$30-50/month is a wild price point for this. Who is going to pay that? It feels too expensive both for enterprise (existing remote desktop solutions run about half the cost) and for end-users.
I worked on a similar solution to this and we had a price point of $5/month per user...
EDIT: 16GB of RAM and 16vCPUs. What a weird balancing of resources. Chrome is typically memory bound, not CPU bound. This also explains why it would be so wildly expensive compared to anything else out there.
EDIT2: A lot of the replies I'm getting seem to think my implication here is that no one would pay for this or it would be easier for people to build this themselves. I'm not saying that at all, I'm just critiquing the price point. There's huge market demand for browser isolation, I've worked on products in that field, I just haven't encountered any customers willing to pay $30-50/month for it.
Fwiw, we had 5 customers pay $30/mo in the last 12 hours who have been trying Mighty for a few weeks.
Believe me, I was skeptical too. I remember sitting in a car driving back up from YC with Michael Siebel asking him: "Hey man, do you think I am absolutely nuts thinking people would pay for a browser that's FREE? That's an idiotic idea right?" and, of course, he encouraged me and I am still feeling pretty encouraged based on talking to users and seeing the revenue/usage/praise 18 mo later.
We have a lot of work to do and I am pretty embarrassed of what we've got still but it felt right to get public about it.
Why might I use this instead of / in addition to Shadow (https://shadow.tech)? I'm a Shadow user, and they seem to give you beefier hardware at half the price, and it's a general purpose OS that will let you run any app (as opposed to "just" a browser).
Most people want an experience where the underlying OS and the application (the browser) interoperate seamlessly versus having to tame two desktop experiences. The primary application people think is slow is their browser by a wide margin so that's where we decided to focus as more native desktop apps become web apps. That focus lets us constrain the problems we get solve vs boiling the ocean with all of Windows.
Fwiw, we started by streaming Windows and pivoted away.
It's not clear to me that Shadow's business is sustainable. Windows licensing alone for virtualization across end-users if you buy from a reseller is $11/mo/user alone. I only know because we tried and became a reseller briefly. They also seem to use consumer GPUs that violate NVIDIA's licensing and agreements. Maybe they know something we don't.
> They also seem to use consumer GPUs that violate NVIDIA's licensing and agreements
They claim to, in reality they are sliced Quadro/Tesla cards that get a GTX 1080's worth of performance. I was wondering about the Windows licensing myself, not clear how they got around that.
Perhaps the rotate (?) the licenses somehow? That is, not every subscriber is active all the time? Imagine it as the public computers at the library. Maybe?
In any case, even at $20 p/m it feels like a strong value. That ~$1000 every four years - without ever being stuck with an out of date machine.
Yep, this is exactly what I was getting at. Shadow is one of many examples of application streaming services which aren't limited to the browser and offer similar hardware (or even flexible hardware) at a lower price point.
+1 I love their service, it's flawless and I often forget I'm using a stream. Then again, I'm on a wired Ethernet connection and a fiber line within 5ms of the datacenter so that probably helps.
What's actually crazy is that i even ditched my Ethernet cable and is running on a ubiquiti amplfi 5ghz router, and there is seemingly no difference in my location at least.
Isn't Shadow basically going out of business? Pre-orders aren't estimated to be available until October and I thought I read somewhere that they are selling off pieces of the business.
There are 2 competing offers to buy the company, as I know of. One from OVH founder Octave Klaba, the other from JB Kempf, of VLC fame. So no, I don't think it should go out of business - in the short term.
I'm not skeptical at all the people would pay for this. I worked on a cloud browser for seven years, there's a bunch of different market needs for this stuff. But $30-50 feels really high. We got feedback from enterprise customers that they were looking in the $5-15 range per user per month. That said, we pushed the security angle much more than performance, so the dynamics are a bit different.
Congrats on all the work here. Browser streaming isn't easy stuff!
Pricing is a good example of something that most people are intuitively wrong about. What you think people will pay and what people actually will pay are rarely congruent, and most of the time people guess far too low. Literally every bit of advice and writing about pricing I've ever read boils down to "Charge more than what feels right; you'll be surprised at how high you can go before you lose customers."
