BitTorrent support for Firefox

RedSwoosh, a provider of P2P technologies based software distribution services, have made public a very alpha version of FoxTorrent, a Firefox extension that adds support for BitTorrent, a protocol for peer to peer data distribution. At least for a few hours. The release came after an overly enthusiastic developer leaked a development version last week but it isn’t available any more.

I got to get and try it and so far FoxTorrent looks pretty good and simple: you click on a .torrent file and it handles the request through a light web server that acts as an agent and connects to BitTorrent peers. The interface is completely web based (http://127.0.0.1:9421) showing the currently downloaded files and with options to pause and resume them even accross sessions. Files are shared as long as Firefox remains running.

I have used powerful BitTorrent applications before including Azureus and µTorrent and of the long feature set they provide, allocating bandwidth for uploading and downloading (leeching and seeding in BitTorrent argot) is the only one I consider a must have. Torrent prioritizing should also be doable without adding much complexity to the user interface. I would prefer a solution integrated with Firefox’s Download Manager so I don’t have to look at two places to get the current status.

FoxTorrent is the latest attempt to bring the popular P2P protocol to Firefox. As recent as last February, Joshua Henderson announced BitFox, though it is in the very early stages of development and there’s nothing to try yet.

In 2005, firepuddle, was one of the projects competing in Google’s Summer of Code but as as far as I know, nothing happened.

Since BitTorrent support is not in Firefox 3 PRD (product requirements document), extensions like FoxTorrent or BitFox look like the most realistic way to get it. I believe BitTorrent should become just another download method, as invisible as FTP is today. Power users get a couple of tweaks (like prioritizing, bandwidth allocations, pause/resume) and the rest keeps its current BitTorrent client.

Let’s hope both projects get to deliver a final version of their products.
Read more about the Torrentfreak situation.