I was an early beta tester for Project Maelstrom, a project I thought was really cool. I gave them some feedback.

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These are notes to help the User Experience Designers.

I also don’t really understand the purpose. Is this just a more UI way of interacting with torrents or is this really an attempt to cache the web locally in peers.

Indicate to users how much they’re sourcing from other users. It’d be nice to have an idea for how many other users are active and a server/peer breakdown of data. I want it to feel different rather than just know that it’s different.

It’d be nice to know how much data I’ve provided people as well (just a ticker somewhere). I understand the desire to minimize the UI, but what’s going to originally attract people to this browser is knowing that there’s decentralization going on (speed would attract later when more users come).

Possibly give it some light redesign (change coloring/tint?) so that it’s more evident that users aren’t just on Chrome.

The fade on tab switching/page loading is interesting. I’m not sure if it’s going to make things appear slower than they are. Watch out for lower power graphics cards which may not make for the best experience.

When attempting to load a magnet torrent via the browser, I was greeted with intense CPU utilization. (A full core was busy). Memory usage seemed fine. The reported download speed was surely smaller than it should have been.

Suddenly after loading a torrent that was streaming capable, my network card’s reported download speed was 3-4MB/s and the process “chrome.native.torrent” was apparently responsible for this download. Even after closing Maelstorm, this download continued. I’m not sure what it was downloading.