Wyzo 3, The BitTorrent Web Browser
Written by Ernesto on April 28, 2009Radical Software have just launched the latest version of their media web browser, Wyzo. The newest version has been a long time in the making and is one of the few web browsers supporting BitTorrent downloads straight out of the box.
We first discovered Wyzo when it was released in June 2007. The project showed potential but many reported problems with the packaged FireTorrent extension during the early stages. The team had difficulty finding the right people to take the project forward and this combined with a lack of funding resulted in the project being discontinued after a few months.
Early in 2008, the project was revived by Radical Software and one year later, Wyzo 3 is alive and kicking. The most recent Wyzo release is based on the latest Firefox 3 core, but with it comes with a brand new “chrome like” theme and a wide range of proprietary extensions.
The new version of FireTorrent has been completely rewritten and provides integrated support for torrent downloads. Downloading torrents with Wyzo is as simple as grabbing any other file and the speeds are comparable to most standalone BitTorrent clients. FireTorrent is also available as a Firefox extension and currently has 25,000 active daily users.
Another new extension that comes with the browser, FireDownload, provides multi-threaded acceleration to all regular http downloads. FireTray, a minimize to tray feature, allows all downloads to continue while the browser sits in the tray.
Wyzo downloads torrents in the browser
Wyzo also includes some other popular extensions such as Cooliris to enhance the users’ browsing experience. A full list of features can be found at the Wyzo site.
The latest version of the ‘BitTorrent browser’ is a great improvement and shows Radical Software mean business with Wyzo. TorrentFreak was told that here are other proprietary extensions in the development pipeline and Wyzo hopes to gain users by offering a rich media browsing experience.
Disclaimer: Wyzo is one of our sponsors. It’s always good to declare such things or you end up accused of being biased ;-)
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47 Responses
I use Lynx.
@Uppsala: LOL! Used Lynx for many years, straight from the bash shell, but now I`m a proud Firefox user
Probs give it a go spesh as its a sponsor and anything that supports torrent freak must be worth five minutes =-P
wyzo sucks as an actual torrent downloader. how hard is it just to have a program actually good at it dedicated to it
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t see the benefit in such a solution, besides it being all in one – on the other side, if the browser crashes, there goes the torrent.
On the other hand, rtorrent+screen(/dtach/tmux) is rock-stable and uses less ressources – I love it :)
Opera! <3 you got to use opera!!!!
http://www.opera.com/browser/
“Brand new theme” – Chrome interface ripoff
Gestures, tab switching – firefox plugins.
The whole thing is just pathetic.
Instead of making a “media browser” nobody will use they could have made decent torrent plugin for firefox.
firefox ftw !
(”…on the other side, if the browser crashes, there goes the torrent”):
It would be interesting if Firefox adopted Chrome’s idea of making everything a separate process (or Chrome got add-on support), so that if something on a page (or an add-on or plug-in) causes a crash, the entire browser and your downloads won’t sail into the abyss with it.
Kool, might have a try =]
Opera has had this for a long time.
Sorry, I think I’ll stick with Vuze.
sponsors make the world go round
all the bittorrent sites in the world are supported by sponsors/donors/advertisers it is the new busines model
http://www.h33t.com the new business model
I just downloaded the damn thing and one thing is certain: I’m not using it for BT.
What caught my attention is the segmented download feature. Tried it to see if it works with streaming sites and surprise it does. I keep using some Chinese Youtube wannabes to… erm… watch stuff and this browser performs better than both FF and Chrome.
I’m not going to use it on a constant basis, but it ain’t going to the trash bin either.
But does it have anonymity/encryption/whateverantiRIAA?
woaw! look at all those new features! Like the minimize to tray extension! And Cooliris!
And uTorrent!
Only now I don’t have to download them again!
O wait…
@neonfish (#7)
“Gestures, tab switching – firefox plugins.”
If you’re going to do that, at least label them correctly. “opera creations” is how it should be addressed. There’s an old saying “If it’s a Firefox feature, it was created by Opera”.
