Project Maelstrom went public beta

Announced last year by Bittorrent Inc. The new generation browser has entered the stage of public beta testing.

Project Maelstrom is a bittorrent based browser that allows you to publish static content online in the form of a familiar torrent in minutes. The first public beta is compiled in a 32-bit version, while only for Windows, they will soon promise a build for MacOS.
')
At first glance, the interface shows that the popular Chromium engine, a rather old, 37th version (September 2014) is taken as the basis.


The main page shows a counter, which in real time displays the number of people “hosting” the current page. At first it seems that the counter is fictitious and flaunts only to attract attention, but by opening the Developer Tools on the Network tab, you can see a lively Json, giving the number of seeds, feasts, speed of feedback and reception.

Below on the main page of the browser there are test magnet links to torrent files. In the case of a click on the link, the browser thinks for a few seconds, reports that it is looking for peers, and then quickly opens the page itself. The link in the address bar takes the form bittorrent://HASH/PATH . In addition to this format, Maelstrom also understands magnet links and simple http links to torrent files. For some reason, an attempt to open the magnet of the main page in a normal torrent client failed - it cannot receive metadata. And some hashes in general in DHT does not see.

Chromium itself, of course, does not know bittorrent. It is, in fact, a shell for the µTorrent client, hiding under the name “chrome.native.torrent.exe”, which starts with the browser and doesn’t try to complete it after the browser is finished — it remains to “distribute the Internet”.

Settings

In addition to the standard chrome interface, the developers brought out the settings of µTorrent: storage size for distributions (5GB by default), the number of simultaneous active torrents (from 0 to 256, by default 8), the limit of speed of reception / return, as well as traffic for a certain period of time, settings proxy, crash reports and the port of the torrent client that communicates with the browser:

Distributions

There is no graphical interface for creating distributions yet - everything is done with a special optimizing Python script . The essence of his optimizations is to organize the sequence of downloading files, for example, index.html should be loaded first. Plus to this, a fixed portion of torrent data is set to 16kb, since too large size can affect the speed of loading the site.

The initial site seeding must be started in the most common µTorrent or Bittorrent clients. Magnet-links may not work with others - developers warn.

General impressions

In general, an interesting idea, loud PR and rather knee-realization.
In fact, a ready torrent client is taken, a browser in the form of Chromium is hung on it through the API, there are no convenient tools.
One can hope that this is just a beta, and in a relatively short time something more or less interesting will appear, for example, an analogue of the DNS.