The beta for LimeWire 2.5.0 is now available. The free version is available from: http://www.limewire.com/index.jsp/download_beta and a pro version is also available from your pro download page (for pro users only).<p>

The new beta includes several exciting new features and some "under-the-hood" improvements that will improve Gnutella significantly moving forward. The new additions include:

<ul>
<li> "Browse Host" is back by popular demand. If you're unfamiliar with this feature, it allows you to see all of the shared files on another user's machine, making sharing more convenient if you have similar interests. As more people upgrade, this version will work much better than the previous browse host implementation.</li>
<li> Parallel connect on downloads, meaning that you will connect to and start swarming from multiple hosts as soon as you start to download from a group, allowing you to get your download more quickly.</li>
<li> Full support for the "Hash/Urn Gnutella Extension (HUGE)", which assigns each file a unique "hash" and intelligently stores alternate locations for files on the network. If someone uploads a file from you, for example, you will store that computer as an "alternate location" for the file, and send that location to others when they download from you. This all makes downloading more robust and could reduce message traffic over time. It's also a first step towards a "Content Addressable Network (CAN)", one of the ephemeral goals of the Internet for some time.</li>
<li> Bitzi metadata lookup allows you to get more information about files -- right click in the search and library tabs to try it!.</li>
<li> German and French versions available -- thanks to Phillipe Verdy for all of his hard work on this.</li>
<li> The downloader now checks for corrupt files by looking at overlapping regions. </li>
<li> Loads shared files much faster on startup (though the first time may be a little slow).</li>
<li> Connects to the network more robustly.</li>
<li> Installer improvements to save your setting across installs, to correctly pick up the latest Java 1.4 and use it when it's available, fewer 1608 errors, etc.</li>
<li> Full support for HTTP HEAD requests. </li>
<li> Throttles outgoing bandwidth for ultrapeers.</li>
<li> Finally, LimeWire Basic will share the installer by default, even to web browsers (currently Windows-only).</li>
</ul>

So, as you can see, there's a lot of new additions. In fact, the code has changed so much that we really need users to help test it as thoroughly as possible. We've run it through our usual onslaught of tests here, but some always slip through. If you have the time to hammer away at it, we'll be forever grateful.

We hope you enjoy LimeWire 2.5.0.

Best,

The LimeWire Team