Its been a over six months since we last saw an update to everyone’s favorite BitTorrent client. The uTorrent team has released version 1.8 of their BitTorrent client, with significant improvements and updates.
Added the already pent up excitement about the new uTorrent there is also a word that a Mac version of uTorrent is on the way.. Good news for all Mac users out there.. But I feel that a stable Mac build is quite a few months away.
We’ve had to wait for quite a while for this release since the last stable build 1.7.7 was released way back in January. A lot of work has been done in these seven months though, and the list of changes and additions that were implemented is “absolutely massive”, to quote Firon from the release announcement..
One of the most significant updates in the latest version of uTorrent is that it comes with built in IPv6 support, which improves connectivity and thus performance. The only problem is that IPv6 is still not common, and we have to wait for it to take over IPv4. Other new features are better Windows Firewall registration on Vista and improved distribution of new connections across torrents.
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.
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