Is AllPeers FireFox's P2P "Killer App"?

Vivek Jishtu writes "Tech Crunch predicts that the AllPeers Firefox extension will massively increase the attractiveness of that already popular browser, drawing more millions away from embattled Internet Explorer. AllPeers is a simple, persistent buddy list in the browser. Initially, interaction with those buddies will be limited to discovering and sharing files."

Quantumware

Interesting to speculate about software that we can't download, so can't try. Yes, it could be a killer app. Yes, it could be dead on arrival. We won't know until we open the box! Wow, that was interesting...

Re:Quantumware

In the future, AllPeers will also have folders to allow public sharing (probably with restrictions to control copyright violations). I also assume they will build chat and VOIP functionality into the application as well.

You deride the power of the probable assumption?

Re:Quantumware

Lets assume for the sake of argument that AllPeers will release with the ability to convert all web pages to a full 3D virtual reality experience beamed right into your brain. Also, while beamed to your brain it will re-wire your body to be immune to all diseases. If this is true it is quite possible that AllPeers could pull billions away from IE and may in fact bring about world peace.

Re:Quantumware

You deride the power of the probable assumption?

Something about that line makes we want to go watch the Matrix.

Re:Quantumware

We won't know until we open the box! Wow, that was interesting...

Hey, it's Schrodinger's App

Ick,

Looks like a load of hype to me. I've never been a fan of mergin applications into "suite"'s or such. I don't even like media player's in my P2P apps, too many bad experiences with fudged partial videos or mp3/ogg's trashing the process.

Give me simplicity without the unnecessary integration.

You must be a unix user

It is two different approaches to a solution.

The extreme unix view is to get a lot of small apps that each do exactly 1 task and do it well. This has some advantages. The first is that the builder of such an app can concentrate on just 1 problem, another is that you should be able to mix and match. If I want to search through a number of files for a text string I can combine a number of tools as I want.

The disadvantage is also clear, you gotta learn about a lot of apps to do one end task. In windows search is simple. In linux it is two apps each with different syntax rules. Windows search is limited, linux search is complicated.

Another way of doing things is in adding similar functionality to an existing application. Making it feature rich or bloated (depending on your point of view). Web browsers are an obvious example. Should for instance bookmarks be part of the browser or a seperate app? What about a media player? Should the capability to view the source be an internal app (ala firefox) or an external app (IE and opera). Email? Well it is part of the internet isn't it? RSS? XML viewer? XML entry?

Get the picture?

I don't like suits either but then I am not a typical user. I prefer my email and browser and p2p and media player to be nicely seperated. Then again I can live with the fact that I have first to click on a link then choose to save the torrent file then go azureus select open torrent, select the torrent and finally be able to start leeching.

You would be suprised how many people would scream bloody murder if they had to do this.

Sadly it seems that at least in the browser sphere you and I are loosing. Feature creep seems to be a way of life for browser developers.

Anyway I wish the company luck, they already seem to have gotten themselves some free advertising and without even having a product to showoff. Good job.

Re:You must be a unix user

In general, I agree that smaller apps that play well with the system are better than "suites", especially when said suites are inflexible and self-contained.

The stated goal of the Firefox project is to build a browser-only app that's lighter weight than Seamonkey (nee Mozilla Suite). So far, I think they've managed to include useful features without bloating Firefox too much.

It's hardly fair to point to a plug-in for Firefox that's developed by a third party and claim that Firefox is becoming too feature-rich/bloated.

P.S. I imagine your views also influenced your choice of text editor? :)

Re:You must be a unix user

Sadly it seems that at least in the browser sphere you and I are loosing. Feature creep seems to be a way of life for browser developers.

Not really. The whole point of Firefox is to have a very small general-purpose web browser, to which you can add whatever extension you wish.

When AllPeers releases its stuff, *your* Firefox won't instantly become bloated. It's an extension. If you don't want it, don't download/install it, and you won't have it. Firefox is very flexible in that way.

Just because there are more and more extensions available for Firefox doesn't mean it's becoming bloated. It means it's becoming more flexible. As long as you have the option of not installing all of them, I don't see why extensions are a problem.

Re:You must be a unix user

The disadvantage is also clear, you gotta learn about a lot of apps to do one end task. Get the picture?

For the hundredth millionth time, learning is not an issue for everybody. And the people who don't want to learn cripple the choices of those of us who do.

Re:You must be a unix user

You missed the important part of the Unix way:

* If I can mix'n'match on the commandline, I can write a script
* Since all my scripts use standard commands, I can mix'n'match scripts (e.g. loganalyzer.pl webstats.html)
* IF I can mix'n'match scripts, I can write a nice GUI to make it easier

The whole point of the Unix way is using components, plugins, extensions - whatever the hype of the month calls them.

