Is AllPeers FireFox's P2P "Killer App"?

Vivek Jishtu writes "Tech Crunch predicts that the AllPeers Firefox extension will massively increase the attractiveness of that already popular browser, drawing more millions away from embattled Internet Explorer. AllPeers is a simple, persistent buddy list in the browser. Initially, interaction with those buddies will be limited to discovering and sharing files."

Paranoid

[ehaggis]

This looks like a great feature, but it also looks like it could be a consistant security breach waiting to happen. These are the features and user toys that have plagued Microsoft security. Let's hope we don't trade safety for neato-gizmo stuff. And now I will don my tinfoil hat and be silent.

RIAA

[Comatose51]

I can imagine the FUD campaign the RIAA would run against FF and Microsoft running their own to put FF into the category of P2P software, which will result it in being banned from most businesses.

Re:done already

[AKAImBatman]

I wonder if the story submitter realizes that Netscape has bundled AIM as a sidebar extension since the earliest release of Netscape 6 Beta? Might come as a serious shock to his system that this "killer" app is not so "new" or "killer" after all. ;-)

Re:You must be a unix user

[ajwitte]

In general, I agree that smaller apps that play well with the system are better than "suites", especially when said suites are inflexible and self-contained.

The stated goal of the Firefox project is to build a browser-only app that's lighter weight than Seamonkey (nee Mozilla Suite). So far, I think they've managed to include useful features without bloating Firefox too much.

It's hardly fair to point to a plug-in for Firefox that's developed by a third party and claim that Firefox is becoming too feature-rich/bloated.

P.S. I imagine your views also influenced your choice of text editor? :)

Private filesharing

[technopinion]

This is indeed a killer app... if it were a standalone app. Why isn't it? And why isn't there already an app like this? It doesn't seem as though it would be that hard to create, but everything I've tried for private filesharing within a group of friends has been either too complex (waste), too limited (grouper, icq, msn, etc) or too braindead (many others).

Just give me a torrent client or emule-like app that I can limit to a group of defined contacts.

Re:Oh, please.

[aurelian]

The same can be said for just about any new app or service. The web itself was only used by people in your third category at first, then it went mainstream. Ditto mp3 players.

In any case I'm not so sure your division into three groups is all that valid; there's a whole spectrum of users from geek (you) to semi-geek (your dad perhaps, or friends who rip cds and use email) to non-geek (your mom). Geek trends often filter their way along the chain, and in doing so, become big business.

Duh - Adblock

[Dachannien]

No, the "killer app" for Firefox is, has been, and forever shall be Adblock.

Instant message programs and file sharing programs are a dime a dozen, but Adblock is what separates Firefox from other web browsers. It'll have a far more profound effect on the web, too, as eventually it'll become clear to advertisers that the conventional massive blinking ad in the middle of the site's content just isn't as effective as the innocuous text-only ad, because users are far more likely to block an annoying ad than they are a simple text ad.

Re:You must be a unix user

[Hosiah]

The disadvantage is also clear, you gotta learn about a lot of apps to do one end task. Get the picture?

For the hundredth millionth time, learning is not an issue for everybody. And the people who don't want to learn cripple the choices of those of us who do.

Re:You must be a unix user

[Tom]

You missed the important part of the Unix way:

* If I can mix'n'match on the commandline, I can write a script
* Since all my scripts use standard commands, I can mix'n'match scripts (e.g. loganalyzer.pl webstats.html)
* IF I can mix'n'match scripts, I can write a nice GUI to make it easier

The whole point of the Unix way is using components, plugins, extensions - whatever the hype of the month calls them.

CD Writing software is a great example. Choose the GUI you like. Under the hook, none of them had to reinvent the wheel, they all use the same software to do the actual burning.

Great concept. I'm sure 10 years down the road, M$ will "invent" it and hype it to hell just in time for Windos ZX or whatever.

Re:Quantumware

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, looks like someone is using Slashdot to hype vaporware for their own gain.... I never thought THAT would ever happen ;)

BT for sharing family photos?

[hatless]

So let's see. By using BT to share personal files with a few people, you forgo the one big reason to us BT: high speed downloads thanks to swarming connections with multiple peers.

Take that away and you're left with a buddy-file-transfer scheme that's actually going to be slower than any of the competition. Unlike the major IM clients, anyone behind a firewall or NAT (meaning almost everyone) will have to not only open ports on the firewall but also forward the ports to their PC in order to get an upload speed of more than about 10K/sec. And unlike uploading the files to your personal hosted webspace (which you can usually do a whole lot faster than a BT upload), the files are only available for download when your PC is online? Are most people with desktops going to leave them on 24/7 and turn off power management just to keep the new baby pictures available when they could have just uploaded them to Kodak instead? And what about laptops? How effectively are laptop users going to effectively share much of anything?

Also, doesn't using BT generally degrade web browsing performance? If I'm going to have BT on my own PC at all, why would I want a client that shuts down when I'm not browsing, which is normally when I'm happiest to let BT eat up all my bandwidth?

This gets funding? Meet Web 2.0, eerily similar to Web 1.0.

Re:Comment from AllPeers CTO

[Dr. Spork]

Just curious: This sounds like a neat app, but I'm curious why you chose to tie this to Firefox instead of making it a standalone. If I were going to p2p share photos with my family, I'd do it only with an app that's open 24/7, and for me, Firefox is not that app (memory bloat).

I do run Torrent 24/7, and if it had a system for distributing files among friends, I might use it. Right now, I do my friends/family sharing through my FTP server - also something that can run in the background without disturbing my games and other intensive computer use. But I would never dream of not closing Firefox before firing up a game, especially if it ran an extension that further increased its memory/CPU usage.

Re:Comment from AllPeers CTO

[plasticmillion]

For the PR value. :-)

I'm mainly kidding, although we were certainly not oblivious to the fact that Firefox users are an early adopter oriented crowd who would likely be more interested in what we are doing than the average web user. Another major consideration was the fact that we wanted to be multiplatform, but didn't want the bloat of Java, the licensing complexity of Qt, etc.

At the same time, someone was speculating here (I think) that we only based this on FF because XULRunner is not yet available. This isn't true. First of all, we probably could have used XULRunner in its existing form. Secondly, we feel that there are huge synergies between AllPeers functionality and FF. In essence, we've felt for a while that we are building a new generation web browser, and it doesn't make sense to reinvent the wheel. FF is an amazingly extensible platform that enabled us to save a huge amount of time by leveraging their existing functionality. I hope that the synergies between FF and AllPeers will be obvious once you use it.

Personally I leave FF running all the time, but the problem of memory bloat is a real one. We've discussed having a lightweight daemon running when FF isn't, and we'll probably do this sooner or later. I'm curious to find out how big a problem it will be for people to leave FF running. I'm suspecting it won't be as large as you suggest, but we'll see.

DOA for corporate users

[Pushnell]

If by "killer app" you mean, "all chances of being used in a corporate environment are dead" then yes, this may turn Firefox into just that. Until FF gains central management of (amongst many other things) allowed plugins, then P2P capabilities via plugins are, in fact, a strike -against- deploying FF. I'm surprised we don't already have plugins for connecting to the popular IM services, which is another common problem.

We need to be giving corporate decision-makers -more- reasons to switch to FF, not fewer.