BitTorrent's audacious P2P-powered Project Maelstrom browser enters public beta
On Friday, Project Maelstrom for Windows enters public beta and is available for anyone to download from BitTorrent's site. BitTorrent says a Mac version is coming soon, but there are no immediate plans for a Linux build.
Maelstrom is a Chromium-based browser that can function as a regular browser that accesses sites over standard HTTP/HTTPS protocols. The program also contains the ability to grab websites packaged as torrents and display them.
Although it's a Chromium-based browser, BitTorrent isn't officially supporting Chrome extensions and apps from the Chrome Web Store. Nevertheless, you can still install content from the Web Store and a lot of it should work, the company says.
Why this matters: The idea behind Maelstrom is simple: if the web relied on BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing technology, accessing web content could become much faster and more reliable than it is today. While the web's server-client architecture works pretty well, sites can often slow down or become inaccessible when servers fail or are overwhelmed by too many requests at once. Theoretically, BitTorrent-packaged sites would never go down as long as you could grab the site's files from another user.