CD Writing software is a great example. Choose the GUI you like. Under the hook, none of them had to reinvent the wheel, they all use the same software to do the actual burning.

Great concept. I'm sure 10 years down the road, M$ will "invent" it and hype it to hell just in time for Windos ZX or whatever.

Re:Ick,

I don't see the logical link between Firefox and p2p. There are a gazillion different types of files I could download off the internet, and a zillion different things I could do over the internet. Having a "persistent buddy" (whatever that is) built into my browser for each one seems to me like it would make my experience as a user more confusing, not easier.

I also have to wonder about the logic of saying that this will really make firefox take off. The percentage of internet users who use p2p isn't that high, and of those that do, how many of them will like this particular app so much that they'll switch to firefox from IE? And how are they going to try the app if they aren't already using firefox?

BTW, it also looks clear that it's going to be closed source. After the kinds of experiences people have had with closed-source p2p clients on Windows installing spyware, why the &^%*$ should anyone get excited about installing yet another proprietary p2p app? Uh, wasn't the cool thing about firefox supposed to be that it's open-source? Who would have cared about firefox if it had been another proprietary browser?

And finally, there are different p2p protocols for different purposes. This one apparently is only bittorrent. The author talks about sharing his movies with his parents, but that isn't what bittorrent is optimized for; bt is optimized for sharing a single, big file that lots and lots of people want, like a BSD distribution or the "New Voyages" videos. [newvoyages.com]

Paranoid

This looks like a great feature, but it also looks like it could be a consistant security breach waiting to happen. These are the features and user toys that have plagued Microsoft security. Let's hope we don't trade safety for neato-gizmo stuff. And now I will don my tinfoil hat and be silent.

Re:Paranoid

Thanks for the comment template. I'll use this template anytime any new feature of any product is released. It'll save me so much time having to actually think up a specific meaningful response.

Re:Paranoid

This looks like a great comment, but it also looks like it could be a consistant comment waiting to happen. These are the comment templates that have plagued comment template security. Let's hope we don't trade comments for comment templates.

Pardon Me....

....but I thought the continual vulnerabilities in IE and the better interface (tabs, etc) were what pulled folks from IE. Isn't Firefox itself the "killer app"?

Fog

I believe AllPeers has already been slashdotted, did we need this once more? They *still* haven't released their software. Woop-dee-doo.

Yes, it COULD be good

Granted, I've only used a handful of bittorrent clients, but my biggest complaint with most is that they use the majority of my bandwidth, and I can't even get google to load when I have them open, let alone most other sites. Why would I want to have this happen every time I open Firefox? I open my browser to surf the net, not get bogged down with extensions that drain every ounce of my connection so I can share a single picture or movie with my girlfriend.

Granted, its a good idea, I just hope they fix that one thing that plagues other clients. With Bittorrent, typically, you're sharing larger files, with this, the intent (though I'm sure it will be used for other things as well) is to share smaller files with close friends. Hopefully, this will be taken into account in the final version.

Re:Yes, it COULD be good

Granted, I've only used a handful of bittorrent clients, but my biggest complaint with most is that they use the majority of my bandwidth, and I can't even get google to load when I have them open, let alone most other sites.

This is more than likely because you are using up all your upstream bandwidth. Limit your upstream to something under your max and you should be fine. You can also limit downstream, but that's less likely to be a problem.

I have 40KB upstream max with my cable service, and I limit it to 25KB and have never had any slowdown problems after doing so. BT never approaches my ~500KB downstream max, so I've never had to limit that. I use Azureus as my client.

restrictions for what purpose?

In the future, AllPeers will also have folders to allow public sharing (probably with restrictions to control copyright violations)

Why does it need restrictions at all? You can do the same thing with an unrestricted email attachment. Just put in a warning notice about sharing, but don't restrict its functionality.

Advertised as Killer app = not so (usually)

Anywhere we see "get our program, its the XYZ killer app" its usually a bit of a pretender.
The killer application for firefox is BROWSING THE FRIKKIN WEB.
Stop trying to cloud the waters.

Nothing to see here

The last time [slashdot.org] slashdot covered this the response was "come back when this is more than vapoware." Well, this is still nothing more than a bunch of slides. What has changed since the 28th when the story was last published? (Nothing, it seems)

Oh, please.

Listen up, people: that functionality is what geeks (like you and me) want. It is *not* what the vast, vast, vast majority of browser users want.

