If you go to The Pirate Bay's Web site, you'll now see the words "The Magnet Bay." As of tomorrow, the popular Swedish torrent tracker will no longer be offering users torrent files, but instead will be posting magnet links.

On its blog today, the Pirate Bay wrote that even though this "marks the end of an era," users should not notice much of a difference.

"It shouldn't make much of a difference for the average user. At most it will take a few more seconds before a torrent shows the size and files," The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak in an interview today. "Just click the red button instead of the green one and all will be fine."

The Pirate Bay says the reason for the change is simple--the torrents are a waste of space and time. "It's simpler for us and no more hassle for you," the site wrote on its blog. "It's more resilient than .torrent files and it uses much less bandwidth for those who want to mirror."

Two weeks ago, The Pirate Bay warned that this would happen and explained exactly how the magnet links work. Rather than keeping all torrent files on a central server for users to download, the magnet links instead let users download from other BitTorrent users.

"A lot of media has hyped that we're stopping with the torrent files. It's like saying that Ferrari is no longer selling cars--they're just selling BETTER cars," The Pirate Bay wrote on its blog. "As are we, we're giving you the best links there are!"

However, it seems the recent crackdown on file-hosting sites like MegaUpload might be another motivator. The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak that magnet links use far fewer resources and also make the site less susceptible to being shut down.

"Countries, particularly in EU, seem to moving toward total censorship so we do all we can to avoid our users ending up with less freedom," The Pirate Bay wrote on its blog.