At Mozilla, we are always committed to people’s security and privacy. It’s part of our long-standing Mozilla Manifesto. We are continually looking for new ways to fulfill that promise, whether it’s through the browser, apps or services. So, it felt natural to graduate one of our popular Test Pilot experiments, Firefox Send. Send is a free encrypted file transfer service that allows users to safely and simply share files from any browser. Additionally, Send will also be available as a an Android app in beta later this week. Now that it’s a keeper, we’ve made it even better, offering higher upload limits and greater control over the files you share.
Neat feature, because sending files is still a messy and unpleasant experience. I trust Mozilla to do this right.
It’s still actually hosted on top of Google Cloud infrastructure, though. Heavy use would see Mozilla paying Google for the storage and bandwidth.
CtOS,
At first I read this thinking it could be a new mechanism to allow firefox users to directly transfer files to each other (aka in P2P fashion). That would be a nifty tool for firefox to have (and probably not too difficult given the existing HTML5 websocket capabilities in firefox), but after taking a look at it you’re right: It’s just a hosted file service running on a google server.
This has been tried many times in the past and these public file repositories are often overrun by warez and/or illegal content and eventually the public service degrades “wait 2 minutes before downloading” and/or begins up-selling a premium service. I often do need to transfer large files with others, so I think it’s a problem worthy of mozilla’s attention, but I think a P2P file transfer solution would have been better. It could be useful, but I’m skeptical of mozilla’s ability to foot the bill for free server-side file storage in the long term. And making users register their email address to transfer large files? Yuck.
The P2P solutions for file sharing do exist.
But they don’t use websocket, they use WebRTC.
Here is an example: https://www.webrtc-experiment.com/file-sharing/
Lennie,
Of course you are right, I should have mentioned HTML5’s WebRTC & user connections. WebRTC lacks a signalling mechanism by itself, so it generally still needs connections to be initiated through a server component, and that’s where websockets could come in (better than hacks like constant HTTP polling). Anyways, back to mozilla’s tool, if they used the technology in HTML5, the server could serve up the javascripts and initiate the P2P connections. At which point the clients would take over allowing truly unlimited transfers without inuring any additional costs to mozilla. Under mozilla’s current design, the more use this free service gets, the larger their bill will be transferring and storing all user data at google. A P2P design on the other hand only requires very modest server resources, so I think they should consider at least making it an option for send.firefox.com.