They have a sample called Paddle Over which lets people send files to each other over Bittorrent without having to do anything but select a file and send an URL. This can be very useful for making these kinds of applications faster (since they don’t have to bounce off the server), cheaper (no bandwidth costs for the service), more secure (governments can’t demand a copy if the service never had one), etc.

See
http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-turns-web-browsers-into-a-file-sharing-hub-120707/

Actually, I use Safari to read BoingBoing now because I can’t login to Disqus with Chrome ;)

Anyway, this is frustrating because the browser developers can’t test every setup. There are lots of complaints about Firefox’s memory management issues (in OS X and everywhere else) but the developers always claim the issue doesn’t exist and won’t do anything about it. I didn’t pay much attention to it until it started being a problem for me so I guess I can’t blame them, it’s just annoying. 

I’ve grown to like Chrome anyway and don’t really desire to go back to Firefox. But on your suggestion I might give Camino a try, I’ve heard of it but never tried it.

But then, go figure, there will be rarer sessions, where it eats memory but goes for days because the memory is regularly released on demand, with almost no beachballs.

I really wish there was a way to track down what causes poor performance and somehow avoid it.

For the record, the champ browser in terms of memory usage (generally within 1GB), overall perkiness and uptime length regularly of 2-4 weeks with over a thousand tabs created and eliminated is – CAMINO.

Agree on chromeOS.

It can be useful in some very small niches (chromeOS), but it brings further complication: when using something like this, are you then seeding as long as the browser is open? Or are you not seeding at all? Seeding makes a huge difference for most users with asymmetrical downstream/upstream capabilities.

If I didn’t have a separate linux machine to handle file serving and torrents, in-Chrome bittorrent would be fine for me even for large files that require leaving the browser open (again, since I do that anyway with no issue). I agree that for heavy bittorrent users it’s superfluous but there are plenty of uses. 

Even in my case, with a second computer used for downloading, if I want to download something small on my main computer (which depending on the source can take mere seconds) it would be a lot easier to do it this way than to bother to open a separate torrent program.

It would also be good for the clueless who have no idea what bittorrent even is, and had no idea they needed another program to download those files, assuming this was baked-in to Chrome.

Btw, on magnet links though. If we ‘could’ build this you could already do even better than ‘just’ having people input magnet links into a site. Using registerProtocolHandler you could register your site as a handler for all “magnet://” links and have the browser open up your web app whenever the user clicks on a magnet link on the web.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Web-based_protocol_handlers/