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Comment by cookiecaper | Hacker News Reader

Really there's no reason Firefox and Chrome shouldn't support torrents as a normal download mechanism, default to 1.0 share ratio with a cap of 1/3 upload speed (obviously adjustable), and just let web sites start using it transparently for every file over 20 megs.

BitTorrent is a GREAT content delivery mechanism. It decreases download time, decreases bandwidth costs (for everyone), ensures that file remain available as long as there are seeds (i.e. no way to censor a rogue file from a central point of control (assuming DHT is in use of course)), and checks every chunk and automatically redownloads if corruption is discovered. It's really pretty awesome.

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It's a privacy issue.

Imagine I'm an Evil Doer(tm) and I decide to go to a porn site and download "Sick fetishes 3" just so I can publish the list of IP addresses that were part of my BT swarm.

With BT right now, you as a user are probably savvy enough to know that risk and accept it, but if it was built right into the the browser, a lot of bad things could happen.

It's too bad too, because I'd love to see a much bigger adoption of BT.

While this is true, browsers could benefit from a "bittorrent-lite" implementation. You get the files from a server, but they come with metadata like a .torrent file, which includes hashes for small chunks of the file. Downloads are automatically checked and can resume anywhere. It could all be transparent to the user. Really, it's amazing this isn't the default way to download yet.

Resuming fetching multiple unfetched fragments of a resource is already possible with HTTP range requests. Checking the entire file can be done if the server provides a Content-MD5 header (though I'm not sure actual client use of this is widespread), and checking parts of it is infrequently useful by itself to the processing application and would be highly application-dependent even if so. The big win of BitTorrent is the distribution of available channel capacity over the swarm of downloaders; if you're not going to use that part, HTTP does quite well by itself.

Proxy the transfers through the host site?

Oh, wait.

Opera does has built-in torrent support

Do they implement it properly, e.g. <video src="torrent:..."> or is is just for downloading?

Bittorrent is not a very effective protocol for streaming video. It's unlikely that it works in video tags and even if it did, it would not provide a very good user experience. Maybe in ideal conditions.

Bittorrent does not download files sequentially from the beginning to the end, but it grabs a piece here, a piece there. This way it can achieve greater availability and faster transfers for everyone.

Yeah, Opera just has a bittorrent client built in, as in, when you click on a torrent file, it presents it to you like it is "downloading" a traditional file.

1.0 is too high since the original server is willing to serve a reasonable amount of content and that doesn't even really count as seeding.

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