BitTorrent today announced that its latest creation, uTorrent Web, has passed 1 million daily active users. Although uTorrent Web had been available in beta for years, the web-based torrent client was finally released as a stable version exactly a month ago, on September 4. It’s not fair to say that it took just one month to hit the milestone, however, as BitTorrent saw a rapid increase in adoption of uTorrent Web in the late stages of the beta through to the full release.
BitTorrent commonly refers to the infamous peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing protocol associated with piracy. But there is also a company by the name of BitTorrent, which owns the two most popular clients for the protocol: BitTorrent and uTorrent (stylized as µTorrent).
Not to be confused with uTorrent, and despite what its name might suggest, you still have to download and install uTorrent Web. The main difference between uTorrent Web and its counterparts is that all the downloading happens in your browser. Just like uTorrent, uTorrent Web can play audio and video files before they’ve finished downloading, but unlike uTorrent, the playback also happens inside the browser. Other file types can be downloaded, as well — it’s really just like a normal torrent client.
In our testing, we found that we still prefer uTorrent Classic, as it is still significantly simpler to install and use. Furthermore, uTorrent Web has annoying notifications to get users back into the app:
And a week later I’m uninstalling @uTorrent Web. This notification is NOPE. https://t.co/dBypJ51tQI pic.twitter.com/UIyelKU6ys
— Emil Protalinski (@EPro) September 13, 2018
Still, 1 million users clearly like the product enough to use it every day, a notable achievement.
uTorrent Web is only available for Windows, and BitTorrent did not share any plans today to support other operating systems. That said, the company did promise to add new functionality before the end of the year, such as streaming files from your Windows computer to an Android device. A similar BitTorrent Web product is also in the works.
Source: VentureBeat
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