BitTorrent is a P2P technology using which we can download files from other users’ computers without needing any intermediate server. For using BitTorrent, we need a client software. Only a BitTorrent client such as PicoTorrent can open the .torrent or .magnet files and proceed to download the remote data.
PicoTorrent is a very small and portable BitTorrent client for Windows. It does not install any unwanted programs on your PC and works really well. It does not consume too many of your system resources. We can use PicoTorrent as the default BitTorrent files opener for Firefox. This way when we click on a .torrent file link on any website, it will quickly start downloading the torrent using the PicoTorrent BitTorrent client.
Here is how we can set PicoTorrent as default app for BitTorrent files in Firefox:
- Download PicoTorrent from https://picotorrent.org/. You can download either the installer version or the portable version (ZIP). We downloaded the portable version (PicoTorrent-0.25.0-x64.zip) and extracted it in C:\PicoTorrent folder.
- Launch Firefox and visit about::preferences. You can also click on the Firefox menu (hamburger icon in top-right corner) and select Settings from there.
- Select the General category, scroll down and find the Applications section.
- In the search box under Applications section, type torrent.
- Click on Action next to TORRENT file and then choose Use Other.
- Click on the Browse button in the window that opens and select PicoTorrent.exe file. In our case, this file was located in C:\PicoTorrent folder (see step 1).
- This is it. Now Firefox should be showing Use PicoTorrent as the default action for the TORRENT files.
Now whenever you click on a link for download .torrent files, Firefox will first download that file and then open it using the PicoTorrent BitTorrent client. You can try downloading LibreOffice using this new setup through the BitTorrent links (you will find .torrent links at https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download/).