Also, 50% of the highest-paying customers bring more than 50%of the revenue, by definition. Often much more.
Apple keeps applying this strategy since 1990s.
Tesla bootstrapped itself off $80k cars, and only now is expanding to the "reasonable" $30k market segment.
You may not need everyone jump on your service just yet, you can start with the most needing it who are moneyed. Then you expand, economies of scale kick in, and you can introduce lower and lower price tiers, and people enjoy falling prices and getting a bargain.
Enterprise might say $5-15, but someone who controls their own budget and spends all day in the browser would easily pay more. Freelancers. Bootstrappers. The same way people pay for an IDE.
I agree they would pay more, but I'm still skeptical of $30-50. As I mentioned in a comment below, why limit it to the browser? If you've got all these resources just offer a full VDI which more typically prices in this ballpark.
> If you've got all these resources just offer a full VDI which more typically prices in this ballpark.
Perhaps their solution has something specific to the browser which allows them to do it really fast and cost effective. Eg. Sending just diffs of DOM to the client.
a useful comparison is other proxy/cloud browsers and especially VDI. $30/user/mo seems normal in enterprise: https://www.nutanix.com/products/frame/pricing , citrix, ... . Frame and some others were a good perf+quality jump, and maybe mighty is/will be the next
positioning for consumer/prosumer is interesting and invites changing the math! opera was notable here as a web accelerator, but also a warning sign for pursuing this as a VC-funded businesses. the internet is bigger now..
Exactly, I always wonder how much Safari is faster than competing browsers. I have dozens of open tabs and it just works. With other browsers, I cannot even work after a certain number of tabs.
Indeed, I'm really bad at closing tabs. One day I wondered how many Safari tabs I had open on my pre-M1 2018 base model MacBook Air. I went into the tab preview pane and discovered it was around 480 tabs. Mind you this was in between system restarts so some were probably suspended or something, but still. I don't even notice with both IntelliJ and VSCode open as well.
People who don’t close tabs because they unconsciously don’t want to lose their search history.
At the end of the day your search history should be fed into a personal search engine which digests the data and figures out which pages were most useful to you (maybe by helpful browser buttons)…and uploads that into some open database. This can then be the basis for a new type of search engine.
It could be implemented trivially on something like Mighty, since everyones browsers run in the same datacenter.
As a reference, I've got more than 100 open tabs on this Firefox Android (it counts them up to 99 then it displays ∞) and probably another one hundred on my desktop (Ubuntu /Gnome), split on five windows on five different desktops. I can't assess the speed of Safari because it doesn't run on my hardware. It could be faster but those Firefoxes don't feel slow and don't slow down when the number of tabs increases. I don't have a really large number of open tabs though.
I expect to pay for this with high probability. I don't think I'm in the first target batch as I'm giddy in M1 land now, but I do work on so many different machines and love the idea of a persistent environment in the cloud. I also expect to want to do genomics in my browser at some point, and thus envision a need for 100x+ more powerful browser tabs.
What would you be doing that would require 100x+ more powerful tabs? I'd imagine most process-intensive work is already being done server-side or in a desktop app, not the frontend of a browser app.
Someday I want to run a whole world simulation. Think "The Sims" except the whole world. 8 billion agents, say a million bytes per person, so 8PB of RAM. While the sim is running I want to copy and paste the URL in a new tab and change a few params to compare the results. I want things to be instant.
Today I want to visualize 100,000 rows across 1,000 dimensions in 10 different tabs.
Between Today and Someday there are endless things I want to do.
You are not explaining your architecture. The parent (and me as it happens) assume that when you paste the URL and change params then that URL is sent from your browser to a server. The server runs the simulatíon based on the params in the URL it received and returns the results to the browser. With that architecture you would need a lot of resources for the server but not for the browser. What architecture are you thinking of?
Server is just a dumb nginx server sending HTML and Javascript. No dynamic routes. Everything happens clientside (main thread and/or web workers, local storage for persistence).
Still to early to think how to sell our [ we are in the very early stage] to sell our WebApp subscription as a bundle with MightyApp. But the price will be to high [add $15 for our side]. Waiting for the future when Linux and Windows ( sadly) versions arrive. Imagine the Arduino’s guys with this. Go buddy!
