Torch Browser

» see torchbrowser.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Torch was the browser i kept finding on other people's computers, never my own. Around 2013 or 2014, if you fixed a relative's laptop in turkey, there was a decent chance it had Torch installed next to two toolbars nobody asked for. I ran firefox and then chrome. Torch was chrome's engine wearing a download manager as a coat.

Torch Media released it on 18 june 2012, a Chromium build with a torrent client and a media grabber wired directly into the browser chrome. The pitch was that you never left the page to save a video or start a download. One year later, on 18 june 2013, the company said it had passed ten million active users. For a browser that mostly spread through bundling and free-download sites, that was a real number.

The last actual update shipped in september 2020. After that the downloads sat frozen while Chromium moved on without them, and by november 2022 the official downloads were gone entirely. A browser that stops getting security patches is not a browser anymore, it is a liability with a bookmark bar. Torch quietly became the thing you were supposed to uninstall.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually was ~

Torch made sense in a specific window. Between roughly 2010 and 2015, downloading a video off a page or grabbing a torrent meant juggling separate programs, and Torch folded both into one window. It was convenient in the way that convenient things sometimes are, by getting a little too close to the parts of the web the big browsers kept at arm's length.

~ how it actually ended ~

Nobody announced a funeral. The updates just stopped in 2020, and the download links went dead two years later. The domain still answers, and old installers still float around the same free-download sites that spread it, which is its own kind of afterlife. Running one in 2026 means running a browser six years behind on security, so the safest thing Torch does now is not run at all.

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