I liked how the old Opera included a bittorrent client. It was the only browser that did, and felt like it was actually the way it was meant to be used. But nobody got it. You had warez kiddies left and right complaining how it sucked compared to Azureus and later µTorrent which had bazillions of features to tweak and max out their connection, or saying it was useless because their favorite ALT did not whitelist Opera.
But I just used it a lot when running bigger downloads like install discs for Linux distros, OpenOffice etc., and it made a difference when there was some major release and half of the plain old http mirrors were painfully slow or down entirely. Admittedly, that situation got a lot better compared to 10 years ago, but still I'm delighted by how natural it felt to use, since it seamlessly integrated with the browser's download manager. And you didn't have this "uh, I need to start an external program for this" kind of reluctant thought when you saw a website offered download via torrent.
Today I just wonder if BT would have evolved differently if all browsers would have included a client.
The Brave browser has a bittorrent add-on pre-installed. I've been toying with it as my daily driver for a couple weeks and have been really enjoying it. The project still needs work but I love what they're doing.
I wish I worked there, I do miserable tier 1 tech support. The reason I am promoting their browser is because it has the exact functionality the parent comment was looking for. Its also a really neat project by a former Firefox dev. It's a browser made to inherently block ads and tracking . Its essentially seamlessly does what several add-ons do for me in Firefox. I'm just excited to see a browser take tracking ads, fingerprinting and other browser privacy seriously.
I think there's still potential to steer BT in a more exciting direction if there was the will to from those involved. More quality software projects using it to download by default. Bring the trust back, shake off the reputation for just being trojan-infested cracks.
There's plenty of things besides piracy people could be doing with torrents and related tech and it seems like such a waste of an idea. A Linux package manager, an open-source Acestream alternative, collaborative work on large scales
Updates for large software (mostly games) is often distributed via BT. But it's mostly invisible to the end user because the client just does it transparently.
Also, the original Bittorrent client looked like an Internet Explorer file download dialog. The download experience was nearly identical: you clicked on a download link, and a download dialog with a progress bar opened up. Behind the scenes, the torrent file MIME type was registered to the Bittorrent client, so it was downloading the torrent file and launching the Bittorrent client, while a normal download showed the download dialog directly, but the user didn't have to be aware of these details.
So yes, it's the way it was originally meant to be used.
Personally I really truly believe that once you can make a torrent client in javascript that runs directly in the browser without any plugins or gateways/tunnels that you will see it explode.
Developers will code it into their download pages, decentralized systems like a p2p wikipedia will be possible and always accessible by anyone with a browser.
You will see it explode indeed (where "it" means "the browser" and "explode" means "tab gets throttled and/or crashes"). I understand the motivations for everything-in-a-browser, but this approach has major externalities - e.g. the client's power, both as in CPU and as in battery.
Something like a torrent network is a bunch of IO with some processing which fits perfectly with javascript. WebAssembly might be able to get around some of the performance issues in specific areas (like some of the more complicated hashing stuff) if there are some, but it's more than possible to write performant code in javsacript.
It might be possible, but I have yet to see it. So far, the performance increase has been thanks to the engine executing such code, despite the opposite effort ;) of the JS code.
Vuze already has a supporting plugin, and there's been talk for Transmission to include it. I'm not entirely sure, but I think that if 1 person has a compatible client it acts as a bridge connecting the two types of swarms via DHT!
But I just used it a lot when running bigger downloads like install discs for Linux distros, OpenOffice etc., and it made a difference when there was some major release and half of the plain old http mirrors were painfully slow or down entirely. Admittedly, that situation got a lot better compared to 10 years ago, but still I'm delighted by how natural it felt to use, since it seamlessly integrated with the browser's download manager. And you didn't have this "uh, I need to start an external program for this" kind of reluctant thought when you saw a website offered download via torrent. Today I just wonder if BT would have evolved differently if all browsers would have included a client.