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Is AllPeers FireFox's P2P "Killer App"?
Vivek Jishtu writes "Tech Crunch predicts that the AllPeers Firefox extension will massively increase the attractiveness of that already popular browser, drawing more millions away from embattled Internet Explorer.
AllPeers is a simple, persistent buddy list in the browser. Initially, interaction with those buddies will be limited to discovering and sharing files."
I harvest my buddy list from my peers outlook
Interesting to speculate about software that we can't download, so can't try. Yes, it could be a killer app. Yes, it could be dead on arrival. We won't know until we open the box! Wow, that was interesting...
My blog
Looks like a load of hype to me. I've never been a fan of mergin applications into "suite"'s or such. I don't even like media player's in my P2P apps, too many bad experiences with fudged partial videos or mp3/ogg's trashing the process.
Give me simplicity without the unnecessary integration.
This looks like a great feature, but it also looks like it could be a consistant security breach waiting to happen. These are the features and user toys that have plagued Microsoft security. Let's hope we don't trade safety for neato-gizmo stuff. And now I will don my tinfoil hat and be silent.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
....but I thought the continual vulnerabilities in IE and the better interface (tabs, etc) were what pulled folks from IE. Isn't Firefox itself the "killer app"?
I believe AllPeers has already been slashdotted, did we need this once more? They *still* haven't released their software. Woop-dee-doo.
All Hail Discordia. Hail Eris. Fnord.
Just wait until it gets included by default, and Firefox becomes the most popular file sharing program.
Then gets sued and killed off by the RIAA.
Granted, I've only used a handful of bittorrent clients, but my biggest complaint with most is that they use the majority of my bandwidth, and I can't even get google to load when I have them open, let alone most other sites. Why would I want to have this happen every time I open Firefox? I open my browser to surf the net, not get bogged down with extensions that drain every ounce of my connection so I can share a single picture or movie with my girlfriend.
Granted, its a good idea, I just hope they fix that one thing that plagues other clients. With Bittorrent, typically, you're sharing larger files, with this, the intent (though I'm sure it will be used for other things as well) is to share smaller files with close friends. Hopefully, this will be taken into account in the final version.
In the future, AllPeers will also have folders to allow public sharing (probably with restrictions to control copyright violations)
Why does it need restrictions at all? You can do the same thing with an unrestricted email attachment. Just put in a warning notice about sharing, but don't restrict its functionality.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
But that's the lovely nature of Firefox. The Mozilla Foundation can concentrate on building a better *browser* while leaving the API open to developers who want a little more from Firefox via Extensions.
I think plain, vanilla FF is a wonderful browser. The Extensions I use just make it better....for me. I don't expect my roommate or my girlfriend to run the same extensions I do, or even run any.
Anywhere we see "get our program, its the XYZ killer app" its usually a bit of a pretender.
The killer application for firefox is BROWSING THE FRIKKIN WEB.
Stop trying to cloud the waters.
liqbase
So the parade of new apps for Firefox continues. And how long before there are so many "killer" apps available, that Firefox begins to suffer IE bloat? I'm not a P2P fan, so this doesn't appeal to me at all, but it will to a great many people. And so will the next big thing, and the next, ad infinitum, until the complaints begin that Firefox is crawling and unmanageable. If this is such an important functionality, build it right in and make sure its optimized.
Uhm, you do realise you don't need to install it, right? This is optional, non-mandatory stuff. You choose to use it if it appeals to you.
The last time slashdot covered this the response was "come back when this is more than vapoware." Well, this is still nothing more than a bunch of slides. What has changed since the 28th when the story was last published? (Nothing, it seems)
Listen up, people: that functionality is what geeks (like you and me) want. It is *not* what the vast, vast, vast majority of browser users want.
... well, that's it ... there are no other users.
By far, the most frequent browser users are corporate people who have (significant) parts of their internal operations accessible by a browser. They won't be using it because the company's internal operations aren't set up that way. (And if you don't understand that dimension of browser users, you ought to look at where most Windows desktops are deployed: in a corporate environment.)
The next most frequent users are moms, pops and their kids at home visiting numerous sites for homework (read "plagiarism"), sports news and recipes. (And if you don't understand that dimension of browser users then get up out of your chairs, walk down the street and do a door-to-door survey of people in your neighbourhood.)
The next most frequent users are people like you and me: intensive users who push the boundaries -- who stopped using IE years ago (I'm mostly Opera, occasionally Firefox and still have a version of Lynx that I can launch).
