Streaming and Downloading Torrents in Firefox
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.
The 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).
