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The Bottom Line

Torrent, or BitTorrent, downloading has quickly blossomed into one of the most common forms of peer-to-peer networking and file sharing. It is used to download almost anything including movies, music, software, and much more. TorrentBar is a Firefox add-on which lets you search some of the Web's top torrent sites directly from a browser toolbar. The ability to retrieve Google search results with the torrent file type as well as links to the latest P2P news are also included.

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Pros

• TorrentBar makes it easy to search popular torrent sites right from Firefox's toolbar section.
• The Google torrent search is a very convenient feature.
• TorrentBar's visual presence in your Firefox window is subtle and non-obtrusive.

Cons

• The list of torrent sites to choose from is rather small.
• Only one site can be searched at a time.
• Sites can not be added or removed from the Search menu.
• TorrentBar Help is still "under construction".
• Some of the predefined keywords are useless.

Description

• TorrentBar lets you individually search 11 different torrent sites using keywords that you specify.
• Some of the sites listed in the Search drop-down menu include IsoHunt, TorrentSpy, and BitTorrent.Com.
• The Search menu also includes an option to search Google with the filetype:torrent parameter.
• TorrentBar's main menu includes links to the latest P2P news in both English and Polish.
• The Check for updates option displays a detailed list of all of the toolbar's releases.
• The keyword drop-down menu includes predefined choices such as Torrent News and BitTorrent Client.

Guide Review - TorrentBar

TorrentBar is a very basic add-on in the sense that it does not contain many of the bells and whistles found in most other toolbars. It does, however, give you the ability to easily search some of the best torrent sites out there. Its presence is very unassuming in your Firefox window and, for someone who has a good amount of add-ons installed, this is definitely a good thing. With that said, TorrentBar has its share of somewhat glaring shortcomings. First, the amount of sites that you are able to search is small compared to the large amount of torrent sites that are available nowadays. I realize that the majority of them are not great and some are even a haven for malware, but it would be nice to have the ability to manually add sites to the toolbar. Being able to quickly search Google with the torrent paremeter is nice and I found myself using this feature quite a lot.

The basics are there and TorrentBar has a lot of potential. Unfortunately, it still requires a few significant upgrades before it can compete with some of the alternatives that are available. If you tend to only search a few of the top sites and do not consider yourself an avid "torrent hunter" then you may find this add-on effective. A more active downloader will probably want to try something different.

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