BitTorrent’s revolutionairy web browser has entered public beta

It’s been a few months since we’ve heard anything about Project Maelstrom but BitTorrent surprised us yesterday with the release of an open beta for Windows users, with a Mac version coming soon. For those of you who aren’t familiar, Project Maelstrom is BitTorrent’s own Chromium-based web browser that is capable of retrieving content using peer-to-peer rather than traditional servers, something that has the potential to revolutionize the Internet. 

In December, BitTorrent Inc. announced its plan to radically change how we use the Internet with Project Maelstrom, a browser that retrieves web content from peer-to-peer-distributed torrents instead of traditional servers. Now the company is ready to give us an early look at its work. On Friday, Project Maelstrom for Windows enters public beta and is available for anyone to download from BitTorrent’s site. BitTorrent says a Mac version is coming soon, but there are no immediate plans for a Linux build. Maelstrom is a Chromium-based browser that can function as a regular browser that accesses sites over standard HTTP/HTTPS protocols. The program also contains the ability to grab websites packaged as torrents and display them. Although it’s a Chromium-based browser, BitTorrent isn’t officially supporting Chrome extensions and apps from the Chrome Web Store. Nevertheless, you can still install content from the Web Store and a lot of it should work, the company says.