In the browser · No install, no account
Send one without installing anything.
Open a tab, drop a file, hand over the link. There is no download, no sign up, and nothing to uninstall afterwards. It works differently from the desktop app, and the rest of this page is about exactly how, because you should know before you send anything rather than after.
Say it first
It goes through a server
The desktop app connects your machine straight to someone else's. The browser version cannot, and it is worth being blunt about why rather than letting you assume otherwise.
What crosses the relay
- Encrypted packets it has no key for
- That two anonymous endpoints are talking
- Roughly how much data went between them, and when
What it never gets
- Your file's contents, which are encrypted end to end
- Your file's name, size, or type
- Who you are, because there is no account to be
- A copy of anything, because it forwards rather than stores
The encryption keys are made in the two browsers and never leave them, so the relay carries bytes it cannot read. That is a real protection and it is not the same as no server being involved. If what you need is that no third machine ever touches the traffic at all, use the desktop app, where it does not.
Three steps
How a browser transfer runs
- 0x01
Drop a file in
Nothing installs and nothing signs in. The page holds your file locally, hashes it, and hands you a link. Close the tab and the transfer is over, because the tab was the whole of it.
- 0x02
It crosses a relay
A browser cannot open a direct connection to another machine. Nobody's can: the sandbox has no way to send the kind of traffic peer to peer needs. So the two tabs meet at a relay server and it passes the bytes between them.
- 0x03
It lands whole
The other side downloads it in their own browser and checks the hash. If a single byte were different from the one you dropped in, it would not match.
Side by side
Browser or desktop
Neither one is the lesser version. The browser is for sending something to a person once, without asking anything of them. The desktop app is for the people you send to often.
| In the browser | Desktop app | |
|---|---|---|
| Connection | Relayed through a server | Direct, machine to machine |
| Speed | Limited by the relay | As fast as the two connections allow |
| Account | None | Needed for friends and presence |
| Encryption | End to end | End to end |
| Size | Capped, so one transfer cannot take the relay down | Whatever fits on the disk |
Not open yet
Being built now.
The browser version is in development. Everything above is how it will work, written down first so that it is a promise rather than a description written afterwards. The desktop app is finished and you can have it today.
One byte at a time
Both builds are live. Take one now, or leave an address and hear when there is something new to install.
One message, when there is something to install.