Still for the life of me wondering what people see in firefox – probably the marketing and branding. It’s certainly not the performance, standards, features, stability, security, development or ‘innovations’…
Then again, millions in advertising per year does buy a lot of users, which is why firefox is so popular.
elinks FTW :) can’t live without tabbed browsing.
wget ftw
SWEET! If I wanted to view my downloads in a separate window that cant be hidden in the task bar.
Thanks Wyzo!
all you opera fanboys seem to forget is this: firefox had a plugin system from the beginning and could be customized like hell with a selection of thousands of addons, whereas opera only later decided to copy this aproach. so now opera has addons too, but how many compared to FF? and it also lacks the huge community to reliably review new and updated addons. So this might change of course, but until it does, firefox is there for a reason, weather opera users invent their own reasons or not^^. AND opera is not free software, afaik. so who is the thief now? you decide
(Ben, “Still for the life of me wondering what people see in Firefox…”):
I would probably say for the extendability, since Opera does not offer much in that area (although it already has everything a regular user could want in a web browser built-in), although they do have those “Windows Sidebar-ish” widgets, but they don’t offer near the “power” that Firefox’s add-ons do.
I’m addicted to firefox. Opera is awsome on mobile phones/ PDA by far! but for standard PC, Firefox. I choose firefox because it’s not company owned. Any time you can get product comparable to a companies product, ALWAYS go for open source. Open source seems to develope a hell of a lot faster then private bussiness and poeple get to say whats in it. Look at Internet Explorer. Any above average person throughs it out cause you only get what they give you and because it’s branded Microsoft. But each to his own. What ever creams your twinki.
@23 Rainydays, I agree with you. I also use Opera for my Nokia and Firefox for Ubuntu.
HOW BOUT SUCK
NER NER
I TOOK FFX ADDED SOME EXTENSIONS AND WANT TO FEEL SPECIAL NER NER
Taking a free software like Firefox and bundling it with proprietary stuff? Fuck that.
what about the uploading
@Ben Jones (#17)
Yeah, right. Opera is pure genius.
Personally, I don’t care enough about browsers since I have to use at least 3 of them. IE for some badly coded apps, Safari on macOS since it’s better integrated and when I hapen to read web pages on windows machines Firefox is good enough. I certainly don’t need a Firefox/Opera/Whatever ripoff with “torrentz duhnloading” integrated.
Oh, no, you’re just gonna flame me for using such an inferior browser for reading shit twice a month. Go ahead, trash Firefox completely, Mozilla folks are douches anyway. What were they thinking, making an open source project like this. They could have been selling it and when new, free “competitors” arrived given it away for free like the best, last hope of humanity.
wyzo is malware by spammers. These guys have been spamming Gnutella for a long time.
They are flooding Gnutella massively with dubious pseudo results named “wsvsmkepa”. These results arrive verifiably (unspoofable) from 65.254.32.240/29 which assigned to RADFACTORY.CO.UK. RadFactory is a part of Radical Software.
There are also tons of fake results for each single search from the same range that contain an installer for wyzo:
“SEARCHTERM [wyzo].zip”
“SEARCHTERM [wyzo].torrent”
“SEARCHTERM bittorrent downloader.zip”
In other words, the people behind wyzo are parasites and disgusting scum. It’s quite likely that people using wyzo become part of a botnet that spreads even more spam. Steer clear of Wyzo and Radical Software!
What’s next, TorrentFreak? Advertising for MediaDefender?
1.i use FF it kicks ass. And…
2.I think wyzo is good because it allows numbskull chavs and the like to start downloading torrents when they are using bebo or some other social sh*t <- this will increase popularity of bittorrent and seed numbers will rise along with public awareness and acceptance of the BT protocol and filesharing.
3.Opera… ROFL!
back to the “lynx”. what has the operating system have to do with the browser, unless the browser is not open source? a “wrapper” for wyzo should be no problem if they released the source.
while i do use firefox, the scary part is only having one choice – as in ibm and micro$oft.
WHOIS – 65.254.32.240/29
Location: United States [City: Wilmington, Delaware]
Radfactory.CO.UK, in the US?
A Coward: It’s amazing but the so called internet – you might have heard about it – makes it possible to use server located in the USA whilst sitting on your arse in the United Kingdom.
