How Project Maelstrom by BitTorrent Will Change the Internet

Maelstrom  is a next generation browser, developed by BitTorrent that uses  BitTorrent’s P2P technology in order to place some control of the Web back in users’ hands by eliminating the need for centralized servers. Maelstrom project details were first published by Eric Klinker on BitTorrent’s official blog back in December 2014. The primary aim of the project was to build an Internet truly powered by people, one that lowers barriers and denies gatekeepers their grip on our future. Since, we know how difficult is the situation these days with fighting for net neutrality. Project Maelstrom definitely brought us with good NEWS. 

Also read: What is Net Neutrality and Why Should You Care.

How can we keep the Internet open? How can we keep access to the Internet neutral? How can we better ensure our private data is not misused by large companies? How can we help the Internet scale efficiently for content? BitTorrent says

If we are successful, we believe this project has the potential to help address some of the most vexing problems facing the Internet today.

BitTorrent reported more than 10,000 developers and 3,500 publishers signed up for the alpha, and it’s using their insights to launch a more stable public beta. Today Rob Velasquez announced on BitTorrent’s official blog that Maelstrom beta program is ready and people can download and use it.

Along with the beta comes the first set of developer tools for the browser, helping publishers and programmers to build their websites around Maelstrom’s P2P technology. Here’s what’s new since the alpha release:

• Improved stability
• Support for auto-update
• DHT visualization for users when loading torrents
• Developer publishing tool

The developer tool for publishing will help developers build for Project Maelstrom easily. They can even use the command line to command line tools to do that. This will streamline the process for creating and publishing content for other users to access while using Project Maelstrom. You can download developers tools from their GitHub repo:

With this when you access a website, the browser connects to a “swarm” of users already accessing the site who have pieces of it ready to send over. These bits are assembled into the final product and displayed normally. If it works as intended, you won’t notice a difference in the functionality of these sites.

The torrent browser is going to be able to access regular web pages via the internet, but it’s mainly for these so-called torrent web pages. One of the main advantages here will be scalability that surpasses anything we have today on traditional server infrastructure. When a site gets hit by a lot of traffic, a server has to devote more and more bandwidth to serving content, which can easily saturate the pipes. In the case of a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS), a website could be knocked offline for hours or days. A torrent web page should actually become more reliable as it is accessed more. More seeds mean more speed and accessibility.

Currently, it is available for download for windows users only. If you’re interested and on Microsoft’s OS, you can download the beta from BitTorrent:

Do you think Project Maelstrom could revolutionize the Internet and make it more open? Tell in comments!

Related: Speed Up Your Torrent Downloading With Vuze’s Swarm Merging