As creators of people-powered software, we at uTorrent have you, our users, to thank for making us the best Torrent client on the internet. We can see your support when you vote us number one in third party polls and that means a lot to the team of engineers and developers here.
Your standards are high and we work hard to meet those expectations by pushing ourselves to improve product performance and experimenting with new ideas, as our beta community knows. Some of these work out and others we scrap based on feedback and move on to new ones. We can never rest on our laurels.
As 2015 draws to a close we want to take a minute to look back at the achievements of our engineering team. Our people are the best in the business and often we take for granted the work that they do.
2015 was a year of focusing on the fundamentals. µTorrent got smaller and more efficient. µTorrent developers were on the front lines of addressing security vulnerabilities identified for the wider libutp-based community. We improved stability and performance with a series of changes that further reduced a crash rates. We fixed bugs when they appeared and tweaked the small features you asked us to address.
We added a dramatically improved feature for our Pro product: user streaming. This allows users to preview and consume torrents just seconds after adding them, connection speed permitting. There’s been a lot of positive feedback for this and if you want to try it out, you can do so with one of the Trials offered to our free users.
We also evaluated our partner offers and ad partners and committed to improving the user experience for these, as well as how we fund the development of our technology and products. There have been some baby steps and some bolder steps. But we’ve done it all with our users in mind and we’ll continue in this direction throughout 2016.
To demonstrate that the µTorrent team is working hard to make good things happen. A snapshot of what’s happened in 2015 is below. Thanks so much for being our customers. Have a great holiday season and a wonderful New Year.
While some may miss these ads, we’ve raised our ad standards for our advertisers to deliver higher-quality safe-for-work ads.
The change that further cut the client’s already-low crash rates in half
An academic group identified a potential security threat: UDP-based DDOS attacks that could affect the entire industry; the solution was developed and implemented by the uTorrent engineering team.
By the numbers:
- Crash rates reduced, in general, by 50%
- This is a direct effect of moving over to the IEOOP architecture
- One of the highlights in performance improvements was fixing bad performance when making selections in the list view.
Performance:
- Improved product shutdown times by fixing crashes at shutdown and adding local shutdown performance monitoring
- Improved disk-flushing speed to slow devices
- Reduce DHT bootstrap server traffic
- Efficiency and CPU surge fix when navigating torrents
- Reduce network usage of client
- Unnecessary resource use on streaming
- Improved resource usage
Security and community protocol work:
- Solution for threat of UDP-based DDOS attacks
- Fix security vulnerability in DHT bootstrap server
- We also fixed a vulnerability in the shell association handler for magnet links
New features:
- Pro with streaming (beta Nov 2014, stable Q1 2015) and streaming trial for free users
- Introduction of a low-cost, ad-free premium product (coming mid-December 2015)
Better-quality offers:
- Advertising – Implemented higher standards for ad creative and ad partner
- Advertising – Introduced new larger single ad unit to regain user workspace (vs. two ad units)
- Partner Offers – Raised our standards higher during the vetting of partner offers
Fit and finish:
- Fit and finish work in torrent information display (Adjusted default column widths, restored missing data, fixed bug in relevance column in peers tab)
- Made rendering improvements to the Devices list
- Restored compact category view
- Pro player and streaming improvements
- Fixed layout and display issues in main client view
- Fixed tab client area vertical overflow
- Fixed bug where Tab selection would not persist
- Fixed bug during torrent selection and toolbar activation
- Fix bug where cat tree would prevent resizing
Product quality:
- Crash fixes (malformed packet crash, crash on torrent creation for certain media types, crash during btapp session list query, decoding UTF8 string crash, crash on helper process launch, when update server unavailable, at startup for some XP and 7 users, crash when rendering the streaming UI, when resizing the category tree, when rendering sidebar, when rejecting pieces, when updating BT Apps,
- Improved reliability of MP3 metadata parsing
- General improvements to media parsing code
- IPV6 Web UI listening socket bug
- Magnet and torrent shell handles fixes during registration
- Improvements to DHT bootstrapping, libuTP and miscellaneous:
- Fixed rare crash while bootstrapping to the DHT
- General improvements to the DHT code
- Fixed libuTP connection sequencing weakness
- Fixed bug causing some advanced settings to not persist across client restarts
- Fixed memory leaks while adding HTTP-hosted torrent files
- Fixed client deadlock when right-clicking on an RSS item
- Fixed bug where antivirus would fail to update
- Reliability improvements to helper process launch and communication code
Boom. Now it is time to enjoy some eggnog and start planning for 2016.