This is huge challenge BTW. I am dealing with electron kind of Web App and we are thinking in sell our subscription model with a bundle with MightyApp in the future waiting for the other versions Windows ( sadly) and Linux ( imagine the Arduino users ). Wait and see. The best for MightyApp!
I agree. People just point to the exceptions and not the vast majority of products and businesses that failed.
That drop box comment was a bit off since having an offsite backup of your most important data and having it available across all your devices is super useful. However I see where he was coming from. I still have on site backups. And most of the time that’s way cheaper for massive backups.
$30-50 USD for browser inception? If I had my entire environment there I could see the usefulness. But the browser alone?
I see some comments where people are already paying. Who is using this?
Well, that's one of the points. It's easy and trivial to come up with the downsides of something. There are already a bunch of people trying to do that in every thread.
Might as well exercise the less-used part of the brain where you try to imagine the positive aspects of something.
I would care if i knew the buzz around these things is organic or genuine. Yet this thing popped simultaneously on my twitter , hn and elsewhere, clearly some marketing machine is pushing it. Overall though, technology that reduces the options of the user and gatekeeps is always net negative imho.
wasn't trying to !. Also you're absolutely right, mighty might fail as a consumer application. But rigging together a very complicated system of software will definitely fail as a product for these people.
I'm confused by how hostile Zed thinks Drew is being here.
He quotes a post from Drew thanking Brandon for his remarks, and spends the rest of the essay saying the thanking is an uncalled-for "level of retribution", "effective slander case". But both exchanges between Drew and Brandon (the one in 2007 as well as the one in 2018) seem friendly to me.
My impression is that when linking to Brandon's post, people are usually saying "a company can still succeed by offering something that was previously possible, by making it easier to do" and "don't be discouraged by criticism saying it's already possible". They're not saying that Brandon was a bad person or that his feedback wasn't useful or anything.
Zed also makes a big deal about Brandon not being able to delete his post - but I remember dang mentioning that they would delete posts when asked, but everyone so far has agreed to a compromise of removing the username but keeping the post, which does seem like the best solution in a case like this (where the content of the post has historical value but the author might want to disavow it).
Sorry about replying to a week old post but your link and post really made me think:
I think the initial HN comment was justified albeit a bit nerdy, the marketing was just poor at the time. Not being able to delete a post is sort of a problem with all written media, the internet is not your group of friends at a bar. Being able to distance yourself from something that you've previously said might be a solution, an "I stand corrected" button might be a solution. Perhaps just being able to add a strikethough to an old post.
You're right to point to this, but I feel the comparison is much more "unfair" in the Dropbox case. FTP+SVN (lol) is not even close to the experience Dropbox gives.
In the case of Mighty the experience is known. It is Chrome, just faster. Sure, someone might prefer to use Mighty, fair enough, but there's no "extra magic"
BTW, Dropbox was huge when it launched and everybody was using it. I don't know anybody using it anymore. Maybe it's because people are using less desktop programs and more browser apps and apps in their mobile devices. So, less "explicit" files?
Why would someone want to do all that instead of paying this company $30/month? There are lots of people who's jobs are spent in a web browser. Your examples aren't selling a solution to a problem–they are just tools. Which is fine and great for people who need them, but I simply wanted a faster browser, I'd rather use a service that is dedicated to that purpose.
i think the main selling point is the always-on browser, not a faster browser. i dont know what demand there is for faster browsers, if speed was a big deal i think most web apps would have moved to native, but almost none of them do. People who use beefy web apps are likely capable of setting up their own server which could double as a terabyte of remote storage, file sharing, any self-hosted app really.
I m sure the makers have done their research and found $30/month is the optimal price of a browser of a browser. Surely a lot of businesses will be convinced it's worth the money because $bigCorp uses it as well, and cargo cults work, I'm just pointing out what money can buy at that price point.
Then someone might figure that they can rent servers for $30 /mo and sell 10 remote desktop subscriptions on it.
