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

torrent

[supe]

So where's the torrent for Opera 8.02?

Re:torrent

[Kissing Crimson]

Actually, that's not a bad idea. One of the few Firefox 'features' that really annoys me is that each update requires a full download of the installer package. Opera could quietly download its updates through bittorrents (at severely choked rates!) and the present the update to the end user when complete.

Re:torrent

[ZephyrXero]

I dont' see why anyone would use a download service that's not bittorrent anymore. Users benefit from faster downloads and content providers have to pay for less bandwidth. It's a win win situation (unless you break it like Blizzard).

Re:torrent

[masklinn]

One of the few Firefox 'features' that really annoys me is that each update requires a full download of the installer package.

Which, as it's been said times and times again, is fixed with a binary updater in the soon to come Firefox 1.1

On a side note, it should be noted that Opera is no better in that field...

Re:torrent

[alnjmshntr]

Are you serious? User's benefit from faster downloads in a P2P environment, but it's still nowhere near as fast as a direct download from a fat pipe (at least in my experience).

Especially considering that bittorrent downloads normally take a while to get up to steam.

Re:torrent

[rikkards]

I agree. Downloading the latest Service Pack or ATI drivers usually is around 500KB (as in bytes) through http. BitTorrent will take a while and usually maxes out around 150-200kb per second (I think it is bits whatever Bittornado uses)

Re:torrent

[yodaj007]

How did blizzard break it?

Re:torrent

[imsabbel]

They didnt really break it, but they sorta jumped into cold water....
Back when WoW came out, there were large patches, with 100.000s of users, which led to things comming to a crawl. Overloaded trackers, non-connections, ect.
Made a bad impression, but i was suprised that the last patches worked quickly without any problems, so i guess they ironed out the process.

Re:torrent

[Soul-Burn666]

Thanks for showing at least one person knows how BT was meant to be used...

BT wasn't meant to be completely P2P with all peers on small pipes. BT was meant to aid BIG sites in order to avoid flash crowds when a new big thing comes (new distro, new game patch, new vid).

The sites have huge pipes, for normal use, but when the number of users triples, even the huge pipe isn't enough. This is where BT comes in to play.

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:torrent

[n54]

Sorry but are you serious? Don't get me wrong I do understand your sentiment but don't compare the situation with downloading torrents with only a few thousand seeds or less.

To get a real feeling of how it would be I recommend trying out the Azureus bittorrent client, keep it around and fire it up when a new Azureus version has been released, then look at the speed with which it dowloads (through a torrent) the new version and self-updating/installing itself. It's blazingly fast when one has five-digit numbers of seeders and at least on my network the limiting factor becomes my local pipe-size and nothing else. And this even when I'm behind a router with NAT which I haven't poked a hole through for Azureus! (OT: fixing the router is on my todo-list of course).

Now imagine the same with Mozilla, Firefox, Open Office, and other similar large userbase F/OSS projects.

Want to increase the speed even further? Use the same bandwidth that would otherwise be used for fixed server2client downloads for torrent seeding instead as needed.

And I get ecstatic simply thinking about how it would be if at least the major F/OSS client software used something akin to Azureus' self-updating/installing (however that would not be good for server software which should not selfupdate in such a way).

Slightly off topic Azureus is the sweetest Java program I've ever come across, it has not been entirely flawless but it is getting close now, proving that Java can be "done right". And unless you're using the Safepeer plugin the startup is fast and smooth.

Back to the topic: once again Opera does something truly innovative, I recon the F/OSS community will see the beauty of the idea and be fast to do the same: a good idea is a good idea, no shame in using it. I hope to see this implemented in both Mozilla and Firefox since I use both, and I hope F/OSS also sees the ingenuity of the Azureus solution described above.

Do we want to leave IE7 dead on the start-line? Then integrate and make good use of bittorrent!

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:torrent

[zootm]

User's benefit from faster downloads in a P2P environment, but it's still nowhere near as fast as a direct download from a fat pipe (at least in my experience).

There's an overhead because the protocol is more complicated (and the file is split into pieces), but it's really not very significant in the big picture. You'd be unlikely to notice a difference in rate between your fat pipe download and the same fat pipe seeding a torrent. The difference being that if the fat pipe was seeding a torrent, when the number of users downloading the file increased, the other downloaders can help each other download and take strain off of the server, making the download faster.

Traditional downloads are likely to be marginally faster when the source has excess bandwidth to requirements, but anything less than that and you'll start seeing Bittorrent showing its advantages. And even below that, the hosting costs go down with Bittorrent downloads, so it's just more attractive in general.

Prediction...

