BitTorrent Launches Project Maelstrom, the First Torrent-Based Browser

An anonymous reader writes BitTorrent today announced the first torrent-based browser. Project Maelstorm, as the app is currently called, is being made available as an invite-only alpha to "a small group of testers." Although BitTorrent is in the very early stages of the project (testers are being asked to help assess for usability and reliability), the company strongly believes Maelstrom "is the first step toward a truly distributed web, one that does not rely on centralized servers." This is by no means a new idea from the company: it's the core behind the relatively successful synchronization tool BitTorrent Sync. "Centralized architectures have not scaled well to the volume and size of data moving across the Internet," a BitTorrent spokesperson told VentureBeat. Maybe, but building a file-sharing tool around the idea of decentralization is not the same as building a whole browser.

Comments

Private?

[buchner.johannes]

For normal websites, I can see the benefit of requesting data blocks identified by hashes. But doesn't bittorrent require that all data you download is shared between peers? How can any secure, private connections be handled, like banking or shopping?

Re:Private?

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect that the torrent aspect would not function for anything using https, session variables, or a few other similar html gimmicks.

As for practicality, the server's connection speed is rarely the bottleneck in web browsing. Something like this would mostly serve as a potential user-defense against accidentally DoSing a popular page (if enough people join the maelstrom).

Interesting if done right

[amaurea]

One of the reasons why the world-wide web is buried in a sea of advertising is that the costs associated with hosting a web-site increase as the site becomes more popular. So you might be ruined by your site becoming too popular. Advertising fixes that problem by giving income proportional to the popularity. But it comes with the undesirable side-effect of the ads themselves.

A peer-to-peer alternative to HTTP is a very different way of solving the same problem. If people who visit a page help upload it to other visitors, then the available resources will scale with the number of visitors without the server's bandwidth needing to increase. Bittorrent does this very successfully for large files and demonstrates that this mechanism can work. But bittorrent's latency is too high to serve as a replacement for HTTP. If this new protocol fixes that, and manages to get supported in many browsers, then things could get interesting. If they are to have any hope in the protocol gaining acceptance, it mustn't only be low latency, it should also be open and well-documented. So let's hope they don't pull another "Bittorrent Sync" here, and keep the protocol closed.

Re:Interesting if done right

[amaurea]

Not all websites are for profit. In fact, the majority probably isn't. This approach would only be a moderate help for for-profit websites, but it would help for popular noncommercial websites like wikipedia, discussion forums, open source software pages, etc. It could also be used to make a noncommercial youtube alternative. Just because something takes an effort to produce doesn't mean that somebody is looking to get paid for it. Some people are just looking for an audience, or others to collaborate with, or are just trying to make the world a better place.

Just a few stories back here on Slashdot we heard examples of people who had their webpages grow so popular that they were forced to put ads on them, even though they didn't wish to. That's the sort of case that would benefit the most from a distributed system.