The BBC loses an additional 10% of users for every extra second it takes for its site to load. And when Yahoo! reduced its page load time by just 0.4 seconds, traffic increased by 9%
1 second delay reduces customer satisfaction by 16%
The longer a webpage takes to load, the more its bounce rate will skyrocket.
I'm not onboard with this price-point either. If it's pointed at shitty chromebooks users, I get the price point even less.
Nvidia GeForce NOW (Cloud Gaming Steaming) is $10 a month and gives you access to top of the line enterprise GPU/CPU/RAM hardware and nearly your entire Steam, Unreal, Ubi, etc libraries. I can play Cyberpunk 2077 with fully maxed out graphics settings with no perceptible latency.
But you are updating. You're spending $360-600 a year on this.
RAM isn't that expensive, even if you do feel like you need to upgrade again in another 2-3 years. I can buy a completely brand new, good computer every 3 years for that price. And it will be able to handle running 100 tabs.
There are a lot of potential reasons why someone might benefit from a remote browser, but I don't think computer processing power is one of them. My phone can handle running over 100 tabs in Firefox.
I don't know, is this an adblock thing? I currently have ~950 tabs open on my 6-year-old desktop computer, and my computer isn't crashing. I think it's currently using 8-9 gigs of RAM. Maybe my system is particularly optimized, or maybe without an adblocker websites are way heavier and multitasking is a big problem? I do run uMatrix and uBlock Origin, so maybe my experience isn't typical. But the point is, for $30-60 a month I could buy another 16 gigs of RAM.
I am sure it is uBlock + uMatrix that's giving you the boost. I use both and whenever I open a regular website in Incognito mode (in case uMatrix ruleset adjustment would be too consuming for a one-off) you can feel the fans spinning up.
Wish more people used these addons -- there is no reason why webpages should download megabytes of JavaScript to "improve my experience" :-)
You're paying THEM to update their servers at a price point you could easily match or come in lower on YOUR workstation upgrades. I don't understand how people are trying to justify this cost.
Twitter's special move was a character limit. There are people who just want the browser and will ironically pay a premium to have that one thing done very well.
16GB of RAM and 16vCPUs. What a weird balancing of resources.
They are probably doing things somewhat inefficiently in the beginning, like renting whole, generic VMs for every customer. Both the price and the resource balance should get better when they catch a little scale.
If you’re making good money, investing $1-2 dollars a day to be able to work more productively is incredible roi.
I hope to see people normalize spending $ on software. A lot of software is way under priced, and if it was priced higher, we’d have more incentives for companies to come and make more great software.
I can imagine a small niche for something like this. Big corps can end up with weird IT department restrictions and capex/opex inelasticity. There are a tragic number of professionals stuck with a cheap Dell thin-and-light laptop with a 1368x768 TN display and 6 GB RAM. They can absolutely afford a better computer, but they can't get IT/purchasing to give it to them. They're unincentivized to spend their own money on a nicer computer, and even if they did want to, they could never get it on the domain and approved with IT's spyware and antispam software. But they may have a small amount of opex, their direct manager could accommodate a monthly "I need this subscription to do my job". This results in stupidly expensive Todo-list collaboration subscriptions, and cloud computers that are more expensive than local computers, and IT-bypassed remote storage systems...it's not a rationally optimal state of affairs, more like a weird corner of the chaos of modern society.
Genuine question, but would the places that are that inflexible wrt to hardware upgrades have the flexibility to allow you to use a cloud service to perform your most sensitive work?
I worked there and they had these awful surface pros with hardly any memory. Their solution was to use AWS's hosted Desktop for Developers. It.. sort of worked OK.
This, by the way, was not just for a few people: because of Brexit there are thousands of people all working on making the new systems for customs etc work.
I suspect organisations that are undergoing digital transformation (as they are) will have this kind of setup. It was rife through the whole place: rubbish old IT stuff rubbing shoulders with modern SaaS.
I hate this setup. You generally need to have anything audio/video related on the laptop anyway and these are the most CPU hungry apps. Working through remote sessions suck and are high latency even on good connections, it's really noticeable for certain things like alt-tabbing and intellisense and it works awfully for multi monitor setups.
I suspect it's more so companies can pretend all their old rules about keeping data on site can remain. Still, it's better than going back to the office.