Anyway, if you had read the complete WHOIS data you’d noticed this line:
ReferralServer: rwhois://rwhois.gnax.net:4321
If you knew how to use whois, you could now enter this:
whois -h rwhois.gnax.net -p4321 65.254.32.242
into a terminal (some rectangular thingy with text and stuff) and see who this range IP address is actually assigned to – instead of just the provider.
I think the auto-recursive output of domaintools is more dummy-friendly:
http://whois.domaintools.com/65.254.32.242
Recently I found a hot club — SeekingTall.com — just for hot tall gals and guys to find their cupid. Come on, tall singles. Don’t miss your lover.
Since the moderator is still sleeping…
A Coward: Go to whois.domaintools.com if you don’t know how to use WHOIS properly.
I use lynx, the rest are so bloated. :P
PS: for me, torrents get their own dedicated client.
wyzo isn’t free and open source software, so why are you guys endorsing it?
If it isn’t GPL then I’m not interested, and you shouldn’t be either.
We don’t know what’s going on inside this app, and the developers are chasing profits, not features.
should’ve told that it was an advertisement from the start, wouldn’t have read it
“Disclaimer: Wyzo is one of our sponsors. It’s always good to declare such things or you end up accused of being biased ;-)”
lol and now you cant get accused of being biased…
QUOTE:
There’s an old saying “If it’s a Firefox feature, it was created by Opera”.
Fully agree, a lot of things that are blindly credited to FireFox were actually created by Opera.
I downloaded it, tried it, there is nothing special here all it is is firefox, with a different icon, and 3 built in plugins, no malware, spyware, adware… just firefox with a different name.
Sam: Please explain, how you concluded that it contains neither malware or adware! You used a scanner right? And it didn’t find anything, right? BWAHAHAHAHA…
Nice try.
opera is bjeautiful
Why did you guys not post an article about her??
..shiiiiiieeee..
I use Midori: http://www.twotoasts.de/
swiftweasel -> http://swiftweasel.tuxfamily.org/
*compiled for specific cpu architectures, also more secure.
*basically a GPL’ed firefox
Well internet is developing fast and great things take some time to come after some rise and fall.
firefox came after netscape failure.
bittorrent came after previous models of p2p failed. likewise Chrome has come because the codes of firefox, opera and the likes are outdated and cannot come up with todays rich content web sites.
and you cannot blame Wyzo because they have come with a nice and innovative way for others to follow.
some may claim firefox, opera already had this feature but Wyzo’s presentation is better than the counterparts.
Ja, das ist meine echte email-adresse! Heute Nacht hatte ich das “Vergnügen” mit einem echten Jünger der mainstream-Presse zu kommunizieren. Das Problem, ich kenne diesen Menschen schon mein halbes Leben… Heute NAcht, wurde mir bewußt, dass Menschen, die für sich selbst denken können, in dieser Gesellschaft unerwünscht sind! Das hier ist kein Gelaber von jemanden der zu viel Zeit hat – nein, das hier ist eine Anfrage an Leute, die die Fähigkeit haben, jemanden zu folgen, der diese Gesellschaft in die Knie zwingen wird. Ich will hier keine grauen Mäuse hören – ich will Menschen, die bereit sind dieses Land, durchwachsen von Korruption, brennen zu sehen. Dieser Text ist kein Scherz, kein Spaß – dies ist die letzte Möglichkeit Freiheit zu erkämpfen! Danke.
Yes, that is my real email-address! Tonight, i had the “fortune” to meet a real believer of the mainstream-press. The problem, i knew this men half my life… Tonight, i realized, that people, who think for themselfes, are no longer accepted in this society. This is no chatter of someone with to much time on his hands – no, this is an outcry to people, who have the ability, to follow a movement, that will bring down this system to it’s knees. I don’t want to hear them grey mice complaining – i wan’t people, who whant this land, rotten with corruption, to burn. This text is no joke, no scam – this is the last opportunity to fight for freedom! Thanks.
I am sorry for my bad english – please, correct that text and copy it. Thank you!
bigboy190@web.de
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