Comment 66 for bug 339772

> Why BitTorrent?

Because it makes up about 1/3 of all the data traffic on the Internet, so could
therefore be said to be reasonably relevant to an application whose key function
is obtaining files across the Internet? ;-)
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/bittorrent.html?tw=wn_story_top5

> Your "average" web surfer doesn't need BitTorrent at all.

Not right now, perhaps. It's chicken and egg.

> There is nothing my parents needs to download which they can only get via
> BitTorrent.

Quite possibly not. But there are a lot of distributors out there (*cough*
mozilla.org *cough*) who would _love_ your parents, and 20,000,000 other people
just like them, to get their product using BitTorrent rather than FTP, because
they'd save a fortune in bandwidth. But they won't bother setting up a .torrent
until at least some of the visitors have clients which will download them
without leading to an increase in support calls.

> And of those who do need BitTorrent (one third of all Mozilla users max, I'd
> say),

One third of users is a mainstream feature. We have many features which are used
by a much smaller proportion than that, even in Firefox.

> (upspeed and share ratio are too important parameters to be left to default
> or automatic setting)

I'd say we are aiming to make it possible for people to download files over
BitTorrent who wouldn't understand sharing ratios if you spent ten minutes
explaining them. :-)

Gerv