Exactly. Also, who needs those resources just for a browser? Why not make it a full VDI instead? With those resources it feels like a waste to limit it that way.
This is my thing about it - I always hear people complaining about Chrome being a memory hog, but it never feels slow to me. I'm writing this with 15 tabs open and it's not even a worry. I only have 16gb in my laptop too.
I regularly run Docker + Slack + dozens of Brave tabs (still Chromium), and both individual tabs and my whole computer will slow down with some frequency, despite having 16GB of RAM.
Am I missing something? How does Mighty allow professionals access to internal websites and other internally hosted content. If this is priced for professionals, how is it even possible to allow workers to stream sensitive documents etc from a cloud service browser?
This argument falls apart when you consider how often this is made nowadays. Yes, for one individual product spending 1-2$ per day isn't much. If you do this however for everything people advocate it nowadays, you're suddenly spending a thousand bucks plus per month solely on subscriptions.
> it was priced higher, we’d have more incentives for companies to come and make more great software
This is also a strange logic. The definition of innovation and the benefit of competition is to drive down prices for consumers, not up. Let's not turn software into some sort of Veblen good.
> If you’re making good money, investing $1-2 dollars a day to be able to work more productively is incredible roi.
Sure, but investing $2/day pays for an M1 MacBook Air in under 2 years. That's why so many of us are struggling to understand this.
It might make sense in the context of companies with weird IT department restrictions that won't let them buy new laptops but will let them spend $50/month on a service.
For the "why would someone pay" question, I think it's quite simple.
1. We are more and more moving to a world of highly valuable workers. Improving their efficiency in a high salary country is easily worth it. Company should be willing to pay 0.4 - 1% of your salary to make you more efficient.
2. Longer liftetime of company computers. No need to upgrade to M1 yet.
3. Seems like they are building a full on WorkOS as well. That migth also just be worth it.
Pardon me for being rude, but this seems like a pretty naive marketing take on what they're offering. What exactly is the use case here? Employees that have hundreds of tabs open saving a couple seconds loading web pages? How much productivity is being lost there, objectively?
Once you get above 20 tabs, are you genuinely keeping track of every single one as something to return to later? Or are you just being lazy and lack the personal systems to track what's actually important or needs to be returned to later?
I've been using a 11y/o computer at home for everything--code compilation, VMs, work AND personal life--and this has never been an issue for me.
Maybe I'll give you #3, but if an employee came to me asking for this as a paid subscription, I'd shut the idea down immediately. Seems like another startup trying to fill a space that doesn't need to be occupied.
> Once you get above 20 tabs, are you genuinely keeping track of every single one as something to return to later?
yes! Ideally I have around 500 tabs that I all need. I for example let your comment sit here for a while unsure if I was going to reply to it. There are more topics on HN currently under investigation. Each spawns a series of extra tabs. Cloud browsers, whole OS in the cloud, what hapend to paperspace? I open several articles that I may or may not read. When I get back to this discussion I look over the tabs it spawned and continue exploring while closing old ones... There is a window with music, one with youtube videos I might want to watch/comment on with the further research tabs they spawn. A dozen tax tabs, courier services, business card services. Dozens of tabs for websites I'm working at. jsfiddles, specs, demos. Tabs about wind turbines without propellers, road side wind turbines, covid, oil and coal reserves. And aggregators ofc
Basically, I can only do work or look at depressing shit for so long but I get back to it after watching a cat video.
When closing lots of tabs I go over the topics which helps me remember what I've looked at.
Its funny howmany people I talk with who have a single tab (usually also a single application and a single monitor) but know instinctively that their approach is better. (as if there should be only one metric) I cant begin to explain how much I'm enjoying myself.
In the old days there was webspeedreader and MyIE2 that were much more suitable for the giant session. Then there was tabmixplus and then came chrome which is pretty much a turd with 10+ tabs then web extensions killed all the good tools.