[niteskunk]

I predict a swarm of FireFox BT plug-ins within the next two weeks.

Re:Prediction...

[Celt]

I've heard its been suggested before and frankly I've been disoppointed that it hasn't been implemented.
I guess now it will :)

Re:Prediction...

[masterren]

MozTorrent seems to be in the works already.

http://moztorrent.mozdev.org/

Re:Prediction...

[patro]

And I predict a blog post from Asa about how Firefox had this feature before Opera.

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

[csnydermvpsoft]

A lot of the time the Slashdot effect isn't due to bandwidth being exceeded, but rather due to the database server being overloaded on database-driven sites. These sites couldn't be served this way anyways, as they have dynamic content that could be different for different users.

Re:Apache

[kv9]

what we need is people implementing the idea not people coming up with ideas. hint: Development on mod_torrent is currently suspended indefinitely due to lack of time.

they need help.

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

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.

Re:Good feature

[kihjin]

BitTorrent is no different than HTTP or FTP. It's Just a Protocol.

You can't "steal" movies or music (or anything, for that matter) with BitTorrent, either, since that implies that downloading is theft. Theft leaves the original owner lacking in the item you 'stole'.

Either way, this is an interesting move from Opera. Now it's only a matter of time before Microsoft will announce that they are embedding BitTorrent into Longhorn. Like all those other goodies they are planning ;)

I'm not impressed

[ReformedExCon]

The real problem with this move is that even though they have a sort of "first mover" advantage, Opera is at the mercy of the Firefox/Mozilla developers with regards to this feature. Some enterprising Open Source developer will be able to incorporate BitTorrent into the Firefox browser without much trouble, and then Opera, the only significant for-pay browser left, will turn back into an also-ran.

The key for Opera is to get into niches where they stand a chance, handheld computers and cellphones are one area they are very active in. Per-unit licensing for their browser on cellphones makes them a lot of money. I hope they do well into the future.

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?

Re:I'm not impressed

[Kjella]

As much as I'd like to find my way to an OSS solution, I find myself going back to Opera every time. I don't have like one major thing to point, but it is many tiny things that make it feel considerably more polished and userfriendly. Firefox, meaning no disrespect, still feels like it was designed by engineers. It's solid, it works and that's basicly what people need.

As far as Opera are concerned, they are doing very well in their niches, and as far as the desktop goes, I think they have a common cause with Firefox in making as many people as possible consider alternatives to IE. A person who thinks "I've been hearing so much good about features other browsers provide" is a far more likely customer than a "IE came with Windows. Good enough." person. Not to mention that enough non-IE users force sites to follow standards, levelling the playing field against IE.

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.

And Mozilla is on it's way...

[MTO_B.]

Thanks to google's summer code we can hope to have a functional BitTorrent client built with XUL/XPCOM.

Included in Firefox? :-)

Check the Mozilla development projects that have been accepted for Google's Summer of Code program:
http://summer.mozdev.org/projects.html


And the MozillaZine news about it here:
http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=6 874

Just more proof...

[Kjella]

...that bittorrent the technology is not going away. In fact, it is a vastly superior method that should replace HTTP/FTP for most file downloads. There should be no more need to find mirrors, simply run it and let the program decide which sources are the faster. An integrated client will introduce a lot more people to it. Now, if they get consistantly better download performance perhaps you'll even see popular demand :)

Kjella

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.

Re:Fine, but...

[Jerf]

Yes.

Next question, please.

Re:Another prediction

[swillden]

I predict that networking sites will be swamped by Opera users

sites... swamped... by... Opera users ???

Does not compute.

The new "vi vs emacs"?

[slapout]

Is "Opera vs FireFox" the new "vi vs emacs" ?

Re:Legal problems?

[ari_j]

The precedent recently set is that you cannot distribute a tool with the intent that it be used to infringe copyrights. Grokster distributed software and said "Go illegally download songs to which you have no license!" Opera is saying "Go and download really big files!" Including Bittorrent is no different than including HTTP in their web browser, since either can be used for both lawful and unlawful purposes. What would make Opera a target is if their new release were advertised (at all! ... hahaha, I kill me) with the tagline "Opera 8.5 with Bittorrent: the world of pre-release movies is at your fingertips."

Re:Another prediction

[byolinux]

I think he means they both gang up and hit a site at the same time ;)

Re:Fine, but...

[justforaday]

And if I click on an .exe, my browser should execute it. No wait, that's not a good thing...

Re:Money

[Khashishi]

What's wrong with wanting money? Not everyone can subsist on rocks and mud, you know.

Re:Another prediction

[ArsonSmith]

Netadmin: We've been Operadotted!!!

