p2pnet - rss feed: BitTorrent with Opera
p2p news / p2pnet: BTO has arrived. Opera has now released it technical preview (TP) of Opera 9 with BitTorrent, aka Merlin, on Opera Labs but, "Why should people use this, when dedicated BT clients, such as Azureus, always end up doing a better job?" - wonders DaBlade in a comment to a previous BTO story.
"It’s pretty obvious to everyone within P2P that multi-network P2P clients work like crap. Multi-purpose applications must be even worse… Mediocre implementation of BT. And, Opera is proprietary. They lock up all their code so no one can change or improve upon it. I say stick with what works, people. Azureus, KTorrent, Yet ABC and all the other dedicated BT clients."
There you go. And in the meanwhile, apart from BT, "There are some very cool features we want you to try," says Opera:
- Opera Widgets - small AJAX applications that provide "specific functionality"
- Use your favorite search engine in the search box. Go to the site you want and right click on the search field site and click on the search field. You will then be prompted to “create search”
- "Cosmetic surgery" for web pages with an improved content blocker: "see the page the way you want".
- Improved pop-up blocker: "We added more intelligence to help weed out even more pop-ups. But since not all pop-ups are created equal, use the trash can to retrieve pop-ups you may want."
- "Site specific preferences" for people who want to control settings for specific pages.
- Thumbnail preview" making it, "easy to have many tabs open at once." Using the thumbnail feature, you can see what’s what by resting the mouse on any tab.
Go here for a download
Also See:
BTO story - Opera 9 with BitTorrent, February 7, 2006
Opera - Opera 9 Technology Preview 2, February 7, 2006
February 8th, 2006 at 6:55 pm
Opera has a “simple” implementation of BitTorrent with not as many features. Its not intended to be a replacement for a fully-featured client, but to allow newer users to download torrented files just like any other file. They also previewed the technology a while back in Opera 8.02 or something. (http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2005/07/07/)
Personally i wouldnt use it, but its good that Opera are trying to make p2p more acceptable and natural for the typical browser user.
As for the remark on “Multi-purpose applications” - most browsers already are. Opera has built-in Mail, and Opera and Firefox both have built-in RSS readers… BitTorrent is just treated as another protocol, like HTTP and FTP.