By far, the most frequent browser users are corporate people who have (significant) parts of their internal operations accessible by a browser. They won't be using it because the company's internal operations aren't set up that way. (And if you don't understand that dimension of browser users, you ought to look at where most Windows desktops are deployed: in a corporate environment.)

The next most frequent users are moms, pops and their kids at home visiting numerous sites for homework (read "plagiarism"), sports news and recipes. (And if you don't understand that dimension of browser users then get up out of your chairs, walk down the street and do a door-to-door survey of people in your neighbourhood.)

The next most frequent users are people like you and me: intensive users who push the boundaries -- who stopped using IE years ago (I'm mostly Opera, occasionally Firefox and still have a version of Lynx that I can launch).

The next most frequent users are ... well, that's it ... there are no other users.

So basically: when you get to the people who use their browsers the most, you're also talking about the smallest cohort of browser users. Killer app? Sure: but only for us.

buddy Interaction

> Initially, interaction with those buddies will be limited to discovering and sharing files.

A bit like MSN Messenger, but without the chat :-P

But it's still in the box

Since the AllPeers applet is still in the box, it's impossible to say whether or not it's a killer app. Since we cannot directly observe AllPeers, it must be existing in a meta-state where it is at once both a killer app, and in fact not.

But I'm slightly uncertain about this.

RIAA

I can imagine the FUD campaign the RIAA would run against FF and Microsoft running their own to put FF into the category of P2P software, which will result it in being banned from most businesses.

What next?

And in other news, the Open Office suite has been released as a Firefox Plugin. Analysts predict that not only will this draw users away from from IE, but millions will also switch away from Office.

An interesting quote from the article, "What we're really waiting for is someone to release a linux distribution as a Firefox plugin. This will spell certain death to both IE and Windows simultaneously. The big hurdle is to figure out how to launch Firefox before the OS has even booted."

Dan East

Right idea, wrong platform

Allpeers certainly does look awesome, but what's it doing in a web browser? It belongs in an IM client like GAIM or as a standalone app. I've been waiting forever for an easy way to share files with my friends, but I'm not crazy about the idea of tying up 100MB of RAM leaving Firefox open all the time.

FF needs

FF needs a simple BitTorrent plug-in to make the downloading of files easier - an alternative to HTTP transfers. Something slimline that will benefit those who don't or can't run a full p2p app, but might need files that are released via p2p. More and more we see files not hosted on a web server, but are instead available as a torrent. Something needs to built to bridge the gap and allow more people to participate. This AllPeers extension doesn't look like it'll do the job. AllPeers is something for the teenagers.

Why?

Why have we had two mainboard posts pimping a vaporware browser extension that, if completed, will duplicate the functionality of existing programs, inside a browser?

Private filesharing

This is indeed a killer app... if it were a standalone app. Why isn't it? And why isn't there already an app like this? It doesn't seem as though it would be that hard to create, but everything I've tried for private filesharing within a group of friends has been either too complex (waste), too limited (grouper, icq, msn, etc) or too braindead (many others).

Just give me a torrent client or emule-like app that I can limit to a group of defined contacts.

The Real Killer App(tm)

.. is Slashdot. 2 modest websites made useless in less than 2 hours, Allpeers and PortableApps.
This ain't a news site, is a DDOS portal.

May I suggest a new financing method? Package and sell various versions of "the ./ effect" to recognized website maintainers, ISPs, sadistic sysadmins and such, then post timely news entries saying something on their site (crap or dupes are common, anyways: this won't statistically change the number of interesting news). Be sure to claim no responsibility for excess bandwidth usage on customer's websites.

The average user

Why do all slashdot headlines seem to assume that every person who uses a computer out there is a techie?

90% of people browsing the web just want to view a website or two, maybe order something online. They couldn't give two shits about seeing their "online buddies", downloading illegal stuff via p2p.

Waited a while for this

I waited years for this to come out, and now the site is slashdotted and I can't get my beta test request in. Oh darn it all.

Features I'll be looking for is drag and drop sharing of pictures or folders, and an interface so easy that any new user can find files I want them to see within seconds of visiting my address or buddy icon.
Firefox needs a Bit torrent extension so badly.

Is AllPeers FireFox's P2P "Killer App"? Hmmm No.

Is AllPeers FireFox's P2P "Killer App"? The answer is no. Why no? How about why yes? No one is going to care about this extension. No one is going to decide to switch because of it. This isn't going to matter at all. How can anyone even pretend that this type of extension is going to be the "killer app" to cause a large move toward Firefox? This same guy probably thinks that linux just needs a similar "killer app" and Windows will be done for. Gimme a break.