The next most frequent users are
So basically: when you get to the people who use their browsers the most, you're also talking about the smallest cohort of browser users. Killer app? Sure: but only for us.
Since the AllPeers applet is still in the box, it's impossible to say whether or not it's a killer app. Since we cannot directly observe AllPeers, it must be existing in a meta-state where it is at once both a killer app, and in fact not.
But I'm slightly uncertain about this.
There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
I can imagine the FUD campaign the RIAA would run against FF and Microsoft running their own to put FF into the category of P2P software, which will result it in being banned from most businesses.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
And in other news, the Open Office suite has been released as a Firefox Plugin. Analysts predict that not only will this draw users away from from IE, but millions will also switch away from Office.
An interesting quote from the article, "What we're really waiting for is someone to release a linux distribution as a Firefox plugin. This will spell certain death to both IE and Windows simultaneously. The big hurdle is to figure out how to launch Firefox before the OS has even booted."
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Some great PR work!?
Reminds me of Paul Graham's piece from early last year The Submarine.
WOW! just what I need. Another buddy list that nobody subscribes to. I hope they make it work with AIM, Yahoo, and not to forget my favorite forced MSN Messenger.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
But that's the lovely nature of Firefox. The Mozilla Foundation can concentrate on building a better *browser* while leaving the API open to developers who want a little more from Firefox via Extensions.
That's been the lovely nature of pretty much every browser since Netscape introduced plug-ins.
Sheesh.
Allpeers certainly does look awesome, but what's it doing in a web browser? It belongs in an IM client like GAIM or as a standalone app. I've been waiting forever for an easy way to share files with my friends, but I'm not crazy about the idea of tying up 100MB of RAM leaving Firefox open all the time.
And in other news, the Phantom console is the greatest gaming console ever created and will cause Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo to bow down to it's awesomitude.
The extreme unix view is to get a lot of small apps that each do exactly 1 task and do it well. This has some advantages. The first is that the builder of such an app can concentrate on just 1 problem, another is that you should be able to mix and match. If I want to search through a number of files for a text string I can combine a number of tools as I want.
The disadvantage is also clear, you gotta learn about a lot of apps to do one end task. In windows search is simple. In linux it is two apps each with different syntax rules. Windows search is limited, linux search is complicated.
Another way of doing things is in adding similar functionality to an existing application. Making it feature rich or bloated (depending on your point of view). Web browsers are an obvious example. Should for instance bookmarks be part of the browser or a seperate app? What about a media player? Should the capability to view the source be an internal app (ala firefox) or an external app (IE and opera). Email? Well it is part of the internet isn't it? RSS? XML viewer? XML entry?
Get the picture?
I don't like suits either but then I am not a typical user. I prefer my email and browser and p2p and media player to be nicely seperated. Then again I can live with the fact that I have first to click on a link then choose to save the torrent file then go azureus select open torrent, select the torrent and finally be able to start leeching.
You would be suprised how many people would scream bloody murder if they had to do this.
Sadly it seems that at least in the browser sphere you and I are loosing. Feature creep seems to be a way of life for browser developers.
Anyway I wish the company luck, they already seem to have gotten themselves some free advertising and without even having a product to showoff. Good job.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
FF needs a simple BitTorrent plug-in to make the downloading of files easier - an alternative to HTTP transfers. Something slimline that will benefit those who don't or can't run a full p2p app, but might need files that are released via p2p. More and more we see files not hosted on a web server, but are instead available as a torrent. Something needs to built to bridge the gap and allow more people to participate. This AllPeers extension doesn't look like it'll do the job. AllPeers is something for the teenagers.
You may not be a fan of P2P, but here's a hypothetical use that you may get out of this.
You install the extension and your family members (parents, children, whomever lives across the country/world) also install the extension. You all create a buddylist that has only each other on it. Now you have an extremely simple way of accessing information you may need to send to each other, especially larger files that you can't e-mail to each other easily.
Just because most P2P is used to get copyrighted material for free doesn't mean that all of its associated uses are bad.
I actually do use Opera which has an e-mail client and an IRC client built right, but neither feature of which I actually use. I of course visit webpages, in tabs under the Opera process, that load videos inline but only as a matter of convenience. I often push inline videos to the external equivalent player (For instance, when viewing 'Man stroke Woman' on the BBC site, excellent by the way for UK readers). I've also used Opera's built in BitTorrent client (in the snapshot build's), but very tentatively for unimportant leeching.