– The uTorrent Team
Merry Christmas to all the staff at uTorrent and best wishes for a fantastic 2016! 😀
Great work. I had the pro version two years ago but I didn’t see any added value. Most downloads I did couldn’t be verified for viruses as it was the advertising advantage. I suggest that a “VPN” option with the pay utorrent. Personally I would definitely pay for that service
Cheers and merry Xmas or happy holidays
Richard
Sounds interesting would like to give this product a run
No tried pro yet, well impressed with torrents, notice big drop in dodgy stuff, have good 2016 !
Your the best thankyou
Many many thanks for your hard work in creating such fantastic revolutionary software I’m enjoying on daily basis!!!
God bless you all!!!
Merry Christmas and a happy peaceful New Year!!
Happy festival of lights 2015 from France.
Great job until now.. thank you for making it possible to get great music and movies online.
Have a great Christmas. .
Мне очень нравится ваш сайт !!! Большое спасибо …
Hello, I am really glad that you sent me this message. I wanted just to thank you, uTorrent, about all your improvement and your availability. I do really like your apps, have a good holiday too.
Appreciate all you’ve done, and want to say thanks for all your hard work. Looking forward to 2016 as you all stay on top of everything, keep up the great work and a happy holidays to all of you.
Bri
Thanks for your good wishes and the hard work you have all done over the year. Hope you all have the most wonderful Christmas and next year will fulfill all your own wishes!!
Thanks for all your help in downloading. Much appreciated. Merry Christmas!
thanks so much
your welcome
I just want to thank you for the great service that you have provided me throughout the year. Happy Holidays to ALL. 😀
Thank you for all your good work, and may you and yours be safe. Looking forward to another bright and wonderful year with you.
oneleg
Thanks very much and have merry chritsmas
some times I have to un-install and then re install your program would you please get rid of open candy as an automatic 3rd party it is virus and malware loaded
thank you
perry clouse
I have been a regular user of u torrent for a number of years and have experienced the positive changes. I love u torrent and will continue to use it. In my opinion it is a public service, particularly, for third world countries. My best wishes to you – uTorrent team, for a great future.
I just love utorrent….without this app my pc and my androids are incomplete. I wòuld like to thanx ur team such a wonderful app….keep it up…thumbs up to u…
WITH REGARDS.
Please do continue with your greater + better things to come…, lah..
HAPPY HOLIDAYS, FOLKS..
Hi I would like to wish everyone at uTorrent a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Спасибо!!!
Thank you guys! You’re the best on the Internet! Merry Christmas and happy New Year to you!
Thanks for providing us an awesome Torrent service. Happy Christmas!
Поздравляю с наступающим новым годом, желаю здоровья и успехов!!
Thanks U torrent.
What about the “Peer Flooding” by ISPs to degrade uTorrent and BitTorrent throughput?
Or is this covered under “Solution for threat of UDP-based DDOS attacks”?
Thanks,
Doc
happy holidays and thank you for all
WITH THE GREETINGS OF THE SEASON (HAVE A MERRY CHRISTMAS AND AN EXTRA HAPPY NEW YEAR) – YOU HAVE BEEN, YOU ARE AND WILL BE A GREAT HELP FOR ALL THE PEOPLES WORLDWIDE, PARTICULARLY FOR THOSE WHO COME FROM POOR OR BANRUPT COUNTRIES, WE THANKS YOU VERY MUCH AND WILL BE AT YOUR SIDE (TOGETHER WITH THE PIRATEBAY.SE
ALL THE BEST TO ALL OF YOUR FOR EVER
CONSTANTINOS, ATHENS, GREECE
Thank you for brilliant service throughout the year, Merry Christmas and a Prosperous 2016..
Thank you for all your efforts & continued improvements…
You have been great.
Thanks to you, I got a chance to watch all the movies I want to see.
congratulations
1001 thanks
I wish you the best
Yes I’m very happy with your product , I have not used it as much as I thought I would I like the classics, and it’s hard to get. Them, one thing I noticed is green patches in some download s is there a way to prev this?
Thank you! I am very pleased
Keep the good work up
I don’t know why I’m having trouble with my downloads the only way it works is if I stop using WiFi.
Great Job: Personal congrats to you all.