Pointy haired: What's that mean?

Netadmin: Two Opera users hit our web server within the same hour.

Pointy haired: What's Opera? Is that a new virus?

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

[wowbagger]

Adding a Bittorrent client to a browser doesn't seem like a good fit to me - a BT client needs to run continuously in the background, downloading and uploading the files.

A browser's model is more one of "load the thing and show it" or "Stream the thing and show it". How does that map to BT, where you cannot even "stream" a thing (since you are getting the pieces out of order)?

Will we see people who's torrent clients only serve the file while it is being downloaded, and then stops?

Personally, I run Torrentflux - which is a PHP CGI app that allows me to download & serve torrents on my server - then I just point my browser at it to set things up.

Now, *if* the browser plug-in then communicated with a [daemon|service|external program] that did the torrent work, and all the plug-in did was send the command to the external entity to command the queuing of the download (and then open a window in the browser when the download is done)- then that might make sense.

Oprah?

[ewg]

I'd be more impressed if Oprah offered support for BitTorrent.

Where is the "bloat"?

[hkmwbz]

"For a community that's so against IE's "bloat" it's amazing how many people welcome with open arms more *unnecessary* bloat."

Bloat? Opera with BitTorrent is a smaller download than Firefox, and BT downloads in Opera work exactly like HTTP or FTP downloads (there is no UI clutter).

Where is the bloat?

"Either you're with bloat in the browser world or you aren't. Which is it?"

I'm for making it easier and more convenient to do stuff online. I hope Firefox gets a built in BT client too.

Re:And open source is innovative?

[trongey]

"...why didn't some bright OSS developer have the idea for such a feature sooner?"

Because it's a fix in search of a problem. When I click on a torrent in IE, Netscape, or Firefox my client opens up and starts downloading. How would this be better? Now if I were an Opera user I would be loading up a BT client whenever I use my browser even though I rarely use it.

Hey, have the Opera guys been hanging around with the MS Office guys?

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.

Re:Fine, but...

[mcc]

Either you're with bloat in the browser world or you aren't. Which is it?

So I take it then that you're opposed to Firefox's inclusion of FTP and Gopher?

Because I mean, come on, either you're with bloat in the browser world or you aren't. You don't need to access gopher or FTP via a webbrowser, there are command line tools for that. And how often do you really use gopher anyway?

Curse this mozilla featuritis! Just think, if they dropped support for Gopher, they could possibly remove an entire kilobyte of bloat!

Will no one think of the kilobytes??

Open with...

[Relic of the Future]

I don't know about you, but when I click a link to a .torrent file, it pops up btdownloadgui... how is this any better?

Re:Open with...

[akozakie]

Because Opera has a unified UI for downloads, with a "Transfers" panel, etc. So, you have a few downloads running, one using FTP, one HTML, one BitTorrent. Why look at 3 different windows if you can have it all in one list - progress bars, current speed, estimated time left...

It's akin to asking why Acrobat provides a plugin - after all if I click on pdf Acrobat would start anyway...

It's good for Opera and BitTorrent

[Progman3K]

Another precedent being set for the LEGAL use of BitTorrent.

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:Way to go, Opera!

[Just Some Guy]

I may just have to switch browsers now.

Out of curiosity, why? Whenever I click on a torrent link, Firefox opens a BT client window in much the same way that clicking on an FTP link opens an FTP client window. What's the inherent advantage of an integrated client?

Elsewhere...

[iamjoltman]

In Soviet Russia, BitTorrent embeds Opera

Re:NAT + torrent?

[Just Some Guy]

No, thank God - at least not on Unix. The last thing you want is $random_app being able to request that your firewall open ports. While it'd be convenient, the security implications far outweigh the possible benefits.

Re:Another prediction

[XMyth]

My grandma calls it Mozulla Foxfire.

Swear to God.

Re:NAT + torrent?

[DeadMeat (TM)]

If your router/NAT box supports UPnP, then apps can programmatically set up port forwarding. Azureus supports UPnP, and it wouldn't surprise me to see other BitTorrent clients following suit.

Most standalone consumer-grade routers have UPnP support built-in, although you may have to turn it on through the router's setup page first. I'm assuming you're using a Linux/BSD computer as your router, so you may want to look at the links on the open-source UPnP SDK project site for pointers about plugging it into your existing setup.

Note that UPnP's port forwarding features are a potential security risk if you're using NAT as a "firewall" (yes, I've heard it referred to as such) to block out all incoming traffic, since malicious apps can now forward arbitrary ports without your intervention. Granted, IMO it's not a big security risk, since you've probably got bigger problems than forwarded ports if you're running malicious code on your computer.