Perhaps, all things considered, the slight sluggishness of Firefox combined with the sluggishness of some P2P apps, in my mind is just making me feel rather queezy?
I can't really see AllPeers being integrated into my browser as being more convenient than an external program.
That's part of my point. Firefox as it is now is an effective, efficient, secure browser. And I have a handful of add-ons I find useful. But there comes a point of diminishing returns. The more and more apps that suddenly fall under the "killer" banner, the more Firefox will be diminished as greater numbers of tools are grafted onto it. This is a trend, the browser-as-Swiss-Army-knife, that inevitably leads to bloated code. IE might have been a greate browser, but MS tried to stuff it full of things while at the same time ignoring standards laid out to keep things orderly. End result? Garbage. I just don't want to see Firefox run down the same road.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Firefox's next killer feature? Maybe next they'll consider tabs and an address bar... Of course that would be taking it too far...
~HTP~ Hug that tux
a simple proxy plug-in, which all other bittorrent clients can detect and latch on to. .torrent files and running the curses client on my firewall: even ignoring bittorent port issues, that's the system wich has the most uptime. I would love for bittorrent clients to somehow know about this, and send their .torrents to my more-stable system.
Maybe I'm the minority, but I always wind up saving the
But I am also of the mind that most communications should happen through a stable proxy.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Why is this not being touted as a standalone XULRunner app? I'll tell you why, because they want to feed off firefox mindshare and goodwill of the community. Have they even got a webpage that works without javascript yet? If I had to sum up this article in 2 words, they would be 'vapourware' and 'hype'.
Do you check someone else's releases which bundle a million extension with Firefox? Is someone forcing you to install all of them? Sadly, you are an idiot too. I am not a Linux loser, but i am also not limited to IE or Blopera. Because you know, X runs on a lot of OS-es. Retard.
We should not speak about killer apps until the app kills some other app ;-)
:-))) But I will leave the title to others...
Otherwise I could claim my Elixon CMS for Firefox as killer CMS
Simply I don't like the things like "the most succesfull movie of the year" entitled to the movie that is just entering the cinemas. They are all lies we call "marketing".
Well, I've got to get back to work. When I stop rowing, the slave ship just goes in circles.
More choice is never a bad thing. Some people will still pick their add ons off the "Top Ten" list, but the others are available for those who are willing to dig a little to find a useful tool.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
IE bloat = sneaky underhanded spyware crammed into IE, often by the computer vendor itself. Primarily designed to pump ads to the user and monitor their actions. Installed as covertly as humanly possible.
FF bloat = extension developed by opensource developers specifically to provide them with crap they want. Users go out of their way to fetch the exts and FF makes them jump through some hoops to complete the process.
not quite the same. When bonzi.com makes a firefox extension things may change, but for now they're different.
suffer IE bloat? Firefox already is more bloated then IE. I still use IE, because its simply much faster, yeah, it helps that its preloaded into the OS and such but its just _faster_ than firefox.
Simultaneously! ;^D
Do you enjoy flaming for fun on the internet?
It turns out that the user interface simplicity I was only partially talking about that you fully latched on to goes hand in hand with something else - the simplicity of the application code itself. Even if you refuse to install any Firefox extensions, the bloat still hits you in the face like a sack of bricks because it insists on using fucking XUL and the rendering engine to render the whole UI.
Without being an actual Gecko developer, I can't tell you if that is its main problem (but it's likely to be a 'big one'). What I do know is that the memory savings and performance benefits from using Konqueror are downright impressive.
- Lost+Found (Linux loser since, well, a long time ago... and loving it!)
Why have we had two mainboard posts pimping a vaporware browser extension that, if completed, will duplicate the functionality of existing programs, inside a browser?
This is indeed a killer app... if it were a standalone app. Why isn't it? And why isn't there already an app like this? It doesn't seem as though it would be that hard to create, but everything I've tried for private filesharing within a group of friends has been either too complex (waste), too limited (grouper, icq, msn, etc) or too braindead (many others).
Just give me a torrent client or emule-like app that I can limit to a group of defined contacts.
.. is Slashdot. 2 modest websites made useless in less than 2 hours, Allpeers and PortableApps.
./ effect" to recognized website maintainers, ISPs, sadistic sysadmins and such, then post timely news entries saying something on their site (crap or dupes are common, anyways: this won't statistically change the number of interesting news). Be sure to claim no responsibility for excess bandwidth usage on customer's websites.
