Mega launches long awaited in-browser chat
The encrypted file hosting service Mega seems to do quite well judging from the site's Alexa traffic rank.
The spiritual successor of Megaupload was launched two years ago, a year after the shut down of Megaupload by the United States Department of Justice in cooperation with law enforcement agencies in other countries.
Users who sign up for a free account get 50 Gigabyte of space and 10 Gigabyte of traffic currently. Paid accounts are available to increase the available space to 500 GB, 2 TB or 4 TB respectively.
The operators of the service announced some time ago that fully-encrypted chat would become part of Mega in the near future.
The company announced yesterday that it released a beta version of MEGAchat, a browser-based end-to-end encryption chat supporting video and audio on the new domain mega.nz.
Chat is only available to registered users at the time of writing. When you sign in to your account on the website (you need to sign in on mega.nz as mega.co.nz does not list the communication options at all) , you get a new conversation icon in the left sidebar that you can click on to see all your conversations.
Conversations are only displayed here if you have have clicked on the person under contacts and there on the start conversation option.
Conversations list all contacts that you have added this way in list form on the left, and options to call the selected contact on the right.
A click on the start call button displays options to start an audio call or a video call. Calls are handled by the browser, plugins or third-party programs are not required for that.
Incoming calls are indicated by audio notifications and the call prompt that is displayed on the screen.
Options to accept or decline the call are provided.
The chat worked quite well during tests even though it is rather bare bones when it comes to features. There is for instance no option to initiate a text chat right away, and the requirement to sign in to a Mega account before chat can be used may also be seen as a nuisance to some.
Mozilla showed that communication is possible without account requirement when it launched Hello in Firefox some time ago.
Still, Mega Chat is a beta product right now. It is likely that Mega is already thinking about adding more features to the client before it leaves beta.
Now You: Have you tried Mega Chat?
No text chat… I hope at least FF will add text chat to their Hello, it would be awesome.
Same here concerning audio & video chat only with Mozilla’s Hello and as it appears with Mega’s browser chat as well.
Why is text chat deliberately left aside? Text may seem old fashioned and voice has the advantage of erasing spelling mistakes even if grammar and style when not rhetoric itself remain visible! But, hey!, a chat is among friends not an appointment for a job!
I miss HTML chats of the 1990s. Booting administrators out of their own room with a little JavaScript was a blast.
Some chat administrators then really deserved it, or would have deserved it in my experience had I had the talent/knowledge to script them out myself!
Twenty years ago, yeah, roaring nineties! Souvenirs, souvenirs … :)
This topic just got me back in my memories to realize that I was not connected before 2000, I think, or 2001, so chats in the nineties… make that in the early century. Seems so far away, so long ago.
For my records only and for the sake of truth, though it won’t change anything to anyone’s life!
I sure know I’m not waiting for this :P
Don’t even know or care about this.
But thats just me :P
I couldn’t get Firefox’s Hello work, but Mega’s chat more or less works for me. It’s strange that there’s no text chat, I hope they’ll implement it soon. Anyway it looks promising.
I must be laughing on this, ICQ, XMPP, MSN is more or less death and now everyone open there own service (again) with the same protocols and features like the 13 years old ones. Funny, instead of close all chat services why not use the old ones and improve them without closing the source and make them available for all external clients?!
XMPP can handle Audio/Video now over 13 years and the only thing we got is 1000 closed sources messenger (based on XMPP and “stolen” source without giving any credit) [like WhatsApp/Hangouts] or “new” services which claim that they are secure even if there is no proof or it’s not based on the trusted known algorithms.
Nope not with me, I think we have enough clients/chats now, XMPP can also handle TLS without any “Javascript” based encryption like mega. I’m not a fan of such “secure” chat products, also also not with another chat system that will be dead very soon (because everyone uses WhatsApp/Hangouts/XMPP/MSN/IRC,…..).