FoxTorrent: Another BitTorrent Firefox Extension
Written by Ernesto on March 03, 2007FoxTorrent is a BitTorrent extension for Firefox, developed by the Silicon Valley based company RedSwoosh. The extension makes it possible to download .torrent files in Firefox, and integrates BitTorrent downloads with Swoosh links.
An internal beta version of the extension is available at the RedSwoosh website (whoops! not that internal anymore). This release is semi-functional, but it gives you an impression of what the final version will look like. It currently downloads only one file from each torrent, and hardly shares data with other users. You will also need the seperate RedSwoosh desktop application the get it working.
However, RedSwoosh assured us that future versions will embed perfectly within Firefox, more so than the open source equivalent BitFox. They see a bright future for the Firefox extension, as well as their desktop client. A RedSwoosh employee, who prefers to stay anonymous, told TorrentFreak that their client will be more popular than uTorrent, the popular Windows client that was recently acquired by BitTorrent Inc:
“One year from now, we’ll have the most popular torrent client on the planet. The fastest. The easiest. Hands down. We’ve basically rewritten the entire BT protocol. Bram [Cohen] is going to shit his pants when he takes our client for a spin.”
Personally I think that RedSwoosh is a bit overconfident. It might not be a good idea to downplay uTorrent and BitFox, before they have a working BitTorrent client themselves. Perhaps they are frustrated by the fact that BitTorrent managed to dominate P2P traffic in just a couple of years. I mean, stating that your company was founded before BitTorrent on your “about us” page wont impress many people. It might be a good idea to stop talking, and start coding. At least they will please Mark Cuban, one of the biggest investors in RedSwoosh, who doesn’t seem to be a BitTorrent fan himself.
It is hard to judge this extension from this initial beta version, but it’s good to see that people have started working on adding BitTorrent support to Firefox, something that Opera has had for months now.
In the meanwhile, feel free to test the internal beta release of FoxTorrent (Windows only).
Update: RedSwoosh CEO Travis Kalanick apologized for the statements released by one of his part-time employees.
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freakin hell. My newish macbook pro had this installed on it, it’s got 2 gigs of RAM.
I had Foxtorrent installed, but haven’t really used it. My laptop had been chugging away all day, and I’m thinking what the H? Why is it so damn slow…
I look into activity monitor, to find out ‘redswoosh’ is eating up 800K!
3 clicks to uninstall this piece of SH, and hopefully things are back to normal.
BitFox seems more on the right path thus far. Requiring a proprietary Desktop application and only being for Windows almost nullifies the benefit of this one. Besides, we are trying to move away from commercially owned clients, not go to another. All the extensions seem to need developing, but if something like BitFox makes it into the Firefox codebase, it could help the commercial application of BitTorrent being used for downloads, given Opera already does it(poor client, but things like stats tend not to matter when downloading off a commercial site),
fox torrent is really crap, their p2p hosting is even worse service i’v used in such a long time. im talking about uploading files to the redswoosh network. i tried a 700mb file on a 512 ADSL took a day to upload at the end. it tells me the file has been uploaded but got this link null. how stupid can this be. after all that wated upload i got nothing in return just a stupid error message. plus no resume support. what complete idiot wouldnt add this into a hosting service. im so pissd i wasted such a long time ! i hate redswoosh bad service !
Well it’s been over a year later and until today I hadn’t even heard of this addon. It’s not even officially supported for Firefox 3. The average reviews for the addon state that it is too simple and not transparent enough.
It’s a big shame as it is still difficult for users new to torrents to understand that they need an additional client to the web browser that can usually download files with..
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