TechoCrunch

uTorrent for Windows made its first public appearance in September 2005, and pretty soon it became the most widely used BitTorrent application(client) by far. With users from every corner of the globe µTorrent has become a household name. After almost four years from the date of its official release the development team at µTorrent has now released a version 2.0 Beta of the worlds most popular BiTtorrent client. With the release of its 2.0 Beta the client introduces many notable changes that will directly effect the Bittorrent scene by offering a helping hand to its users, ISPs and most of all – tracker owners. Some of the notable changes and improved features are:

• Addition of the UDP tracker support!
• uTP has been improved significantly over the previous alpha, with many bugs fixed and performance improvements. It’s no longer hidden in Advanced settings.
• The setup dialog has been overhauled to make it much easier to use and with a built-in speed test. It’s still not quite complete yet, but this will give you a good taste of what we’re up to with it!
• A new transfer cap feature has been added to track bandwidth usage, along with graphs to show your usage.

Addition of the UDP tracker support is definitely a positive approach considering the fact that compared to HTTP trackers, UDP trackers use less resources and put less strain on their servers. Since almost all public trackers usually now have a UDP variant, it can save tracker owners a lot of hardware and thus money. The most noticeable benifits by introduction of UDP trackers will by us the users, since UDP trackers do not interfere with HTTP traffic, which means that associated web-browsing slowdowns will be a thing of the past. Many other Bittorrent clients like Vuze, BitComet, Deluge, KTorrent and rTorrent and to name a few have already added the UDP tracker feature already. This means that we are almost in the berk of Bittorrent revolution with addition of the UDP tracker support by all the major BitTorrent clients. The new Beta is very promising, but I felt the 2.0 beta need some fine tuning before we can use it as it is in the development stage and thus is sometimes very buggy and unstable. To check the latest release notes and feedback visit the uTorrent forums. To download  µTorrent 2.0 beta click here.

Lakhya