It's definitely interesting to see how people's workflows can be so different, I get by with at most ~10 tabs, and close things as soon as I'm done with them. At the end of the working day, I prefer to have at most 2 or 3 left. I sincerely start to experience existential anxiety when the number of tabs goes up too much :-P. Probably related to some subconscious feeling that I need to 'do something' with all these tabs and when they increase in number it starts to feel like I'm 'running behind'. Different people, different workflows, that's perfectly fine.
What I don't really see is why this service needs to exist to solve that particular problem (browser gets slow because too many tabs), because IMO that problem has already been solved very well by most decent browsers. They just swap out the inactive tabs and are able to restore them fast enough even on low-end systems, as long as they have an SSD. Inactive tabs that are not swapped out don't take a lot of CPU resources either. This service sells you a cloud browser with 16GB of RAM, which is pretty much the norm for laptops and desktops now, so it's not going to save you much if 'too many tabs' is causing slowness.
I keep the things I need to do in a separate window. If it gets to crowded I drag some less important ones to a different window. I get anxiety when behind but also if I forget to live. Switching between topics effectively is hard if you are not used to it and it definitely eats away my focus if I don't pay attention.
For a while I use different browsers simultaneously for different things. The session turns out entirely different for some reason as if one is a different person in a different location. I could see a cloud browser as something like that. I have no idea what would happen. Portability will probably influence the session.
I wish bookmarks were good enough, I use tabs in stead to preserve scroll audio and video offset and to have a bunch of tabs for a domain with related tabs next to them. Browsers have poor organization for large numbers of tabs but bookmarks are even worse.
I have no real idea how the session should be organized but I'm sure there are tons of visualizations out there that would work wonderfully. Perhaps some filters with a flow chart for the entire browsing history. Full text search? I don't know.
The price doesn't really matter as I spend way to much time online. 1 euro per day is nothing.
> yes! Ideally I have around 500 tabs that I all need. I for example let your comment sit here for a while unsure if I was going to reply to it. There are more topics on HN currently under investigation. Each spawns a series of extra tabs. Cloud browsers, whole OS in the cloud, what hapend to paperspace? I open several articles that I may or may not read. When I get back to this discussion I look over the tabs it spawned and continue exploring while closing old ones... There is a window with music, one with youtube videos I might want to watch/comment on with the further research tabs they spawn. A dozen tax tabs, courier services, business card services. Dozens of tabs for websites I'm working at. jsfiddles, specs, demos. Tabs about wind turbines without propellers, road side wind turbines, covid, oil and coal reserves. And aggregators ofc
I thought you were trolling at first, but I realize this may actually be serious. You can lose the tab with my comment. I'm a worthless internet stranger, and if you REALLY feel the need to reply, you'll remember, anyway.
How many of those HN topics actually matter? The "may or may not read" stuff I think you can comfortably file under "does not matter" and discard for your sanity's sake.
I waste a lot of time looking at animal videos, too, but I close the tab after. I don't think that counts as something productive or necessary to revisit...
If you're closing lots of tabs, I'd hope you understand those tabs should've been closed earlier--rather than something nostalgic to revisit that never really mattered in terms of what you actually need to do?
It's fun to abuse technology, but at the end of the day, you should ask yourself... why? Is this really making your life more complete? Are you being more productive?
So you have a highly valuable worker where you can afford to pay 1% of their salary for increased efficiency but somehow you can't afford the $1000 to upgrade their machine? Hmmm...
Or you already upgraded the machine and require more efficiency :)
Or the upgraded machine comes with other differences that worker doesn't want :)
It doesn't need to be each of this reasons, and it doesnt need to be a combination, but im just pointing these out as possible ways to justify the pricing.
(1) Sure, but installing more memory works as well and is typically possible without upgrading the CPU a la (2). I'm also not really sure what (3) is about--I'm a bit familiar with WorkOS, but I'm not familiar enough to understand how Mighty is competing.
The 3rd point is clear if you read the mighty website. They advertise improved functionality and hotkeys for common work webapps. That's definitely part of a push to become an OS for work (not workOS).
With that kind of money, you can almost lease nice laptop almost that comes with a browser. I've been looking at options for this recently. 50/month should get you something decent if you commit to that for 2-3 years. That's 1800 over 3 years. E.g. one of the fancy Aple M1 mac book pros would cost about 1300, I believe. The air is cheaper.
