad-hoc standards

[MobyDisk]

Bittorrent is great. Having it as part of the browser is great. But isn't it about time that the Bittorrent protocol become a W3C standard? Or is Bittorrent too hacky, and ill-suited to be a standard? If Bittorrent wants protection from IP litigators and large-scale adoption, this would help a lot.

Re:Prediction...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, that's my friend Joel's project. He's interning at Microsoft (of all places) this summer, so he'd love it if people helped him out with Moztorrent in the meantime.

kget

[msh104]

so it seems kget/konqueror isn't going to be the first browser to support bittorrent after all. http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57591 I think it is a very nice feature to have. downloading from torrent feels almost the same to an end user as downloading from an ftp or http site. and it saves the hosting server a lot of bandwith. to bad microsoft won't support it natively in their webbrowser.

Problems with this.

[mcc]

I can see two problems with this.

The first is that bittorrent is not really a stable protocol. By which I mean, the protocol itself is still under active development. I could imagine in-browser bittorrent being great for about two weeks, then all of a sudden Azureus will come up with some kind of funny extension or the main Bittorrent team will come up with a better multi-root-tracker swarming mechanism or some such and all of a sudden the in-browser client won't work with any of the new torrents out there. That would get obnoxious.

The second is that web browsers are not stable. I mean, web browsers crash a lot. I expect a torrent to be running for hours and hours, becuase if it won't be going that long, well, it makes less sense for it to be torrented in the first place. Even the most stable web browser I've ever used, I'd be a little cautious to run bittorrent inside it because some afternoon I could be reading a site it doesn't like or something and I could crash two or three times, getting booted out of my hypothetical torrent each time, before that torrent finishes. I'd hope or wish there was some way to move the actual bittorrent downloading into a separate process, one that isn't effected by browser crashes, even if it's transparently "part of" the web browser from a GUI perspective. (Come to think of it, I kind of wish at times someone could make a web browser where every window got its own process space, or something, so one browser window could lock up or crash without effecting the others. Web browsers are practically OSes now, they might as well start acting like it.)

Other than these things it seems like a good idea.

Re:Just more proof...

[mikefe]

It isn't good for low latency (and dynamic content) transactions only because of the increased number of round trips bittorrent requires, but for anything that can be batched or sent ahead of time it should work well.

I have been thinking how it would be great for streaming media (even live feeds), if you only delay the play cursor 30-60 seconds.

The media players with embedded bittorrent clients would swarm on the feed for the data before the play cursor, and if there are any missing pieces (maybe 5 seconds) before the current play cursor would use the previous (the one used today) protocol to fill in the gaps (if any).

Live feeds typically don't have a large pipe to the event, and connect to a hosting provider to multiplex the stream for them. The beauty of bittorrent is that it allows multiple hosting providers (or anyone with large upstream capacity and forwarded port) to serve the same stream, even a live feed.

Heh, I interviewed at a streaming media hosting company a coulpe months back, so that's what started me thinking in this area... I'm not sure they'd like this idea. ;)

Re:torrent

[LittLe3Lue]

your claim is just stupid.

consider this.
the average torrent (i assume a movie or something) is being initially uploaded by one seed with, being generous, a max of 80 kBps. The person still manages to send all that information to everyone rather quickly (given a slower start to send 1-2 full copies out into the swarm).

Microsoft Pipes have like, what, 1000000 times the bandwidth? So yes, you usually download as fast as your connection can handle. So yes, you WILL download faster than a popular torrent at the beginning of it distribution cycle.. if the person hosting originally had a small pipe.

If Microsoft used torrents, their overall bandwidth would increase - they just dont need to.

But let dream of the day that every single dedicated 'fat pipe', 'home user', and business used torrents instead of http / ftp / other p2p:
we would see a HUGE increase in bandwidth across the internet.

The reason you beleive torrents are slower has nothing to do with the protocol, but rather the people who use it.

The only issue I have is that torrents die after some time, because people do not seed to 1:1, or people loose interest files that arent 'fresh'.

If Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Opera embeded bittorrent, forced 1:1 seed ratios, and seeded every file in your download folder out to whoever needed it most.. well..

wouldnt that be peachy? :)

Re:Doesn't seem like a good fit to me....

