AnInsomniacy/rayburst v4.1.0-beta.1

v4.1.0-beta.1 — Rebuilt Engine, Major Speedups and Verified Browser Handoffs

on GitHub

What's Changed

Rayburst 4.1.0 is the largest update since 4.0: it moves to the rebuilt Aria2 Next 3.0.0 engine, rebuilds how the app supervises the engine and how browser downloads are handed over, and brings the biggest download speedups the project has had. The engine replaces the event loop inherited from aria2 with a new core (Boost.Asio, libcurl, libtorrent, SQLite) at about a quarter of the previous code. The app now reads the engine through one native pump instead of several polling loops, and a browser download is released only after the engine confirms it would receive the same file. This beta also adds a standalone add window, per-site rules, multi-select, post-download actions and more than forty fixes.

🚀 Performance

Aria2 Next 3.0.0 against the 2.8.6 engine of Rayburst 4.0.1, measured on the same machine and network; every downloaded file was verified.

• Fast single servers download at the same speed with 2–4× less CPU time and less memory.
• HTTP downloads open every configured connection at once. Servers that throttle (429/503), misreport ranges or stall a connection no longer fail the task or drop it to a single connection.
• The app reads the global status and the task lists in one call per tick, and the window no longer polls. Busy engines no longer trigger restart storms (#690).
• Large torrents stay responsive: the file selector is virtualized, and the window receives at most 64 files per task, except the task whose details are open (#447).

🔗 Rayburst Connect

• Verified handoffs: the extension holds a browser download until Rayburst answers. Rayburst asks the engine to request the URL with the browser's headers and cookies, and takes over only when the server answers with the expected file. Web pages, rejected or unreachable URLs and size mismatches stay in the browser, and a lost answer never leaves a download in neither place.
• The popup lists unfinished and recent tasks with pause, resume and show in folder.
• Browser .torrent links either open the torrent's content or are saved as plain files; they are always saved while BitTorrent is off (connect#50).
• Site rules choose the proxy per host and can cap connections per server (connect#52, #489).
• Starting Rayburst from Firefox works when the browser forbids leaving its job object (connect#62).
• Media from a CDN without captured headers is requested with the page origin as Referer, as browsers do, so split audio and video tracks no longer answer 403.

⚠️ Changed Behavior

• The UPnP and port-conflict recovery settings are removed. The engine maps BitTorrent and ED2K ports itself and moves to another port when one is taken; a taken RPC port falls back to a free local port.
• Downloaded .torrent files are saved instead of started; open them to start the torrent. A new BitTorrent switch turns BitTorrent off entirely (#558).
• External RPC clients see the Aria2 Next 3.0.0 changes: XML-RPC and RPC over TLS are gone, and retired engine options are ignored with a warning. See the engine release notes.
• Settings for removed features are dropped on first start; everything else carries over.

✨ New Features

• Standalone add window for browser downloads that arrive while the main window is hidden or closed, showing the batch size and the free space of the target drive (#693, #445, #379, #400).
• Site rules with per-host connection caps and proxy choice, applied to the add dialog and browser downloads (#489).
• Multi-select with Ctrl/Shift click, Ctrl+A and Esc, with batch resume, pause and delete (#473).
• Per-task speed limits in the add dialog and task details, including live upload limits for BitTorrent.
• Duplicate detection against live tasks and history, with skip, add anyway or cancel (#491).
• Replace a task's URL, or retry a failed task with a new one (#548).
• Post-download program with {file}, {dir} and {name} arguments (#651).
• Expected checksum for single downloads, and DNS over HTTPS with presets (#337).
• Clickable notifications on Windows that reveal the finished file (#609).
• Interface size setting with Ctrl/Cmd +, − and 0 (#367), optional IEC units (KiB, MiB) (#496) and a Linux system title bar option (#533).
• Tray icon can be hidden, and shows a dot while downloads run and the speeds in its tooltip (#352, #508, #283).

🛠 Improvements

• The BitTorrent file selector is redesigned with a folder tree, file-type icons, type shortcuts and invert selection (#598, #472).
• Esc hides the window like its close button without quitting (#569).
• Clipboard detection offers file links only by default (#683).
• The engine saves unfinished tasks every 60 seconds and checkpoints progress every 10 seconds, so a crash or power loss loses little.
• The sidecar is stopped through its own process handle, and a restart never overlaps a running engine. Crash recovery stops after three crashes in five minutes.
• Update checks finish within 15 seconds and check both channels together (#657).
• docs/LINUX.md lists workarounds for blank windows, stutter and WebKit crashes on Linux.

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Notifications show on Windows installs upgraded from an older product (#685), tasks added by any RPC client announce their start (#534), and a started task is announced by its real name instead of "Unknown".
• A silent autostart no longer shows a maximized window (#576).
• Queued magnets show as queued instead of fetching metadata (#611).
• Shortening a long multibyte filename keeps its extension (#509).
• Seeding-only or unsized downloads no longer animate the taskbar indefinitely.
• Extension API requests in flight and their write rate are bounded (#603).

📦 Downloads

Bundles Aria2 Next 3.0.0. Pair with Rayburst Connect 2.1.0.

Full changelog: v4.0.1...v4.1.0-beta.1