Littleshoot updates browser plugin, now supports torrents
Back in December 2008, Brad wrote about Littleshoot, a browser-based peer-to-peer application created by the developers of Limewire. A little over two months later, and the .90 beta release has seen several updates and the addition of one major feature: the ability to download .torrent files.
Install the Littleshoot plugin, visit any torrent site, and click on a torrent file and a new tab like the one pictured above will open in your browser. While savvy p2p-ers probably won't prefer Littleshoot to their current torrent manager, it's an excellent option for less experienced users (like the ones you provide with free troubleshooting).
Littleshoot also makes it easy to share what you're downloading on social sites, with quick links to popular ones like Twitter, Facebook, and Digg.
And don't forget, Littleshoot is also a great way to search Flickr and YouTube - you know, in case you want to check out some interesting photos or videos while your downloads finish.
The memory footprint has been reduced, at least on the Littleshoot plugin itself - it's currently using about 60mb on my Vista x64 machine, which isn't out of line with other combination Gnutella/torrent applications. Firefox, however, seems to be having some trouble coping: its ram usage is up to about 430mb.
[via TorrentFreak]
Install the Littleshoot plugin, visit any torrent site, and click on a torrent file and a new tab like the one pictured above will open in your browser. While savvy p2p-ers probably won't prefer Littleshoot to their current torrent manager, it's an excellent option for less experienced users (like the ones you provide with free troubleshooting).
Littleshoot also makes it easy to share what you're downloading on social sites, with quick links to popular ones like Twitter, Facebook, and Digg.
And don't forget, Littleshoot is also a great way to search Flickr and YouTube - you know, in case you want to check out some interesting photos or videos while your downloads finish.
The memory footprint has been reduced, at least on the Littleshoot plugin itself - it's currently using about 60mb on my Vista x64 machine, which isn't out of line with other combination Gnutella/torrent applications. Firefox, however, seems to be having some trouble coping: its ram usage is up to about 430mb.
[via TorrentFreak]













Comments
2
Subscribe to commentsminibarMar 12th 2009 4:53PM
Firefox alone consumes around 25MB RAM. Selectively installing addons ups that to 35MB. However, the trend is toward bigger and bigger addons (see above,) many which consume several times Firefox alone, which too soon renders Firefox unusably sluggish. The problem isn't simply the initial memory consumed but increasing amounts of memory consumed not recovered until restarting. Instead of finding ways of increasing Firefox's memory footprint, I propose finding ways to recover Firefox memory that are Tested and Shown To Work without restarting Firefox. There are too many ways of consuming RAM and not enough to get it back.
Adam FiskMar 12th 2009 5:02PM
First off, thanks for the write up, Lee. Contact me any time if you have questions or want details. There's a lot more coming -- the plugin integration will be a springboard into all sorts of things, particularly integration on other sites.
@minibar Keep in mind this isn't a FireFox add-on. It's a *real* plugin, like Flash or Quicktime is a plugin. There aren't that many real plugins out there because they're hard to write. Writing an add-on isn't much harder than writing a web page. There's really a huge difference. It also means FireFox is no different from any other browser -- it works the same in all of them with some additional ActiveX required for IE.
The memory issue is actually very simple: it's just the JavaScript on the web page itself. The actual plugin is extremely lightweight, and we just have to resist doing too much fancy AJAX to keep that JavaScript memory footprint low, but that's back in the realm of "easy." If the plugin itself consumed a lot of memory, that would be much more of an issue!
Thanks again Lee. I'm here at SXSW if you're around!
-Adam