Over the past couple of years, the BitTorrent market has been dominated by the likes of uTorrent, Azureus and BitComet, with the three of them taking up as much as 90% marketshare. With such sort of dominance these apps we’ve not seen many alternative solutions in the past few years.

Common sense says that it might be next to impossible for a new app in this field to play catch up with the major three, but the newcomer on field Halite (named after a mineral) might just stand a chance.

Halite has been in development since 2006, and over the years it has become a fast, full fledged lightweight BitTorrent client. One of the greatest strengths of Halite is that it uses minimal system resources. If you thought uTorrent was already lightweight, then correct yourself because Halite consistently uses up half the resources that uTorrent uses on my PC.

Halite supports all the basic features the average downloader would need including encryption, selective downloading, a torrent creator and more. At the moment there is no support for disk caching, seeding preferences and torrent queuing, but these and others are on the to do list, which means they will be implemented in the future.

In my tests I found Halite to be slightly faster than uTorrent in download speeds, but they don’t much of a difference.. On the other hand a few users have seen improvements in speed over uTorrent and other clients.

The real benefit obviously is the minimal system resources that Halite uses. Here are a few screenshots of Halite in action…

Overall if you are looking for a fast, lightweight BitTorrent client then I suggest you give Halite a try. I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.

Halite Homepage

Well not everything went good for Mozilla on its planned download day to celebrate the release of Firefox 3. Mozilla had declared today as Download Day, in an effort to set a Guinness World Record for most software downloads in one day. Somehow the plans did not work out that well. The Servers were almost down till 1PM PST, while the event was scheduled to begin at 10AM PST.

Looks like Mozilla didn’t plan well in advance, as one by one their servers went off with the huge number of people hitting the server every minute. Everything is running smooth now, so you can download Firefox 3 right away.

However a question needs to be asked.. Did Mozilla really have to gun for a world record of most software downloads in a day rather than focusing on its natural download/release cycle. Why all this PR? They could have done it the simple way, even if they had done that, we would have seen huge number of downloads today..

Early hiccups aside, Firefox 3 has now set the standard for web browsers. At the moment Firefox 3 is the fastest and safest browser out there.

I’ve detailed review of Firefox 3 coming up, highlighting all the hits and misses Mozilla put together for this awesome release.

I have it installed right now, and it has crashed on me once so far . A couple of my addons didn’t work as well, but they were critical for my daily routine so that didn’t make much of a difference.

Are you using Firefox 3? How has been your experience with it so far? Do all your addons work with it?

Meanwhile keep the download counter moving while everyone keeps downloading Firefox 3.

Yes get ready. The most anticipated release of the year is just a few hours away as I write this. Firefox 3 will arrive today that is June 17th after over 34 months of active development.

As you might already know, Mozilla is trying to create a world record for the most software downloads in 24 hours, and that time just got a little bit more closer.

To Help its cause, Mozilla is hosting a Download Day event, the Camp Firefox BBQ, at its offices in Mountain View, California, today. The company also has asked Firefox fans to host parties to encourage friends to download with them, and place “Download Day” buttons on their Web sites as reminders of the big day.

I’ll be writing a detailed review of Firefox 3 in a couple of days. Until then make sure you help Mozilla create the world record. It’ll be a championing of the Open Source browsers initiatives to make the web a better place.

As of now 1,430,700+ have already pledged to download Firefox 3, and one of them is me!

Come on guys let the tubes carry only Firefox and nothing else. Screw IE! Screw Microsoft!

Spread the word! Visit the Download Day website, and get ready to download Firefox, Its finally there… Almost there…

The extremely popular media hosting site ImageShack has just begun a free BitTorrent downloading service that allows you to download torrents straight from ImageShack servers, and later download them from ImageShack via a HTTP link.

The Torrent download service is at the moment in a public beta, but nonetheless it works as advertised. Just point ImageShack to the torrent file either via URL or by uploading the torrent file itself. The download will begin immediately and once it is completed you can easily download the files to your computer.

Services such as this aren’t new but until now we haven’t seen a compelling free solution such as the one offered by ImageShack. ImageShack does have some restriction, like you can download at the most only 15GB a month.

Here’s what Jack Levin, the founder of ImageShack told TorrentFreak: “We think its going to be a great service for users, especially in the light of ISPs ratelimiting torrent traffic.There is a lot of free and legal torrents out there, that people should have easy access to. We have the capacity to do it, and the world needs it.”

If you are worried about the anonymity of the service, here’s what Jack Levin said: “We will not look at what you download and simply provide you, an account, with bandwidth and space. What you do with it is up to you. The DMCA applies, so, if we get reports from copyright owners to take down content, we will comply.”

There are some neat features like Selective File Downloading which means you can select only the files that you want to download and leave out the rest. The Download speeds are pretty fast and I could download a couple of torrents of about 1GB each in under 2 hours.

The only thing is that as soon the download completes,, ImageShack disconnects. This means that you will be sharing less than you would do. On the torrents I downloaded the share ratio was just 13% and 15% respectively. I hope ImageShack improves the share ratio to atleast 100% because its good karma!

So far ImageShack’s Torrent download service looks very promising and is something that I plan to use regularly in the future. Go Check it out for yourself and let us know what you feel about it?

ImageShack Torrent Download Service | Via Torrentfreak

But the Autopatcher project is back into work, and the team just released an early Beta of Autopatcher. This version of beta gets around Microsoft’s restrictions by downloading updates for Windows and Microsoft Office straight from Windows Update Server rather their own. Once the updates have been downloaded, you can install them by running AutoPatcher.exe. However, the new beta is no where near the older versions in comparison. The new version is pretty much nothing, because you cannot make the updates portable by burning them on a CD, that makes it pretty much like the built in Windows Update.

But even then, it gives a ray of hope. Maybe we will see a new Autopatcher that will help us download updates more easily than before. Till then, here’s my suggestion to Microsoft, Why don’t you guys try and save some bandwidth?

Via TechBuzzz