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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.

mega.nz 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.

mega start call

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.

incoming call

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?

This article was first seen on ComTek's "TekBits" Technology News

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