Antisocial Commentary

<troll>What is with all this social networking crap? Egads. The only technological phenomenon more annoying than blogorrhea (and Mac fans) is this recent notion that everything I do online should be intimately shareable with everyone I know. Hello? If I wanted social interaction, I'd go hang out with people instead of huddling in a dimly lit corner of my basement staring bleary-eyed at the cold, pale glow of my CRT.

Come on people. Am I the only one who still does shit alone on the Internet?
</troll>

And yes, I too appreciate the irony of spurting antisocial rants on a community web site.

integrated P2P is not a good idea

As long as Mozilla does not endorse or support or link 2 it on their web page im ok with it.

We do not need Recording industry suing Mozilla for offering P2P plugins.

No

Next question?

Seriously, if I want to run a P2P app I would, wait for it, run it under my OS. Firefox is a not an OS (yet, and wasn't the whole point to get away from the "everything but the kitchen sink" problem with Netscape?).

I want my web browser to, y'know, browse the web with. Doing FTP is also nice.
I want my OS to run applications under (not, despite what Microsoft would have you believe, browse the web with).

Couldn't we keep this seperation? Please?

Also, even if AllPeers is such an incredible P2P app that everyone in the world will want to use it, people that haven't moved from IE to Firefox yet are probably going to just treat Firefox as a P2P app, and IE as a web browser, IMHO...

FF on Mac OSX

FF frequently dies on Mac OSX Tiger. Usually during the middle of a blog post, when I switch away from the Window I have been using, say, to look up a suitable image to addorn my blog, that when I return, having uploaded my image to an image hosting service, I can't type in the text box. This happens so often that I prefer to use another browser such as Netscape 7.2 or even Safari. It doesn't matter what version of FF I use either.

OT. Has anyone had experience using Camino, good or bad?

Duh - Adblock

No, the "killer app" for Firefox is, has been, and forever shall be Adblock.

Instant message programs and file sharing programs are a dime a dozen, but Adblock is what separates Firefox from other web browsers. It'll have a far more profound effect on the web, too, as eventually it'll become clear to advertisers that the conventional massive blinking ad in the middle of the site's content just isn't as effective as the innocuous text-only ad, because users are far more likely to block an annoying ad than they are a simple text ad.

Re:Duh - Adblock

Actually it becomes clear that server side enforced advertising (click-through pages with manditory delays) are necessary because you cannot trust the client.

vaporware is always a killer app

Vaporware is always a killer app. Nobody advertises an application that doesn't exist yet as merely being a decent app that will do a job.

Vaporware is always hyped as a killer app.

Browser != desktop

I can only imagine this was done as an extension because XUL Runner [mozilla.org] isn't finished yet.

I think using the browser as a host for other apps is cool, there will be a bubble in this as there is in so many other internet trends. Right now we're in the "Wow, let's write an extension because we can!" phase (partly because the only practical way to develop with Gecko is as such, see above). When everyone gets over the cool factor of it, the projects that actually enhance (or even relate to, for that matter) the browser experience will be distilled away from what should have been standalone apps in the first place.

As much as some people want to think the OS will become merely a life support system for the browser, it just isn't going to happen; the network is not the right place for some things, and if one program has everything [mozilla.org], it inevitably becomes bloated and slow [microsoft.com].

Sign-up for their beta test here

Go here and enter your email to be alerted when AllPeers goes live [allpeers.com]. I'm going to try it out, for sharing photos and home videos between friends/family, this sounds cool. Kinda like a .Mac for everyone.

useless?

It looks like a solution....in search of a problem. What makes it such a big deal? What makes it more useful than a program like Azureus? Nothing, as far as I can tell. But then again, it's reviewed on a site dedicated to Web 2.0, so a lot is explained.

NEW FIREFOX FEATURE

A news client!
An HTML editor!
An Email client!
An IRC client!
A Javascript debugger! ..oh... what? Moz... wha? Oh.

Please everyone, stop making my browser into a suite.

Love,
Me.

Comment from AllPeers CTO

I can't resist commenting on this, even though I'm forgoing the very tempting opportunity to moderate posts on this thread (by coincidence Slashdot just gave me moderation status).

Yes, it's a bit silly to speculate about whether AllPeers will or won't be the killer app for Firefox when you can't even see it yet. That said, Michael is making an important point, and I'm afraid that a lot of people aren't grokking it because they attach too much baggage to the term "P2P".

We're not making a Kazaa clone. We're giving people the possibility to share files with their friends and family inside Firefox. This *could* be a killer app because it gives people a real motivation to switch their non-technical contacts (especially family) to Firefox so that they can share with them. In other words, we're adding network effects to Firefox.