This ain't a news site, is a DDOS portal.
May I suggest a new financing method? Package and sell various versions of "the
Why do all slashdot headlines seem to assume that every person who uses a computer out there is a techie?
90% of people browsing the web just want to view a website or two, maybe order something online. They couldn't give two shits about seeing their "online buddies", downloading illegal stuff via p2p.
Nothing costs nothing
Ever been the McDonald's? How would you like your fat today?
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
You're right in your analysis, but wrong in your conclusions. You forgot that those corporate people have a life outside the corporation.
When they go back home, they usually will want to communicate with the group of moms, dads and kids - which don't necesarily use the same computer or even live at the same house. This is the point where an easy protocol for sharing content is most needed (mail worked well for a time, but it didn't scale to the current big multimedia files of video, mp3 and digital cameras).
The sharing of these kinds of files between the two biggest user groups *is* what will make this a killer app, if it has a well-implemented user-centered interface.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
You like having a choice besides McDonalds, don't you?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Forget that--how long is it before the Mozilla foundation has to disable all extension functionality because it's a vehicle for murder?
I waited years for this to come out, and now the site is slashdotted and I can't get my beta test request in. Oh darn it all.
Features I'll be looking for is drag and drop sharing of pictures or folders, and an interface so easy that any new user can find files I want them to see within seconds of visiting my address or buddy icon.
Firefox needs a Bit torrent extension so badly.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Is AllPeers FireFox's P2P "Killer App"? The answer is no. Why no? How about why yes? No one is going to care about this extension. No one is going to decide to switch because of it. This isn't going to matter at all. How can anyone even pretend that this type of extension is going to be the "killer app" to cause a large move toward Firefox? This same guy probably thinks that linux just needs a similar "killer app" and Windows will be done for. Gimme a break.
the more Firefox will be diminished as greater numbers of tools are grafted onto it.
I don't think you understand. AllPeers is an extension. It is not a part of the Firefox browser. It is not created by the Mozilla team. Mozilla has made no plans to take this outside product and graft it to Firefox.
Extensions are an option. Firefox will continue as is: a web browser. If you don't want them, a good idea is to not add them.
You cannot use AllPeers and find it amazingly fantastic at the same time,
due to
x*px >= 0.5 hbar,
where px is the degree to which you are using AllPeers, x is the degree to which you find AllPeers fantastic, and hbar is the height of the bar you are in.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
What is with all this social networking crap? Egads. The only technological phenomenon more annoying than blogorrhea (and Mac fans) is this recent notion that everything I do online should be intimately shareable with everyone I know. Hello? If I wanted social interaction, I'd go hang out with people instead of huddling in a dimly lit corner of my basement staring bleary-eyed at the cold, pale glow of my CRT.
Come on people. Am I the only one who still does shit alone on the Internet?
</troll>
And yes, I too appreciate the irony of spurting antisocial rants on a community web site.
As long as Mozilla does not endorse or support or link 2 it on their web page im ok with it.
We do not need Recording industry suing Mozilla for offering P2P plugins.
Next question?
Seriously, if I want to run a P2P app I would, wait for it, run it under my OS. Firefox is a not an OS (yet, and wasn't the whole point to get away from the "everything but the kitchen sink" problem with Netscape?).
I want my web browser to, y'know, browse the web with. Doing FTP is also nice.
I want my OS to run applications under (not, despite what Microsoft would have you believe, browse the web with).
Couldn't we keep this seperation? Please?
Also, even if AllPeers is such an incredible P2P app that everyone in the world will want to use it, people that haven't moved from IE to Firefox yet are probably going to just treat Firefox as a P2P app, and IE as a web browser, IMHO...
Firefox is much simpler than Konqueror
(last I tried konq anyway)
Konqueror has the same problem as IE, it tries to be the file manager too but the two things are not exactly the same.
To clarify my previous post: for all that want to follow the link to my site: you will not find any killer app there! (At least for now ;-)
(Sorry Derek, I didn't want to trick you.)
Well, I've got to get back to work. When I stop rowing, the slave ship just goes in circles.
FF frequently dies on Mac OSX Tiger. Usually during the middle of a blog post, when I switch away from the Window I have been using, say, to look up a suitable image to addorn my blog, that when I return, having uploaded my image to an image hosting service, I can't type in the text box. This happens so often that I prefer to use another browser such as Netscape 7.2 or even Safari. It doesn't matter what version of FF I use either.
