Despite the extraordinary advances of the last few years, Internet still works on the same basic client-server model: on one side we have clients, on the other, servers. The folks at BitTorrent want to change that with the Maelstrom project, a Chromium-based browser. Maelstrom can work with any HTTP or HTTPS link, but it carries the vision of a “P2P Internet” turned into a decentralized platform whose load is distributed among users.
A Decentralized Vision
How many times have you seen a site go down? If something bad happens to its servers, hours can pass before it comes back. Even the giants of the network have had to bow down at some point due to technical problems. Redundancy helps a lot, but the truth is that there will always be more clients than servers. So far the system has managed to stay afloat, but the masterminds at BitTorrent believe there is another kind of mechanism to connect users and exchange content. The basis of that mechanism is, obviously, the BitTorrent network itself. If millions of users can contribute a few kilobytes and turn them into a high-speed download, websites could work in a similar way.
Maelstrom in Action
That’s what Project Maelstrom is about. At first glance it looks like another web browser based on Chromium code, but just below the surface you’ll find the functionality that sets it apart. The welcome page offers links to different sites and games that are not HTTP, but Magnet. The difference is that instead of downloading all the content, Maelstrom opens it as if it were just another web page. The browser spent a good while as a closed alpha, but last Friday BitTorrent Inc. promoted it to open beta, and anyone can download a copy. Maelstrom has all the basic functions of a BitTorrent client, and adds compatible audio and video streaming.
Our Take
The theory is very good… but it still needs a lot of work. In our test we found that Maelstrom does not save the advanced options for torrents (ports, limits, etc.), streaming performance is very poor (both audio and video, even when downloading at a megabyte per second), and we couldn’t install it on XP, something still possible with Chrome. Those who decide to download it (Windows only for now) need to view Maelstrom as an experiment. It is not ready to replace browsers or BitTorrent clients, but if its development gains traction, maybe it can be.