The other thing is that browsers need GPUs as well. A lot of stuff is hardware accelerated in Browsers these days. Just a bunch of vcpus does not help that much.
As it is, the target audience seems to be people with too much money and yet with a shitty laptop unable to run a browser properly. I'm sure these people exist but it does not sound like a great market opportunity.
Also, from a security point of view, I don't think that a lot of Fortune 500 companies would ever agree tot this.
However, that oddly might be the path to success for this company as well: play the security angle rather than the performance angle: lots of companies worry about their employees having their laptops and phones stolen. The less data is on these devices; the better. But it will need to be iron clad and more than "We won't look! We promise". That in itself basically just screams "but we could if we wanted to". But if you think about it, a lot of office workers access internal tools almost exclusively through browsers these days anyway and most of that stuff is cloud based anyway. It's just that the terms of use, SLAs, etc. give IT departments enough warm fuzzy feelings that they don't forbid this. Office 365 is a good example. Hosts a lot of very confidential information in a lot of companies. So not a strange thought to narrow the surface between the user and that to just a remotely running browser.
Also there's the convenience angle. A lot of developers are running their development tools remotely. Github is pushing e.g. code spaces. VS code can mount things over ssh. It's becoming normal to do that. So why not do that for other things as well? Streaming games is another good example. I would not be surprised to see Google go there eventually.
apple needs to double down on safari, it really lags behind Chrome right now, and likely won't ever be a dev's first choice until they adopt v8 or release the underlying engine. Chrome is the new IE, its the only browser I'm allowed to use on my work computer
I have a 2013 Macbook Pro and I want to keep using it forever. Now if it (Mighty) helps me focus and save 1 hour of my time per month my work, I'll pay up the $30/mo. However, I'd like to pause my subscription whenever possible. I am a consultant. Time is money. Can it save me an hour per. month? How many hours will I spend customizing it? Will my existing plugins work? What layer of Chrome did they optimize? Security implications? I'll be looking for answers to these questions. The founder is someone with a level head and I trust them enough to not chase after "made up" problems.
EDIT: I did wonder about offsetting some of my CPU load by renting a VM out on the cloud instead of paying the $30 though. Not sure of the cost there.
I can't see it being a thing on the consumer end, so it has to be enterprise.
The problem it'll face being marketed to consumers is that every one of the big JS application sites has already deployed a mobile app that takes care of the "works on light hardware" part.
For the ad-laden, tracker-heavy news sites of the world, there are ad-blocker extensions and Brave.
Independent professionals that have to use a heavy site will opt to upgrade their spec, almost certainly; computer financing has made it so that you can pay $30-50 a month to get a whole new system - why would you pay to get a worse experience?
Now, the enterprise can afford to spend on this and it can even solve some major problems. But that's a "current enterprise" problem, and not where I see tomorrow's enterprise going. There will always be startups aiming to be savvier than this, cut out more fat and not get locked into this particular opex and security model. The basic premise relies on the Web keeping its dominant state and I suspect we're in the midst of a trend reversal against centralized systems.
And...if the current enterprise doesn't provision correctly, it's likely they'll just continue to do so and leave their employees to suffer with 2Gb laptops, because it hasn't become mission critical yet.
So, I really do suspect that while it might have a chance for a few years, it's in a race against time to get some market share and expand differentiating factors. In this respect it could have the success of a Dropbox, i.e. "get big, then run out of places to go".
All they need is to get a few large companies on board, and then to convince Web developers that it's no longer necessary to think at all about front-end performance. The rest of us will be forced to follow suit when a critical mass of Web sites require beefier hardware than we can afford to buy ourselves, and faster connections than we can even get access to due to Comcast and Time Warner not giving a shit about speed.
This kind of service lives and dies based on the experience customers initially get. It makes sense to put the price tag on a level where you can provide top-notch service, even if it means serving less customers at first.
It's not a bad thing if people get the feeling your service provides great experience, but is too expensive. You can fix this later by dropping price or giving discounts.
This is a bit like Superhuman. Who will pay $30 a month for faster gmail? Turns out a lot of people and they love it. Sure a lot of people won't and will continue using free email services but those that do really value it and give it a high NPS.
