One day soon, you’ll be able to navigate your web browser to any site with a JavaScript torrent implmentation embedded – like Instant.io or βTorrent – and be able to torrent anything available in the normal torrent network. With this big news, we’re one step closer to the vision of browser-based torrents. In fact, UDP support itself was added to the BitTorrent protocol in a protocol extension (see the μTP protocol) and now UDP is the primary transport used by BitTorrent clients. The WebTorrent protocol allows peers to connect over WebRTC in addition to the widely supported TCP and UDP transports. Browser peers (which must use WebRTC) will now be able to access a huge trove of torrents currently only available to TCP/UDP peers. WebTorrent support in libtorrent opens the door for many more torrent clients to connect to browser peers.

That’s why I’m super excited that libtorrent – the engine that powers many of the most popular torrent clients including qBittorrent, Deluge, and many more – has added support for the WebTorrent protocol. The vision of the WebTorrent project is to extend the BitTorrent protocol so that it becomes more web-friendly, allowing any browser to become a peer in the torrent network.

Webtorrent desktop