Opera Advances with BitTorrent

In a bid to attract more users, the Norway-based company have taken to including a fully functional BitTorrent client in their next release.

When Bram Cohen's BitTorrent peer-to-peer technology gripped the web, it set a new standard in terms of file-sharing. At last, Opera Software have incorporated BitTorrent into their web-browser. The press release on their homepage states how they plan to allow users of their software to download legal torrents "such as Linux software and computer game demos."

They also plan to use the technology as a means of distributing their browser. Speaking from Oslo, Christen Krogh revealed; "the massive response [to Opera 8's release], with more than 100 downloads per second, dealt a technical knock-out to Opera's servers. With BitTorrent, users would have had an alternative download mechanism." HTTP and FTP support for browsers is and has been the standard for many years, and Opera hope to add the BitTorrent protocol to this list, claiming it is the "logical next step."

Download: Opera 8.02 BitTorrent Technology Preview