OT. Has anyone had experience using Camino, good or bad?
..simplicity. Or, rather, I prefer simplicity in my browser. And every time I check, Firefox is getting worse.
Yeah, it's ridiculous isn't it? All those extra buttons and menus they keep adding and on top of that they force you to install all these extensions!
Oh sod it, I can't even be bothered to make fun of you. You're full of shit and you know it. If you really need to be "controversial" find something that is both controversial and true to write about. There's no shortage of issues.
No, the "killer app" for Firefox is, has been, and forever shall be Adblock.
Instant message programs and file sharing programs are a dime a dozen, but Adblock is what separates Firefox from other web browsers. It'll have a far more profound effect on the web, too, as eventually it'll become clear to advertisers that the conventional massive blinking ad in the middle of the site's content just isn't as effective as the innocuous text-only ad, because users are far more likely to block an annoying ad than they are a simple text ad.
Vaporware is always a killer app. Nobody advertises an application that doesn't exist yet as merely being a decent app that will do a job.
Vaporware is always hyped as a killer app.
But that's the lovely nature of Firefox. The Mozilla Foundation can concentrate on building a better *browser* while leaving the API open to developers who want a little more from Firefox via Extensions.
Speaking as an extension writer myself, part of the power of FF extensions is that there is no API, per se: an extension just adds to or overrides functionality, rather than, say, "plugging in" to some callback API (but see below) or even overriding a software interrupt (as in DOS or the Palm OS -- yeah, I've done interrupt-driven stuff both of those too).
But that's also a weakness, because there's no simple way to regulate how an extension works, or how multiple extension interoperate. In one of my own extensions, I prematurely optimized ("root of all evil"); that was negligibly more efficient, but it meant the extension didn't work with mouse gestures.
And despite the power FF offers, it doesn't offer any way for my extension to change the default meaning of the mouse buttons. (Well, there's a kludgy way, but it's not worth the trouble).
Nor is browser.js written in a particularly modular way. In one of extensions, I have to override a whole function (and then call it) when I really want to override a single line -- even though the one line represents one "concept" and the whole function (unfortunately) conflates multiple functionality. Life would be easier, and FF (marginally) faster if browser.js had been written with extensions more in mind.
Another extension I use (but didn't write) is wonderful, except it takes over CTRL-F12, and I use the same key combination to invoke a system-wide spellchecker. It also uses F8 to do something I wish I could turn off.
FF does use some callbacks, for notifications, but some things which should be simple -- like notification when the page location changes, or the current tab changes, are tedious and error prone, requiring multiple callback functions and causing hard to locate problems if not done exactly right.
So, in sum: eventually, just to deal with accelerator keys, not to mention to partition functionality and allow interoperability, FF really will require a more designed framework for extensions, I think, where extensions can register as supporting or overriding certain functionality, and where the user can specify the order in which extensions override and what UI elements invoke them.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Cool, I work in a very similar way with how I download torrents. I've been working on a system to make this nicer... so far I've written a python script that "wraps" the bittorrent-console program and allows me to manage multiple torrents downloading on a remote computer. (Ie I can start and stop them and then disconnect my "client" and the downloads continue..) It's not really ready to be published anywhere yet, but I didn't know there were other people who would even be interested in such a thing..
I can only imagine this was done as an extension because XUL Runner isn't finished yet.
I think using the browser as a host for other apps is cool, there will be a bubble in this as there is in so many other internet trends. Right now we're in the "Wow, let's write an extension because we can!" phase (partly because the only practical way to develop with Gecko is as such, see above). When everyone gets over the cool factor of it, the projects that actually enhance (or even relate to, for that matter) the browser experience will be distilled away from what should have been standalone apps in the first place.
As much as some people want to think the OS will become merely a life support system for the browser, it just isn't going to happen; the network is not the right place for some things, and if one program has everything, it inevitably becomes bloated and slow.
Go here and enter your email to be alerted when AllPeers goes live. I'm going to try it out, for sharing photos and home videos between friends/family, this sounds cool. Kinda like a .Mac for everyone.
fak3r.com
It looks like a solution....in search of a problem. What makes it such a big deal? What makes it more useful than a program like Azureus? Nothing, as far as I can tell. But then again, it's reviewed on a site dedicated to Web 2.0, so a lot is explained.
