James Delahunty
6 Jul 2005 15:16
Opera has added BitTorrent support to its web browser, making it the first browser with native support for BitTorrent sharing. Up until now, an external client like Bram Cohen's BitTorrent or an alternative client like Azureus was needed to initiate BitTorrent downloads. BitTorrent has become widely used to share huge files because of its speed and reliability, making it the biggest way online to share copyrighted material.
However, since BitTorrent has vast amounts of legitimate uses, it's safe from any legal problems from content owners when third parties use the technology to infringe copyright. It makes it very easy to spread large files to literally thousands of people without huge bandwidth costs so it is used by many developers and companies to distribute files on a low budget.
It is likely that many other web browsers will add support for BitTorrent over time as it becomes more widely used. Its use is already growing at huge rates, causing other software companies to write their own sharing technology modelled on BitTorrent. The biggest example is Microsoft's take on BitTorrent, which the company has called Avalanche. However it is unlikely Avalanche would ever dethrone BitTorrent.
You can download Opera from Filepedia.com.
Source:
Betanews