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Software The Internet

BitTorrent Launches Beta of Torrent-Based Browser Project Maelstrom 35

Posted by timothy from the bits-and-pieces-from-all-over dept.
An anonymous reader writes BitTorrent today launched Project Maelstrom, the company's distributed browser, in beta. The company also released new tools on GitHub that let developers and publishers build content for the browser. Announced in December, Project Maelstrom, then just an invite-only alpha, was described as "the first torrent-based browser." The launch today is an open beta, meaning anyone can now try an early version of Maelstrom. You do, however, need a Windows computer. Windows users can download the beta now from here. Since the alpha, BitTorrent says it has improved stability, integrated support for automatic updates, and added DHT visualization for users when loading torrents.
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BitTorrent Launches Beta of Torrent-Based Browser Project Maelstrom More

BitTorrent Launches Beta of Torrent-Based Browser Project Maelstrom

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  • if there is a way to build a Beowulf cluster this way.

  • windows waaat? (Score:3)

    by tomxor ( 2379126 ) on Friday April 10, 2015 @07:18PM (#49450391)
    Was so looking forward to seeing this public beta, lame to be stuck on windows.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      They couldn't get the included NSA & RIAA spyware virus to run on Linux, so Windows only.

    • I was so looking forward they released this as open source. Now its just another piece of closed source non-improvable non-free pay-here software.

      • ... its just another piece of closed source...

        Chromium (on which Maelstrom is based) is open source. Regarding the "non-free pay-here" part... "citation needed".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by KGIII ( 973947 )

      Yup. No Linux version, I've been running nothing but a mix of Linux OSes on my myriad machines and I prefer it. If there's no Linux version there then there is no use for it here. I could boot to Windows but I see no reason to do so simply for a browser that probably spies on me, has few (if any) plug-ins meaning no ad blocker, and will likely eventually try to charge me money, I gave the site a good going-over and did discover an interesting slide show app and will look at that more later as it appears to

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tomxor ( 2379126 )
        its based on the chromium project it should have plugins... just annoying they go for windows first, it's chromium after all.
        • No its logical. Chromium has one one hundredth of a percent of market share and visibilty. If they were launching it for tablets and phones yes, I would agree. THEY ARE NOT. It was rolled out on the most visible, most popular, most used platform first. If you decide that isn't your rig then its your loss, But don't desparage them when they want the largest group of people looking at it.

  • Freenet (Score:3)

    by Mantrid42 ( 972953 ) on Friday April 10, 2015 @07:19PM (#49450395)
    Isn't this basically what Freenet tried to do back in the day?

    • Re:Freenet (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 10, 2015 @07:42PM (#49450523)

      Not really, freenet has many features that this lacks, such as encryption and deniability.

      This has some features, such as being distributed and every download is bit perfect.

      This is primitive compared to things already available, really.

      See IPFS.io for something that builds off the ideas of git, bittorrent, freenet, camlistore for a more permanent solution. In fact, they call it The Permanent Web.
      https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs
      https://sourcegraph.com/blog/ipfs-the-permanent-web-by-juan-benet-talk
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fa4pckodM9g

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Fwipp ( 1473271 )

        I'm excited for when they'll be able to focus their efforts on the javascript implementation - imagine transparently serving all the heavy-weight media assets for your site in a p2p fashion, without the user having to do anything besides click "Play" on the video.

        And if you're not excited at that level; imagine being able to run an imageboard and use only a fraction of the bandwidth you currently do.

        It's already pretty impressive, but the demos & writeup are certainly not user friendly at this point.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Em Adespoton ( 792954 )

      No, because the concept behind freenet is that it's impossible to track from source to destination, and more popular content gains redundancy while unwanted content vanishes from the network -- and the entire thing is encrypted making it virtually impossible to track what anyone's looking at.

      This project, while using DHT, is otherwise completely orthagonal to Freenet -- it's all about using nearby/fast nodes to get you the content you're looking for as quickly as possible via a distributed mechanism. There

  • You do, however, need a Windows computer.

    I do? All this time I thought I was pretty happy with Mint 17.1 Cinnamon.

  • .. almost as long ago as when biittorrent was invented, as a means to abate so-called

    flash crowds

    on the internet... more colloquially known in these parts as the slashdot effect... If everyone visiting a web page with a large quantity of multimedia content helped to distribute the data that would otherwise have to be supplied by the website, the web server would be generally able to tolerate larger numbers of people simultaneously accessing it.

  • Similar project, but OpenSource and works on any OS/Browser: https://github.com/HelloZeroNe... [github.com] (Decentralized websites using Bitcoin crypto and the BitTorrent network)
  • Must every new browser released be based on Chromium?

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