BitTorrent Launches Beta of Torrent-Based Browser Project Maelstrom

An anonymous reader writes BitTorrent today launched Project Maelstrom, the company's distributed browser, in beta. The company also released new tools on GitHub that let developers and publishers build content for the browser. Announced in December, Project Maelstrom, then just an invite-only alpha, was described as "the first torrent-based browser." The launch today is an open beta, meaning anyone can now try an early version of Maelstrom. You do, however, need a Windows computer. Windows users can download the beta now from here. Since the alpha, BitTorrent says it has improved stability, integrated support for automatic updates, and added DHT visualization for users when loading torrents.

Comments

windows waaat?

[tomxor]

Was so looking forward to seeing this public beta, lame to be stuck on windows.

Re:windows waaat?

[Anonymous Coward]

They couldn't get the included NSA & RIAA spyware virus to run on Linux, so Windows only.

Re:windows waaat?

[NotInHere]

I was so looking forward they released this as open source. Now its just another piece of closed source non-improvable non-free pay-here software.

Freenet

[Mantrid42]

Isn't this basically what Freenet tried to do back in the day?

Re:Freenet

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really, freenet has many features that this lacks, such as encryption and deniability.

This has some features, such as being distributed and every download is bit perfect.

This is primitive compared to things already available, really.

See IPFS.io for something that builds off the ideas of git, bittorrent, freenet, camlistore for a more permanent solution. In fact, they call it The Permanent Web.
https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs
https://sourcegraph.com/blog/ipfs-the-permanent-web-by-juan-benet-talk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fa4pckodM9g

Re:Freenet

[Em Adespoton]

No, because the concept behind freenet is that it's impossible to track from source to destination, and more popular content gains redundancy while unwanted content vanishes from the network -- and the entire thing is encrypted making it virtually impossible to track what anyone's looking at.

This project, while using DHT, is otherwise completely orthagonal to Freenet -- it's all about using nearby/fast nodes to get you the content you're looking for as quickly as possible via a distributed mechanism. There's no privacy involved (you're broadcasting what you want to view to a huge number of nodes), and the distributor of content (and anyone else who wants to help) have control over seeding the content being viewed.

Re:Freenet

[Fwipp]

I'm excited for when they'll be able to focus their efforts on the javascript implementation - imagine transparently serving all the heavy-weight media assets for your site in a p2p fashion, without the user having to do anything besides click "Play" on the video.

And if you're not excited at that level; imagine being able to run an imageboard and use only a fraction of the bandwidth you currently do.

It's already pretty impressive, but the demos & writeup are certainly not user friendly at this point.

I remember suggesting this years ago....

[mark-t]

.. almost as long ago as when biittorrent was invented, as a means to abate so-called

flash crowds

on the internet... more colloquially known in these parts as the slashdot effect... If everyone visiting a web page with a large quantity of multimedia content helped to distribute the data that would otherwise have to be supplied by the website, the web server would be generally able to tolerate larger numbers of people simultaneously accessing it.