Comment 65 for bug 339772

(In reply to comment #61)

> Yes. I am suggesting that the Download manager handle torrents, and that the
> browser make it appear to the user as no more complicated than FTPing the
> file.

And the obvious question is: Why BitTorrent? Why not any of the other dozends of
protocols out there? Why is BitTorrent so important for a *webbrowser* that it
requires internal handling (as opposed to via a plugin)? It's not like I think
BitTorrent weren't important (or I wouldn't be a member of the dev team), but a
webbrowser definitely doesn't need it that badly.

> The underlying idea here is to make .torrents accessible to your average
> Firefox downloader, who doesn't want to have to mess with helper apps,
> configuration, bandwidth management, ratios etc., without breaking the
> reciprocal nature of Bittorrent.

Think about this: If your idea gets implemented (and let's assume it's
implemented well), how many users would use it? Your "average" web surfer
doesn't need BitTorrent at all. There is nothing my parents needs to download
which they can only get via BitTorrent. And of those who do need BitTorrent (one
third of all Mozilla users max, I'd say), the heavy users still won't use
Mozilla for it, since they all have their dedicated BitTorrent clients
configured the way they like it (upspeed and share ratio are too important
parameters to be left to default or automatic setting). So your targeted users
group is those who do need BitTorrent but only casually. That's a very small
group, I assure you. No way this could justify a bloat of the Mozilla core,
considering even calendar and IRC have been removed from the Mozilla core (and
very right so).

Frankly, I (and many I know) don't even use Mozilla's download manager for
HTTP/FTP downloads of large files (anything that takes more than 5 min, so the
exact size depends on the bandwidth) because of the lack of a resume function
(so wget comes to rescue). And with BitTorrent, there are only large files...