Browser based torrent clients are not really a new thing. Various web sites have been offering this service for some time now. While most charge to use this service there are also a few free one available. Most notably the service offered by Image Shack (free users are restricted to maximum download limit and also the number of users that are accommodated at a time) and also by BitLet.
The way in which these services work is a bit different. At image shack you point their server in the direction of the torrents by uploading the torrent and the required file is then downloaded to their server and can be retrieved once it has completely downloaded (the torrent file becomes an HTTP link in essence). The service BitLet offers works in a more conventional way so far as torrents go in that it downloads the file to your PC like a regular torrent client.
Why opt for these unconventional methods of downloading torrents I hear you ask? Well if your service provider is a sadist like some service providers are you can use these services to by pass their blocks on torrents ( I think this only applies to Image Shack since you download the file of their servers like you would download any regular file from the inter web). Also this is quiet handy when you are at the office and want to download something, the torrent client just appears like a regular browser window.
I tested these services over the weekend to see the speed that one gets compared to a regular torrent client, in this case I was using utorrent to download the World of Goo soundtrack ,a perfectly legit torrent since it was put online by the games creator(another reason to love 2-D boy). Any ways the seeder to leecher ratio was pretty decent (66 seeders to 0 leechers). The maximum speed that I can get on my connection from torrents is 105 Kbps.
The result show that the torrent client functions just as well as the regular torrent client. It took me round about 20 minutes to download the files using both services. The image shack server was busy whenever I tried to use their service. Though I talked to a few people who have used that service and they spoke highly of it.
Overall this looks very promising, hopefully they’ll add more features to this as time goes on. This is especially good for those legal torrents that never seem to have any seeders. Do check it out and let us know what you think. A definite thumbs up from us.
