Streaming and Downloading Torrents in Firefox

Written by Ernesto on April 27, 2007 

FoxTorrent is a BitTorrent extension for Firefox that makes it possible to download and stream torrents within Firefox. Last month we already reported the leak of an internal beta version, but today FoxTorrent 1.0 was officially released.

foxtorrentThe extension is developed by the Silicon Valley based company RedSwoosh, which was recently aquired by Akamai. FoxTorrent integrates BitTorrent downloads with so called “Swoosh links“, and works on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

p2p-blog did an early review and reports that the extension still has some issues. It causes major memory leaks and it doesn’t work with SSL-secured servers like those from BitTorrent.com.

I’ve quickly tested the audio and video streaming capabilities of the extension, and found that it worked surprisingly well. However, the problem with streaming is that the chunks can’t be downloaded at random, which slows down the speed of the download. Moreover, streaming only works if the download speeds are high enough, which is often a problem.

One thing’s for sure, Bram Cohen is not going to shit his pants (yet).

If you don't like torrents try MP3 Fiesta. They hold nearly 67,000 albums from nearly 17,000 artists. Prices are around the $0.10 mark for single tracks with full albums coming in at roughly $1.00. Tracks are available from 192kbps and they take major credit cards and PayPal

Previously: Company Cracks BitTorrent Protocol Encryption and Introduces Tracker Whitelists

Next: aXXo Torrents Exploited by Malware Peddlers

9 Responses (Add yours or TrackBack)

1 Apr 27, 2007 at 22:28 by Igor

I lik this, but i like this too (edit: removed spammy url)

2 Apr 29, 2007 at 16:01 by ratm

Seems like allpeers is also going to implement torrent downloads:
https://bugzilla.allpeers.com/attachment.cgi?id=1836

3 May 02, 2007 at 22:34 by torrentools

also i suggest to use Torrentools, is a browser toolbar for Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer; allows to search 41 specialized torrent search sites for needed files (2torrents, bitenova, bitoogle, bittorrent, bittorrentshare, bt.etree, btbot, btjunkie, btwarehouse, bushtorrent, demonoid, extratorrent, fenopy, flextorrents, fulldls, google, isohunt, jabberwalker, letwory, litebay, meganova, mininova, monova, mybittorrent, newtorrents, nova9, orbdesign, smaragdtorrent, snarf-it, thepiratebay, torrentat, torrentbox, torrentfinder, torrentportal, torrentreactor, torrentspy, torrenttyphoon, torrentvalley,
torrentz, worldnova, yotoshi).
Extra feature: torrent newsfeed, links to 30 torrent’s sites, links to 12 torrent’s group of discussion, links to 12 torrent’s forum.

http://torrentools.communitytoolbars.com/

4 Aug 19, 2007 at 21:38 by Seven ALive

Why would you want this? I use azureus which is an advanced BT downloader. I don’t wanna have to leave firefox open to download torrents. Its stupid. Plus have the memory overhead of firefox plus the extension just to run. Ya no thanks.

5 Jan 11, 2008 at 19:27 by Google

I Think,İt is very nice information…

Hitchhiker Nation

6 Apr 01, 2008 at 05:45 by refreshbot

why is information about akamai so elusive? and why is it that their brand spelled backwards seems to be an acronym for “I am also known as” ???

7 Aug 04, 2008 at 08:17 by retry

Akamai is a hawaiian word for smart. Sorta like how wiki wiki means quick.

Add your response

It takes approximately 1 minute for your comment to appear on TorrentFreak after it's posted.