There is finally a decent BitTorrent client for the Firefox browser and it goes by the name of FoxTorrent. When I originally saw this Firefox extension make its way out in March I got pretty excited. I thought to myself that there was finally an easy way to download Torrents without having to download an extra program…but as Max pointed out I was a little bit wrong.
After you install the extension it silently installs a Red Swoosh application that is used to power the Torrent downloads. Unfortunately they install this application without ever notifying the user that it is going to happen. This also makes it a little more difficult to full restore your Firefox profile from a backup since the application is installed in the Program Files folder in Windows.
The next thing I’m sure you’re wondering about is the uninstall process. I’m pleased to say that they do successfully remove their software from the computer with no traces remaining when uninstalling the extension within Firefox.
Since the last time I wrote about FoxTorrent there have been numerous improvements. Now it has received a nice UI (user interface) overhaul that makes it seem more usable, and it can also support Torrents that contain multiple files! The thing that most people will love will probably be the streaming media functionality which gives you the opportunity to listen and watch your music and video downloads before they complete.
I clocked the download speeds of both uTorrent (a BitTorrent downloader) and FoxTorrent (the Firefox extension) to make a comparison, and uTorrent came out on top every time. I did it with the Ubuntu ISO images and FoxTorrent had a hard time stretching above 50% of what my Internet connection can handle while uTorrent made full use of the available bandwidth. So if you’re looking to download something as fast as possible you might want to stick with a dedicated BitTorrent client.
Hi Ryan,
Thanks again for the coverage of FoxTorrent.
FoxTorrent has the separate processing running so that you don’t have to keep (the often memory hungry) Firefox running constantly to keep your torrents downloading. We note this in the Welcome to FoxTorrent page upon installing.
We’re sorry to hear that your Ubuntu download only downloaded at half the possible rate… we’ve seen FoxTorrent outperform both uTorrent and Azureus on well seeded torrents. Of course BitTorrent is a very random protocol (the peers you get are selected at random each time), and so we’ve also seen times where those clients outperform FoxTorrent.
Later this week we’re going to release an auto-cap on upload bandwidth feature so FoxTorrent doesn’t saturate your upload connection (and so doesn’t hurt your download connection), so that might help.
Let us know what link you used for the Ubuntu download and we’ll see if we can see why you’re not getting the fastest possible rate.
Thanks!
Happy Torrenting…
Tom.
Thanks Tom, I’ll go ahead and retest the FoxTorrent extension to see if I can get any better speeds this time around.