Together with Mozilla, AllPeers released a version of AllPeers with Firefox included, or the other way around if you prefer. This makes it easier for people who are new to both Firefox and AllPeers to give it a try. Or as Matt puts it on the AllPeers blog:

“When you share by email with unenlightened folks who don’t even have Firefox yet (the humanity!) they can get it together with AllPeers in a single convenient download. Already about 10% of our users are new to Firefox, and we hope that the bundle will help to increase this percentage significantly.”

Even though AllPeers is using the BitTorrent protocol, the extension does not support .torrent downloads. However, this might change because AllPeers recently opened up its source which allows other developers to create a slimmed down version of the extension, with an interface to download .torrent files.

Unlike a year ago, AllPeers is not the only BitTorrent extension for Firefox anymore, they now have some serious competition from BitFox, another open-source extension and of course FoxTorrent, “Bram Cohen’s worst nightmare”.

Here’s a video from the AllPeers team that explains how to use some of the new features, the extension, and the Allpeers Firefox bundle can be downloaded over here.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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).

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.