Dotcom's Mega Only Works in Chrome, Desktop and Mobile Apps Are on Their Way

Dotcom's Mega is almost here, everyone will be able to get it by January 20. The new cloud storage service has been in the works this past year and there's been a lot of talk about it.

Now, we finally get to see if all that was warranted. Dotcom promised a lot of things with Mega, client-side encryption, plenty of storage for free, an app ecosystem and so on.

In the first iteration of the site, he delivered on some of the promises, but not all. The Mega that is launching now is as simple as it gets.

The only way to access it is via the browser, not only that, it strongly "recommends" Chrome, for now. There's no reason for it not to work with other browsers, Chrome doesn't have some magic technology that makes it better than everyone else for Mega.

More likely, the developers simply didn't have time to test the site with anything else but Chrome, so that's what they're supporting for now.

Mega positions itself as a competitor to the Dropboxes of the world, and it certainly is on some fronts, but still has work to do, most importantly, building some apps.

The website is the only way to access the service for now, but Windows, Mac, Linux and mobile apps are in the works and should be landing in the coming months.

The site itself is bare bones, the file manager seems solid, but all you can do is upload files and share them, the absolute core of what the service is meant to do.

One of the big features promised that is here is client-side encryption. You can't really do anything until you set up a 2048-bit RSA key. This way, the only people with access to your files are the people with access to the key associated with any of them.

Mega can't know what you store and neither can any government snooping around. If you want to share a file, you can do it with or without a key.

If you share it without a key, people will be able to download the encrypted file, but they will need the key, which you can provide via other channels. Alternatively, if you want to share the file with everyone, you can include the encryption key with the URL.

UPDATE: Here's the full technical explanation of why Mega only works in Chrome, for now.