The Pirate Bay's own PirateBrowser web browser has been downloaded more than 2.5m times since its launch in August 2013, but the filesharing site is already working on a successor.

PirateBrowser was designed to help people access The Pirate Bay and other torrent services even if they were blocked by their ISP, while also circumventing other kinds of internet censorship in countries including Iran and North Korea.

It reached 1m downloads by mid-October, and has added a further 1.5m since then, but it seems set to be replaced by a new client later in 2014 that will use peer-to-peer technology to evade ISP-level blocks on people's online activities.

"The goal is to create a browser-like client to circumvent censorship, including domain blocking, domain confiscation, IP-blocking. This will be accomplished by sharing all of a site’s indexed data as P2P downloadable packages, that are then browsed/rendered locally," an unnamed Pirate Bay "insider" told TorrentFreak.

"It’s basically a browser-like app that uses webkit to render pages, BitTorrent to download the content while storing everything locally."

The story claims that the new software will be made available as a standalone web browser, or as a plugin for Mozilla's Firefox – on which PirateBrowser was based – and Google's Chrome browsers. The first version is not expected to be released until later in the year, with The Pirate Bay recruiting coders to help with the project.

News of the new project comes at a time when The Pirate Bay is being blocked by a growing number of ISPs across Europe, often as the result of court rulings following cases brought by music or film industry rightsholders.

That includes the UK, where a case brought by music industry body the BPI resulted in a high court ruling in April 2012 that five of the largest British ISPs must block their customers from accessing The Pirate Bay.

The site reached its 10th birthday in August 2013, but was forced to change its domain name six times that year after being shut down by the authorities in countries including Sweden, Iceland, Greenland, the Caribbean island of Sint Maarten. Hence the reference to "domain confiscation" in the quotes published by TorrentFreak.

It would be simplistic for The Pirate Bay's traditional foes to see PirateBrowser and its forthcoming successor as just about piracy. The stream of revelations in recent months about online surveillance by the US National Security Agency, GCHQ in the UK and other intelligence agencies have opened the way for software like PirateBrowser to be pitched as tools for privacy, not just piracy.

In the UK specifically, though, these tools may appeal to internet users angry at the scope of new internet filters being rolled out by ISPs in response to Prime Minister David Cameron's calls for a system to force new broadband subscribers to "opt in" if they want to be able to access sexually explicit websites.

It emerged last week (TorrentFreak, again) that one of the first ISPs to launch such a filter, Sky, is also blocking other kinds of websites in its 13 Shield filter, including "anonymizers, filesharing and hacking" sites.

• 'David Cameron's porn filter is the start of censorship creep'