So the parade of new apps for Firefox continues. And how long before there are so many "killer" apps available, that Firefox begins to suffer IE bloat?
My experience sort of lends support to your thesis, almost, in a round about way:
When I upgraded to FF v1.5 a couple of weeks ago, I did a comprehensive survey of all the extensions I could find, both to select some for myself and so I could talk to others about the choices available.
There are about 1,000 extensions out there now. It took me 3 sessions of about 2 hours each over a 3 day period to review these. I selected 20 for my immediate use. I've got a list of about 10 others that I want to look at again; and I've listed another 30 or so that don't interest me, but might be of interest to someone I know.
In all, after about 6 hours of review I immediately implemented about 2% of the available FF extensions, and found that a total of about 6% were interesting. Now my FF is very nicely tailored to my needs (with a good tool kit for analyzing web pages and other development work) and my desires (I like the occasional game of tetris and free cell). FF still loads quickly, remains very responsive, and doesn't interfere with my other work, so the amount of "bloat" I've added isn't an issue.
But I am a little worried about the future: when the number of extensions doubles (probably before summer) it is going to take more than 12 hours to survey them and select the 1% or so that I might find personally useful, and that is too long. Without a better way to manage the process of sorting and selecting, I'm going to feel like I'm drowning in the riches that FF offers. But there are certainly worse fates!
At the moment the best approach to managing FF's extensions is similar to the counting house approach to managing money: dump the contents of the purse on the table, look at each coin individually, and decide which stack to put it on. Maybe in a few months someone will come up with a better organization of the riches-- like maybe a moderated and metamoderated set of reviews with good searching, etc. Because we're going to need a better accounting system to manage the "bloat" as FF's available wealth grows larger and larger.
I for one welcome our blahblahblah...
The difference is with Firefox if you feel your browser is bloaty you can uninstall apps until it's down to a comfortable weight. IE is bloated before adding plugins.
Firefox has accelerated the trend of the browser becoming sort of an internet gateway device. FF will continue to innovate rings around MSFT.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Check the tools menu. Are you there yet? Do you see 100 million extensions loaded in that you haven't installed yourself? Better yet, check out the part about firefox having "mandatory contradictory extensions that aren't extensions" feature of firefox. You see it? I don't. Stop being an idiot and think before you post about development direction.
Turn based strategy game that runs over XMPP. Phalanx
I tend to just use screen for now. It has everything I need as far as persistence and tracking goes, but the real goal in creating a script (for me) would be transparency. That much seems like an impossible goal, however. As the network traffic doesnt carry with it enough information to fake the role of client. You'll always need the .torrent somehow. Meanwhile, you'll also need the actual /data/ somewhere too. So for "transparency", I think there will need to be some type of proxy protocol agreed apon by clients. (unless you want two copies of all data)
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
A news client! ..oh... what? Moz... wha? Oh.
An HTML editor!
An Email client!
An IRC client!
A Javascript debugger!
Please everyone, stop making my browser into a suite.
Love,
Me.
Yes, it's a bit silly to speculate about whether AllPeers will or won't be the killer app for Firefox when you can't even see it yet. That said, Michael is making an important point, and I'm afraid that a lot of people aren't grokking it because they attach too much baggage to the term "P2P".
We're not making a Kazaa clone. We're giving people the possibility to share files with their friends and family inside Firefox. This *could* be a killer app because it gives people a real motivation to switch their non-technical contacts (especially family) to Firefox so that they can share with them. In other words, we're adding network effects to Firefox.
Does this mean that AllPeers will be the killer app for Firefox? Who knows. But the idea itself isn't patently ridiculous. If you want to make your own judgement, please register for our beta and check it out when it's available. Also, read my blog if you want more technical nitty-gritty about what we're up to.
Peer Pressure
I went to check out this "killer app" and it got a message that says there servers were busy, come back later, lol. Appears they are lacking bandwidth.
So, let me see if I understand what you're saying here...
...
:-)
I think it's really important to fully grasp the important aspects of a post before replying...
You have a girlfriend???
Ah, I see what you mean... have the torrent downloading on the firewall but saving the data to another computer. I currently have my "downloading" computer setup with a large harddrive. I suppose you could do this with a NFS or something, but for now I haven't needed to deal with it. I was using screen for this purpose for a long time but finally decided to do something that could handle multiple downloads without having to guess which screen PID is which, among other things. However, I'm not sure I follow what you mean by the proxy protocol... I am simply talking about a way of handling torrent downloading remotely.
