Here’s another reason why Firefox browser is the fastest growing browser in the world. You can now download torrent files using Firefox if you have the extension installed. Meaning you can avoid installing and using BitTorrent clients such as Azureus, uTorrent, BitComet and etc… Currently I only found two extensions that is able to download torrent files using Firefox. It is FoxTorrent and FireTorrent.
Tried them both and this is what I have to say about FoxTorrent and FireTorrent.
I tested both the extensions by downloading OpenOffice. OpenOffice torrent has enough seeders to max out my download speed.
FireTorrent is the world’s first BitTorrent plugin for the Wyzo and Firefox web browsers. Suitable for novice and advanced users, FireTorrent allows you to download torrents without the hassle of a 3rd party application. The FireTorrent plugin includes the very latest technologies and standards to ensure that your download completes quickly and reliably, including advanced features such as STUNT connections, uPnP NAT traversal, uTorrent compatible peer exchange, and many many more!
FireTorrent is able to maxed out my download speed at nearly 100KB/s.
The only drawback about FireTorrent is I can’t resume the download if I cancel the it. Resuming download should be the basic feature that every torrent client to have. BitTorrent technology was developed to distribute large files and what if we got disconnected at 90% from a 10GB download? That’d be frustrating!
FireTorrent is able to handle downloads very well and there are options such as Port, Download/Upload Rate, Encrypt BitTorrent Connections, Proxy which you can configure. FireTorrent would be a very good Firefox torrent extension if it is able to support resume downloads.
FoxTorrent is an open-source Firefox extension that lets you stream torrents as they download, from your web browser, with zero configuration needed. It said to be Streaming Fast Delivery, Background Downloading, Complete Firefox Integration, Low Resource Footprint, Works on Windows, Mac, and Ubuntu Linux and Configuration-Free.
There is nothing to configure in FoxTorrent. You can’t find any options at all other than the download location. It will be good if it works perfectly but if it doesn’t, you can’t do anything about it. FoxTorrent claims to makes its best effort to auto-configure NAT boxes but it didn’t work for me. I spent 30 minutes downloading OpenOffice and the fastest speed I got was 10KB/s. That’s nearly 10 times slower than FireTorrent! After reading Foxtorrent FAQ, I found out that FoxTorrent uses port 9420. I manually forwarded port 9420 but the download speed didn’t improve.
One more thing about FoxTorrent is, it supports pausing and resuming torrent downloads.
FireTorrent is fast but without resume capability. FoxTorrent is slow and it’s supports resuming. If you ask me which I’d prefer to use, I’d say NEITHER one and I’d stick with uTorrent. Well, if FireTorrent is able to support resuming, I might use FireTorrent.