The new cloud storage site uses some cutting edge HTML5

Jan 21, 2013 11:41 GMT  ·  By

Mega, Kim Dotcom's, of MegaUpload fame, latest venture, is live and has proved quite popular or at least interesting. It's gotten up to 500,000 registered users in 14 hours and probably ticked the 1 million registered users mark by now.

All this attention is proving too much for the infrastructure which is struggling under the strain.

The site itself is working, most of the time, but upload/download speeds aren't great if they work at all. Still, it's easy to get an idea of how the site works.

One of the first things that greet you once you complete the registration process is a warning/notification that you're best suited with Google Chrome.

In fact, Mega makes it very clear that Chrome is the only browser supported and strongly encourages you to switch to it. Normally, these warnings are there just so a site can't be held responsible if things go wrong.

In this case, though, you really should be using Chrome. The site works in Firefox for example, but it's noticeably slower.

There are also weird bugs, which are easily explained by the lack of any testing, such as being very hard to tick checkboxes, most of the time your clicks won't be registered, you have to click at just the right spot for it to work.

But it goes deeper than this, there is a reason why Mega has these obvious bugs in Firefox, it was designed for Chrome from the get go since Firefox didn't offer some advanced HTML5 file management features, nor did any other major browser.

In fact, Mega explained exactly why it chose Chrome and why none of the other browsers fit the bill. Here's Mega's explanation in full:

"Google Chrome: The leading browser, by far. It implements the proposed HTML5 FileSystem API, allowing for fancy features such as recursive folder uploads and efficient downloads. Caveats: Requires user permission to batch-write files after a few unattended completed downloads (for security reasons, and only once per session). Slightly anaemic text rendering.

Internet Explorer 10: A solid, modern browser with blazing JavaScript performance (even exceeding Chrome's). However, until Microsoft fixes a memory leak in the Blob saving functionality, you have to close and reopen the MEGA tab every couple of hundred megabytes of inbound file transfer. And, until Microsoft implements disk-based Blobs or Chrome's FileWriter API, memory usage for a file download peaks at twice the file's size - hardly efficient.

Mozilla Firefox 18: Carefully avoids providing any API that would allow writing files from JavaScript.

Safari 6: No JavaScript file writing, either.

Internet Explorer 9: Lacks all essential features required for MEGA: File I/O, Web Workers, ArrayBuffers, and binary cross-domain HTTP access. Nice text rendering, though.

Opera: No JavaScript file writing and exceedingly slow JavaScript crypto operations."