Bittorrent + Firefox == ??
Having been at the heart of the distribution of Firefox for the 1.0 release (and subsequent meltdown of the mirror network) I’m always wondering about better ways to get Firefox to the masses.
It occurred to me that if there was a Bittorrent plugin for Firefox (that completely eliminated the need for a secondary client) that you would have a very powerful tool on your hands. Not only could you distribute updates faster to thousands of clients everywhere, you’d have a base install of other Firefox users that would be seeding a huge network of bittorrents. Firefox would then be the P2P client … I’ll let you decide if that’s a good idea or not … 
I know that for the Firefox 1.0 release the MoFo had a bittorrent tracker up and they saw about 10,000 downloads from it on the first day (that compared to 1 million total downloads for the same day). The reports were that it was rather slow and even Bram Cohen, the author of Bittorrent, has said it does not make sense for smaller files.
In looking at the current release of Firefox, we have an installer that we need to distribute to clients that is anywhere from 4.9Mb to 8.5Mb depending on your platform. Now, if you could somehow tie the bittorrent plugin for Firefox into the UMO service you would have a very powerful way to update clients. UMO could initiate by notifying the client that “hey, you have an update that is ready!” Then the user would click on “Install Update” which would initiate the download via bittorrent. The client would close the browser, install the update and then open Firefox back up. At that point, you could have the client join the bittorrent network again for a specified amount of time (say 10 minutes) so that it could continue to seed the bittorrent for that Firefox release. No point in having 10 million seeds for a less than 10Mb file; keep that number as small as possible. In addition, there is no reason you’d have to have everybody using the same tracker; if you split it up across several trackers you could get redundancy and scalability for the BT network.
Anyways, just a thought.
