First Look: Latest Beta is BitTorrent’s Best Release Yet
BitTorrent, Inc. has released the beta version of its next peer-to-peer sharing client. The beta release of BitTorrent 6.0 is the most elegant official BitTorrent client yet. And that’s not too surprising, since the company has simply dressed up BitTorrent’s younger, leaner cousin and branded it as a new release.
Fans of Ludvig Strigeus’ tiny ???Torrent client will be happy to learn that this 6.0 beta is the first release to fully incorporate the ???Torrent code into the official BitTorrent client. BitTorrent purchased ???Torrent in December, 2006. The company took over development of the independent client while keeping Strigeus involved in the role of technical advisor.
At first glance, it looks like BitTorrent has just taken the ???Torrent client, made a few minor enhancements and re-released it under the BitTorrent brand name.
"It’s basically the same code base as ???Torrent, but we’ve done a bunch of maintenance to the code," says BitTorrent CEO and co-founder Bram Cohen. "There are a bazillion tiny little things going on in there."
Indeed, the user interface of the new beta looks almost exactly the same as the old ???Torrent. The multi-pane interface remains, as does the tabbed info window that sits at the bottom, under your list of active torrents. The icons are more refined and there’s a new menu bar option called "Get Stuff" that simply launches the BitTorrent download store in a browser window. ???Torrent has always had an admirably clean user interface, and these additions aren’t intrusive. One more bit of ???Torrent’s legacy remains as well — there are no Mac or Linux versions. BitTorrent 6.0 beta is a Windows-only download, but support for Vista was added recently, and it’s present in the new beta. Cohen also says his team is working on a Mac OS X client, which will be released soon. A Linux client is further out, but the current Windows client runs under Wine.
The client performs admirably on Windows XP. It’s a 1MB download, so it’s quite a bit heavier than the last build of ???Torrent, which was around 200KB in size. The client still uses an incredibly small amount of memory — it averaged around 6MB while downloading a single torrent. The client did have a bit of a tough time maintaining upload connections when we first started it up, but after about 2 or 3 minutes, the fluctuations went away.
There are two minor limitations in BitTorrent 6.0 beta that shouldn’t cause too many headaches. First is the absence of any embedded search engines other than the default, which runs searches at BitTorrent’s content store. You can add search engines for other torrent trackers like etree.org and dimeadozen if you want, but you’ll have to add them by hand (under preferences > user interface), and if you had them in your last client, they won’t carry over when you install the beta. Second, unlike with previous upgrades, you’ll be forced to manually re-add all of your active torrents to your queue (and restart them) when you first fire up the new beta.
Cohen says these are simply issues with the beta software. Any bumps in the upgrade path will be ironed out when the client leaves the beta phase and becomes an official release. The transition will be seamless in the final release of BitTorrent 6.0, he says.
Also, fans of ???Torrent needn’t worry about their favorite client being swallowed up or disappearing. BitTorrent will continue to maintain two clients — one version of the original ???Torrent at uTorrent.com (which it acquired along with the client last year) and an officially branded version at BitTorrent.com.
"Any enhancements to the core engine will go into both clients," says Cohen, "but then the BitTorrent client will be further enhanced on top of that."
UPDATED at 3:03PM to incorporate new details from Bram.
