Opera 9.50 Kestrel Adds BitTorrent Peer Exchange

Written by enigmax on September 04, 2007 

Opera, the popular multi-platform browser has supported BitTorrent for some time now. After more than a year of development, the release of v9.50 Alpha sees the introduction of a uTorrent compatible Peer Exchange feature which will hopefully help to speed up transfers and reduce tracker load.

OperaAs BitTorrent is a swarming technology, more peers usually means faster downloads so finding as many as possible is a good start to getting a quick transfer.

Just as information about available peers sharing particular content can be discovered from a BitTorrent tracker, Peer Exchange is an additional feature which allows peers to communicate with each other directly, to discover if there are any additional peers that one peer knows about, but that others do not.

As far as efficiency is concerned, this communication takes place directly with other peers and as a result, some load is eased from the torrent tracker.

Although it already supported the basic protocol, up to now the torrent engine inside the Opera browser didn’t support Peer Exchange. The introduction of Opera v9.50 Alpha 1 (Kestrel) changes that situation and sees the introduction of a uTorrent and libtorrent compatible feature. As is usual with any uTorrent compatible peer exchange, peer exchange with Azureus clients will still not be possible until Azureus makes some changes to their client.

The Windows version changelog lists a whole bunch of bug fixes and tweaks.

For those wishing to take the new browser for a test drive, the advice on the Opera site is to do a clean install and “copy over your profile data (but not your preferences file) if you’d like to test the upgrade procedure. You may not be able to downgrade if you upgrade an existing install!”

Downloads:

Opera 9.5 Alpha Windows

Opera 9.5 Alpha Mac

Opera 9.5 Alpha Unix

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Previously: 20 BitTorrent Tips and Tricks

Next: Most Popular DVDrips on BitTorrent (wk35)

12 Responses

1 Sep 04, 2007 at 19:47 by Steffen

Opera

2 Sep 04, 2007 at 20:49 by Roald Amundsen

Peer Exchange == DHT?

3 Sep 04, 2007 at 21:10 by Ernesto

[quote comment="158705"]Peer Exchange == DHT?[/quote]
No, it’s different, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_exchange for more info.

4 Sep 04, 2007 at 22:24 by Ghost.

so is the idea that utorrent will now communicate with opera users and vice versa? Or is the load not mutually exclusive to either party? I’m a little confused

5 Sep 05, 2007 at 09:29 by Roald Amundsen

Ghost, see the Wikipedia link Ernesto posted (Thanks, btw). Several clients support this, including my favourite, KTorrent.

6 Sep 05, 2007 at 15:47 by Torrent Guru

I read the torrentfreak article and it explained how the Peer Exchange actually works. No mention of anything like that on the Opera link… :/

7 Sep 05, 2007 at 16:47 by Cool_Myll

From the changelog
[quote]Added support for the BitTorrent peer exchange protocol, which is compatible with libtorrent and µTorrent[/quote]

8 Sep 06, 2007 at 01:41 by Docidu

Nice new feature…opera is lookign sweeter every day…can it do anything like adblock for firefox yet? without that i cant even think about useing it…

9 Sep 06, 2007 at 02:09 by Bob

Yes it can and it has been able to for quite some time, you right click somewhere go to “block content…” and then click on what you want to be blocked.

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