BitTorrent’s P2P Maelstrom browser now available for public download

BitTorrent’s P2P Maelstrom browser now available for public download

BitTorrent’s Project Maelstrom peer-to-peer (P2P) browser has entered its beta phase and is now available for the public to download on its website. First announced last December as an alpha version, Project Maelstrom aims to bring the capabilities of P2P sharing to the web browsing experience.

Maelstrom is a Chromium-based browser that allows websites to work over the BitTorrent protocol and be hosted independently of centralized servers by peers. In BitTorrent parlance, peers are computers who have opened a torrent file – or in the case of Maelstrom, a website – in their browser or client but do not have the complete file yet. On the other hand, seeds already have the complete file downloaded. Both peers and seeds continue to share the files with other peers who require more data to complete the file or website on their end.

Maelstrom can load web pages on the internet like any regular browser, but it has the added ability to access torrent-based websites hosted on other PCs. The new browser allows web users to take advantage of the power of distributed technology that is already used in BitTorrent products.

For instance, websites would be able to load more quickly if there happened to be a seed or peer located closer to you than the central server on which the site was hosted. Popular websites could see the largest benefit from this as users who visit a site automatically become peers for that site, so a larger number of hits on a page would translate into more peers for a particular website. The larger number of peers would then increase the chances that new visitors would find a peer situated nearer to them, thus speeding up loading times for more users. Furthermore, the P2P model might even help to ease server overload problems on websites that routinely see heavy traffic.

With Project Maelstrom, BitTorrent intends to make a truly open internet possible and eliminate the need for, or at least reduce dependence on, servers. BitTorrent has even released developer tools to help developers build specifically for its new browser and further streamline the creation of new content. Over 10,000 developers and 3,500 publishers have already signed up to work with the platform since the release of its alpha version.

Source: BitTorrent Blog