SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
TorrentFreak reports on the April 10th public release of BitTorrent Inc's torrent-powered browser Maelstrom:
In short, Maelstrom takes Google's Chromium framework and stuffs a powerful BitTorrent engine under the hood, meaning that torrents can be played directly from the browser. More excitingly, however, Maelstrom also supports torrent-powered websites that no longer have to rely on central servers.
By simply publishing a website in a torrent format the website will be accessible if others are sharing it. This can be assisted by web-seeds but also completely peer-to-peer.
Project Maelstrom's stated primary goal is to keep the Internet open and neutral:
If we are successful, we believe this project has the potential to help address some of the most vexing problems facing the Internet today. How can we keep the Internet open? How can we keep access to the Internet neutral? How can we better ensure our private data is not misused by large companies? How can we help the Internet scale efficiently for content?
TorrentFreak notes that it's not an all-in-one solution, though:
While Maelstrom can bypass Internet censors, it's good to keep in mind that all shared files are visible to the public. Maelstrom is caching accessed content to keep it seeded, so using a VPN might not be a bad idea. After all, users leave a trail of their browsing history behind.
Unfortunately, it seems that the project is closed-source, and the beta is currently Windows-only, with a Mac version announced. The devs have stated that a Linux version is planned, but is a low priority.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2015, @07:11PM
A web browser should parse and display HTML. It should NOT try to be a torrent client too, or an email client, a word processor, a pdf reader, or an ecmascript interpreter.
One of these is not like the others.
All of your examples are document formats.
Bittorrent is just another protocol, like http, https, ftp, gopher, etc. New protocols absolutely should be considered for inclusion into a web browser. The original concept of the web was not protocol specific.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2015, @08:55PM
Please no. I don't want web browsers to become even more bloated than they already are. There are plenty of torrent clients out there; this would just be redundant, and it would simply add more useless bloat.