Pirate Bay's web browser crosses 1,00,000 downloads in three days

Pirate Bay launched the PirateBrowser just three days ago, and it has already been downloaded more than 1,00,000 times. PirateBrowser lets people bypass ISP filtering and access blocked websites. The PirateBay team – that has stood the test of time and survived multiple lawsuits – says that it never expected such a response and is now determined to offer more anti-censorship tools. It had released the browser to commemorate its 10th anniversary.

PirateBrowser let users bypass all the restrictions

Pirate Bay is one of the most censored websites in the world, and the PirateBrowser software will let users bypass all the restrictions. Taking this in consideration, business-wise, the idea seems to be spot on. According to Torrentfreak, within three days, more than 1,00,000 people downloaded PirateBrowser through the direct link, while the official torrent file was shared by over 5,000 people.

In fact, to cope with the massive demand, the team had to upgrade the connection for the download link. Even after three days, there's an average of thousand downloads per hour for PirateBrowser. Pirate Bay’s Winston told TorrentFreak, “I didn’t think it would catch on so fast. I guess people want to see the websites their governments and courts are trying to hide from them.”

PirateBrowser is a pre-configured version of Firefox  bundled with a Tor client and some proxy configurations to speed up page loading; it is purely a tool to bypass censorship. However, Winston further explained, “It’s not providing anonymity and it’s not secure to hide your identity. PirateBrowser is only supposed to circumvent censoring and website blocking. If we made the browser fully anonymous it would only slow down browsing.”

Reportedly, the team is also working on a special BitTorrent-powered application that lets users store and distribute The Pirate Bay and other websites on their own computers. This will ensure that third party tools do not block them. Currently available for Windows, Pirate Bay will be releasing Mac and Linux versions of the PirateBrowser.