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a perfect fit. It should have been done that way from the beginning. People shouldn't have to muck with other clients to just casually download content off of the Internet. It's not a file-sharing network, it's a mechanism to utilize resources of a collection of peers to distribute a file to reduce the effects of saturation. Not everyone sits around uploading data all day when they download torrents. They download the torrent and share while doing so, then cease sharing and make use of the content that they have acquired. They have no philisophical investment in providing everyone in the world with bandwidth.

Re:torrent

[rayde]

i've posted about it before, and realize there are technical hurdles about it, but i'd love to see an apache mod that enabled apache to act as a tracker/seed for files. as long as the webserver is running, there is at least one seed and one tracker. the tracker could be smart enough to remove itself as a seed when enough seeds have entered the swarm, and reinsert it when seeds leave. (this would reduce the bandwidth problems inherent with seeding on the same machine as your tracker, but always keep at least one seed).

problems i'd forsee arrive when the tracker needs to be responsible for seeding several files at once while still acting as a tracker... however, on the "fat pipes" we've been talking about, this should be less of an issue, and because of the nature of bittorrent, the tracker should only need to be a seed for a short amount of time, especially with a relatively popular file.

Re:I'm not impressed

[hkmwbz]

So now your "no end of sites" has changed to "internal development sites"? Interesting.

"IE and Mozilla are a lot closer to rendering like each other than Opera is to them."

Nope. That depends entirely on what you are looking at. Opera and Mozilla's CSS box models are similar to each other, while IE gets most of it wrong. IE is the odd one out, not Opera.

"So, please get off your high Opera horse and look at it from a practical development perspective."

So what you are saying is that you are allowed to spread FUD about Opera, but I am not allowed to point out the fact that what you are saying about Opera applies equally to Mozilla?

Re:I'm not impressed

[FFFish]

Opera has Firefox beat hands-down when it comes to plain ol' usability. There are so many things it makes so very, very easy to do, that Firefox either does not do or does not do easily.

Whenever I move from Opera to Firefox, I find myself frustrated and going back.

It continues to surprise me that people don't see thirty bucks of value in Opera, and settle instead for the piss-poor experience of MSIE and the clumsy experience of Firefox.

Re:Odd, FF keeps luring me from Opera (prev Op use

[jp10558]

I think this is where there are differences. First, I have yet to see a useful extension that could not be replicated for any browser via another helper program or userjs or whatever.

Second, what I do see is the possibility of exploits for extensions same as BHOs in IE.

Third, I see many people having popular extensions break when they upgrade.

For me, extensions seem to be far more a hassle than they are worth. And as far as I can tell, there are enough people out there who feel the same to make Opera profitable. And that, not market share, is what matters to me as an Opera user.

Re:torrent

[Kaboom13]

I play Wow, I also use bit torrent extensively. The WoW implementation of BT is broken beyond belief in several ways. First, it has lots of problems with routers and firewalls that normal BT has no problems with. Many people who routinely use BT can't get it to work correctly, Second, the client has no setting to limit the UL speed, like every decent BT client. This setting is important because otherwise the UL can completely throttle the download (this is a problem with every BT implementation). Setting a limit slightly below your maximum upstream bandwidth greatly improves performance. Finally, the client does not continue seeding by default, and has no option to continue seeding during the patching process or while playing the game. So what happens on patch day is everyone logs in eagerly to see the new changes as soon as the patch is released. All these people have nothing to share back and all have to share blizzard's woefully inadequate seed. As people start to get some downloaded and share with each other is will speed up some, but as soon as someone has the full file they leave the torrent because they are eager to play and blizzard has not made the option to continue seeding while playing available. The torrent is generally completely useless for at least a day until traffic dies down. I left it on for 4 hours on a release day and saw I was not even 5% finished and had a U/D ratio of 1000%. That is not a working patch delivery system. Everyone who actually wants to play just goes to fileplanet or filefront or similiar sites and gets the patch in under 5 minutes. People even sometimes set up their own torrents of the patches and they always work better then Blizzard's. If Blizzard was willing to devote a fat enough pipe to seeding (or just rent it from someone else) it would probably work a lot better, but that kinda ruins the point of bit torrent.