Does this mean that AllPeers will be the killer app for Firefox? Who knows. But the idea itself isn't patently ridiculous. If you want to make your own judgement, please register for our beta and check it out when it's available. Also, read my blog [allpeers.com] if you want more technical nitty-gritty about what we're up to.

sharing frenzy

so=> what are you guys sharing ? besides goatse and tubgirl of course

Sounds like marketing to me

Trying to make anticipation.
Let's see the software, install it, try it and then decide if it's a "killer app".

Killer app?

If I'd known this is what Firefox needed for a "killer app", I'd have written an Extension to integrate GAIM into it ages ago.

Solution to /. effect

Oh man, you guys are totally missing the point! Mention p2p and everyone immediately rushes to the war3z and pr0n conclusion. so you have millions of people with the allPeers installed ... and you can say, automatically include yourself in a group of users ... say people who read slashdot, or digg, or metafilter, or boingboing, whatever. Then you follow a link from one of those pages, and the load time exceeds a threshold, or you get a 503 ... the the extension automatically starts searching peers in the appropriate group for chunks of the page, bitTorrent style. that might not be what allPeers does today, but it's not too much to think that it could.

BT for sharing family photos?

So let's see. By using BT to share personal files with a few people, you forgo the one big reason to us BT: high speed downloads thanks to swarming connections with multiple peers.

Take that away and you're left with a buddy-file-transfer scheme that's actually going to be slower than any of the competition. Unlike the major IM clients, anyone behind a firewall or NAT (meaning almost everyone) will have to not only open ports on the firewall but also forward the ports to their PC in order to get an upload speed of more than about 10K/sec. And unlike uploading the files to your personal hosted webspace (which you can usually do a whole lot faster than a BT upload), the files are only available for download when your PC is online? Are most people with desktops going to leave them on 24/7 and turn off power management just to keep the new baby pictures available when they could have just uploaded them to Kodak instead? And what about laptops? How effectively are laptop users going to effectively share much of anything?

Also, doesn't using BT generally degrade web browsing performance? If I'm going to have BT on my own PC at all, why would I want a client that shuts down when I'm not browsing, which is normally when I'm happiest to let BT eat up all my bandwidth?

This gets funding? Meet Web 2.0, eerily similar to Web 1.0.

Announcing the end of slashdotting!

This application has some potential well beyond what most people seem to think. It can turn Firefox into the first bittorrent-based web browser, and make it a bittorrent web server in addition. Having bittorrent based web pages would be more practical for the typical person who wants to create a few static pages to let his family and friends know what he's doing, store photos, that kind of thing. It would allow a person with a modest connection to avoid getting slashdotted when he posts his killer case mod/robotics project/lego furniture.

The primary problem with this, of course, is that more and more of us are hiding behind NAT walls, and bittorrent functions poorly if it can't create a server connection. If it became a truly "killer app" it might start the cascade avalanche towards IPv6.

Oh the stench!

This smells like "spyware" like hell.

ewww, buddylists

how gross and so not me luckily i already use FF, but this extension is over hyped, what's the beef?

DOA for corporate users

If by "killer app" you mean, "all chances of being used in a corporate environment are dead" then yes, this may turn Firefox into just that. Until FF gains central management of (amongst many other things) allowed plugins, then P2P capabilities via plugins are, in fact, a strike -against- deploying FF. I'm surprised we don't already have plugins for connecting to the popular IM services, which is another common problem.

We need to be giving corporate decision-makers -more- reasons to switch to FF, not fewer.

Killer indeed

Because Firefox already isn't enough of a memory hog, right? I rarely see applications hit the 150k memory footprint and those are usually databases indexing half a bazillion records. The proliferation of Firefox extensions is nice and all but if this AllPeers thing is yet another nifty doodad that will cause Firefox to swell in its pants and then throw a premature exception, then no thanks.

An Alternative to HTTP would be good

An alternative to http downloads WOULD be a good plug-in for firefox. So instead of downloading a large file from a web-site through HTTP or FTP, a web-site would have a link to a p2p file that initiates this plug-in which would download the file in a P2P fashion. I guess this is equivalent to having torrents and BitTorrent installed, but if firefox had a plugin then maybe more web-sites would accomodate this type of download.

This would obviously be beneficial to both users (quicker downloads) and web-site owners (reduces their bandwidth charges). I would think that the web-site would have to still host the file so that at least one source of the file is always available for not-so-popular files.

I don't think this plugin achieves that as it seems to be more to do with sharing files between users.

DUpe

Man. You can't buy promotion like this. Especially for something that hasn't been released yet.