Next Opera Browser Promises BitTorrent

Opera Software announced earlier this month that the next Opera browser will contain BitTorrent technology. BitTorrent, for those of you playing along at home, is a peer-to-peer protocol for distributing really large files. Like, movie size or bigger. (You can read a pretty good overview at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bittorrent. I'm a little fuzzy on how a protocol like this, which is peer-to-peer, is integrated into a browser. Does the browser start taking on P-to-P characteristics?

The Opera 9 browser will both allow people to search for torrent files and to download them as well, instead of requiring a BitTorrent client. Opera 9 is not being spoken about in terms of alphas and betas at this point -- a "technical preview" (TP) will be made available "soon." Unfortunately a search for the Opera site for "Opera 9" finds zilcho.

Opera 8.x seems to recognize the BitTorrent protocol; in fact, Opera offers browser downloads on its site in torrent form. I would love to see what else they have up their tabbed sleeves; having the browser wars back is almost as much fun as the search engine wars. You can see Opera's press release about the BitTorrent protocol at http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2006/02/06/.

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