BitTorrent & Firefox
Firefox has some great advantages when it comes to browsing and downloading torrents. Of course Firefox is just a browser, but if you use it the right way, your daily bit of torrent will get a lot easier. Let me explain.
No annoying popups:
A lot of torrent sites use annoying popups. They probably have a good reason for it, but it doesn’t make me very happy. Fortunately, Firefox has an excellent built in popup killer. I use Firefox for quite a while, and the amount of popups decreased to almost zero.
However, since Firefox’ is getting more popular, ad company’s are trying to built new ads that are harder to stop. Layer ads for example. If you go to Seedler.org, everything seems just fine until some stupid layer ad shows up after 5 seconds. But here comes the good part. Just install the adblock extension, enter the url where the layer (or other) ads come from, and the ads are gone. In the case of seedler.org, the ads come from “layer-ads.de”, so just add “http://layer-ads.de/*” to the configuration window of the adblock extension and you’re clean.
Opening torrents
Why save a torrent to your hard drive if you can open it directly with Firefox? In Firefox you can customize the way file extensions (.torrent) are handled. When you click on a torrent file, Firefox asks you what you want to do. You can either save the torrent, or open it directly with your favorite torrent client.
If the “open with” box is greyed out for some reason, I advise to download the mimetype extension. This extension allows you to edit the way all filetypes are handled.
Direct search
One of my favorite things about Firefox is the search bar. There are a lot of useful torrent search plugins available for Firefox. This makes searching torrents a lot easier. You don’t have to browse every site, just put your keyword in the search box and go. If the results on a particular site are not satisfying, just select another one and hit go…
I have bundled Firefox search plugins for the most popular sites in a simple installer. So if you want to add some nice torrent search plugins, take a look over here. You can select just the plugins for your favorite sites, or just install them all.
Customize websites
The great advantage that Firefox has compared to for example IE is that it is far more customizable. I already talked about some of my favorite extensions, and Greasemonkey is another one. Greasemonkey allows you to install all kinds of useful user scripts so you can customize the web to your own needs (in a sense).
Some of my favorite, torrent related scripts are:
Imdb torrent linker
Last.fm torrent linker
Remove crap from Torrentspy
Hide seedless torrents on Piratebay
It is not even that hard to edit those scripts to your own needs, or create scripts of your own. This excellent site has a nice overview of things you can do with Greasemonkey, and more important, how to.
Integrating
Unlike Opera, Firefox does not have a built in torrent client. But there is an extension that adds a torrent client into Firefox (still very Beta). Personally I prefer a standalone client, but I will keep an eye on their latest improvements.