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Thank you for your reply. All writers like to hear from their fans, and your reply was especially worth reading. I have replied to other writers myself. You should continue reading, and reply when ever you can.
Sincerely,
-Grand Parent poster
P.S. It made me laugh out loud.
so=> what are you guys sharing ? besides goatse and tubgirl of course
Trying to make anticipation.
Let's see the software, install it, try it and then decide if it's a "killer app".
You can't get there from here.
If I'd known this is what Firefox needed for a "killer app", I'd have written an Extension to integrate GAIM into it ages ago.
Oh man, you guys are totally missing the point! Mention p2p and everyone immediately rushes to the war3z and pr0n conclusion. so you have millions of people with the allPeers installed ... and you can say, automatically include yourself in a group of users ... say people who read slashdot, or digg, or metafilter, or boingboing, whatever.
Then you follow a link from one of those pages, and the load time exceeds a threshold, or you get a 503 ... the the extension automatically starts searching peers in the appropriate group for chunks of the page, bitTorrent style.
that might not be what allPeers does today, but it's not too much to think that it could.
So let's see. By using BT to share personal files with a few people, you forgo the one big reason to us BT: high speed downloads thanks to swarming connections with multiple peers.
Take that away and you're left with a buddy-file-transfer scheme that's actually going to be slower than any of the competition. Unlike the major IM clients, anyone behind a firewall or NAT (meaning almost everyone) will have to not only open ports on the firewall but also forward the ports to their PC in order to get an upload speed of more than about 10K/sec. And unlike uploading the files to your personal hosted webspace (which you can usually do a whole lot faster than a BT upload), the files are only available for download when your PC is online? Are most people with desktops going to leave them on 24/7 and turn off power management just to keep the new baby pictures available when they could have just uploaded them to Kodak instead? And what about laptops? How effectively are laptop users going to effectively share much of anything?
Also, doesn't using BT generally degrade web browsing performance? If I'm going to have BT on my own PC at all, why would I want a client that shuts down when I'm not browsing, which is normally when I'm happiest to let BT eat up all my bandwidth?
This gets funding? Meet Web 2.0, eerily similar to Web 1.0.
This application has some potential well beyond what most people seem to think. It can turn Firefox into the first bittorrent-based web browser, and make it a bittorrent web server in addition. Having bittorrent based web pages would be more practical for the typical person who wants to create a few static pages to let his family and friends know what he's doing, store photos, that kind of thing. It would allow a person with a modest connection to avoid getting slashdotted when he posts his killer case mod/robotics project/lego furniture.
The primary problem with this, of course, is that more and more of us are hiding behind NAT walls, and bittorrent functions poorly if it can't create a server connection. If it became a truly "killer app" it might start the cascade avalanche towards IPv6.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
This smells like "spyware" like hell.
how gross and so not me luckily i already use FF, but this extension is over hyped, what's the beef?
My first download will be..... ......Duke Nukem Forever!
Aaaaaaaaaagh. Buzz words. Even the words, "buzz words" are trite and overused.
But what about the Leonard Smalls of the world? Has anyone thought of these people?
"Name's Smalls. Leonard Smalls. My friends call me Lenny... only I ain't got no friends."
Absolutely right. Even if not browsing for extensions and you know exactly what you want, it still takes forexer due to the poor implementation of search and piss-poor organization of the extensions page. It looks like it was laid out when there were only a dozen or two extensions and failed to scale. It's actually easier to google for the extension because the Google search will take you right in.
If by "killer app" you mean, "all chances of being used in a corporate environment are dead" then yes, this may turn Firefox into just that. Until FF gains central management of (amongst many other things) allowed plugins, then P2P capabilities via plugins are, in fact, a strike -against- deploying FF. I'm surprised we don't already have plugins for connecting to the popular IM services, which is another common problem.
We need to be giving corporate decision-makers -more- reasons to switch to FF, not fewer.
The basic bittorrent package comes with a script called "btlaunchmany" which already does this in a great way. You point the script at a directory. When you put .torrent files in the directory, it notices them, and starts up a torrent. When you remove the .torrent file, it cancels the download process. All the torrents are managed together in one interface. So you can leave it running and just drop .torrents in, and when they finish up you can remove them.
splunge (n) -- A good idea.. but it could be lousy... and I'm not being indecisive!
of my current project.
Its a superposition of the finished and unfinished state. No wonder I'm scared to look at it.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
two articles, plugging the same peice of non existant software, and the mods turned down my "Bill's date with Jacko's operating system" masterpeice?? I cry foul!
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
Even if Bonzai Buddy or Gator starts making FF extensions, you still have to wait 3~4 seconds and then click "yes" to install. Usually you have to restart FF before your extension starts working too.
Anyways, That still has nothing to do with FF 'bloat'. Anything you add to a vanilla installation of the browser is your own damn problem and not browser bloat.
Bloat is also a matter of opinion, Opera has mouse-gestures, tabbing, that 'next' button, etc. Are those features or bloat? Depends on what you want from a browser.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Because Firefox already isn't enough of a memory hog, right? I rarely see applications hit the 150k memory footprint and those are usually databases indexing half a bazillion records. The proliferation of Firefox extensions is nice and all but if this AllPeers thing is yet another nifty doodad that will cause Firefox to swell in its pants and then throw a premature exception, then no thanks.
I know! Let's hype this on slash-dot! Yeh, Buddy. They'll just love it! After all, it's TECHIE!!!
Someone needs to write a program to function as an alternate bookmark storage to all of the major browsers. It would use plugins to activate different hooks, like activeX for IE, an extension for firefox, a part of konqueror, etc. It could even provide exports for the browsers that don't allow extensions. It should use WebDAV to synchronize across multiple computers and allow multiple programs to modify the list simultaneously.
So many people are concerned with loosing their bookmarks when switching browsers. Firefox is nice in that it can read IE, but I forget if it just copies or links to the other browser's bookmarks.
An alternative to http downloads WOULD be a good plug-in for firefox. So instead of downloading a large file from a web-site through HTTP or FTP, a web-site would have a link to a p2p file that initiates this plug-in which would download the file in a P2P fashion. I guess this is equivalent to having torrents and BitTorrent installed, but if firefox had a plugin then maybe more web-sites would accomodate this type of download.
This would obviously be beneficial to both users (quicker downloads) and web-site owners (reduces their bandwidth charges). I would think that the web-site would have to still host the file so that at least one source of the file is always available for not-so-popular files.
I don't think this plugin achieves that as it seems to be more to do with sharing files between users.
Man. You can't buy promotion like this. Especially for something that hasn't been released yet.
We have something that would work better than torrent files for p2p in the browser - dijjer. It requires a Java Runtime Environment but there are extensions which make it easier to use in Firefox. Dijjer downloads content in-order (unlike bittorrent) and there's nothing to configure once your web server supports the range header. I was working on a dijjer applet and extension a while ago, but I got too busy to develop it further. The slashdot effect for webpages could be mitigated using a combination of Dijjer and MAF to distribute archive copies of the page as long as its popular.
This looks like a classic sting to me.
Just what I need, another extension to improve my browsing experience; I would prefer quicker page loads, someone to plug the freakin' memory leak and for FireFox to either:
...
- run (without issue) for > 12 hours without requiring a restart
*OR*
-load more than whatever the magic number of pages that causes FireFox to crap on my relatively zippy machine
I love the 'Fox too, but the bitch has been testing my patience as of late. As for this rather unrevolutionary extension - I wouldn't install it on your machine
Or am I just seeing what I want to see?
If only I had mod points....
Slashdot - where to disagree, is to be a troll
I'm flattered, but my comment was merely an off-the-cuff one-shot, and was not interresting in any way at all.
A separate deamon that could survive a Firefox exit or crash would be very interesting. (And will eventually allow power users to try more complex setups, like the daemon running on a separate always-on head-less server, while the FF plugins is only used as interface. For example, that's something I do frequently with mlDonkey & mlDonkey, and that's something that is really missing in Azureus [no head-less mode. Always needs to start full GUI, even when remotely controlled] ).
Also if you keep your promise of making AllPeers open-source, there's good chance to see something interesting like :
- Allpeers-compatible plug-ins for IM softwares like Gaim. IM softwares may be different candidates as "always-on" programms (because some networks like MSN don't allow messages when recipient is offline, there are a lot of people keeping their IM software always running).
- Allpeers-compatible module for multi-standart P2P softwares like mlDonkey or Shareaza.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
if anyone knows how to open a extension in opera with a remotely running app please let me know :)
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Anyway I just used the azureus example because it is a P2P app. Just wanted to make clear how using completly seperated apps can incur extra work work by the user. It was not meant to show any shortcoming in azureus.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.