I see this being similar, people who spend a lot of time in Chrome and for who the improved speeds are highly valuable in both terms of opportunity cost will not think of $30 as 'too expensive'.
The other thing is customer service, like Superhuman, with a $30 a month price tag you can actually give good customer service.
Finally, at this price tag you only need about 275,000 customers and you have $100m ARR. I don't know how long the Mighty wait list is, I do know Superhumans was last reported as 275,000.
Only time and the market will tell, but I'm really bullish on this company doing great things.
as a happy Superhuman user paying $30/month for slightly faster Gmail: yes. its absolutely worth it for tools you use daily to be as fast as humanly achievable.
They actually tried! There was a Chromium project called Blimp for a while which supported browser streaming, but it got shut down after less than a year in development. Had some major dev power behind it too, not sure what happened.
I was head of the Blimp team at Google and could tell you exactly what happened, although it’s probably not something I can discuss too much publicly. Great project, great team, turned out to be very hard and involved making major changes to Chrome to do what we wanted. And unlike Mighty we were not willing to charge users a ton of money to use it. Fast, cheap, high quality: pick two :-)
Very different projects than what Blimp was. Blimp was integrated into Chromium's rendering pipeline itself to stream draw commands directly to the client browser.
Imagine Apple partnering with telcos to do this off M2 racks then Google doing the same with Chrome split into a client and Linux container - $10/month for "Chrome Pro".
The first troll comment I'm reading here is yours. Just because you stare at some toast for two years until you start to see an image of Jesus in it doesn't mean someone else can't point out that it's just a burn mark.
16GB of memory for 16vCPUs is a very weird balancing of resources in anyone's books. Either their definition of a "vCPU" is actually a far smaller CPU share in order to pump up the numbers or they are overselling CPU hard.
And yes, 50$ a month is also a high price point for this.
I actually worked on browser isolation products for seven years. No need to be rude.
EDIT: Just because the attitude of this comment really grinds my gears: Here's my patent for network-based content rendering which was submitted back in 2017: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10878187B1
Believe me, I've thought about this a little more than 5 minutes.
As a self hoster, nothing irks me more that more software that takes control from the user to some random third party.
And I fail to see why anyone would use this, you need high speed internet capable of streaming 4k for one and if you have access to that, then chances are you also have access to a sufficiently powerful computer capable of running chrome locally.
Coming to security, this is a complete disaster. All your traffic including passwords are going to a third party server and you have to trust that server to not do anything shady.
This cant be economical either, or will be too expensive.
And the testimonial on the website, I find it hard to believe that a CEO of a company cannot afford a powerful computer but can afford a (presumably expensive) subscription service giving them access to a video stream of a browser running on powerful hardware.
Like another user said VNC can already do this, and much more without the electron wrapper.
It's pretty rare that I root for a company to crash and burn on principle. I'm an entrepreneur myself so it takes a lot for me to go there.
I hope every single one of these cloud-streamed remote-app or remote-OS plays fails and fails hard. They're helping lead the Internet and the computing ecosystem in an even more dystopian direction. I've been happy to see Stadia not really take off.
So lets say this succeeds. Then Google or Facebook buys it. Now all your browser sessions including passwords, keys, authentication codes, private messages, etc. are globally visible to be data mined.
Who's to say they're not doing this already?
What if this is hacked?
This is worse than that Amazon idea of giving Amazon delivery people keys to your house. In the physical world it's pretty easy to see people when they come in your front door. In the digital world you have no idea what these people are doing with your data. There is zero situational awareness.
I think you kinda hit it on the nose. Who knows where or how or who has access to these machines. IDC if it's encrypted in transit or what, but there is no way a corporation with strict data privacy rules would be able to stream potentially sensitive information across the wire especially when it will be stored in the cloud in web form for a period of time. IDK good luck, but I'm definitely tin-foil hatting with this guy above me.
For me it's not so much a trust issue with this company, though for cloud and mobile stuff I have come to a "guilty until proven innocent" rule as regards privacy. It's (1) the trend this supports, and (2) what happens if worse players get access to it either through hacking or acquisition.
I guess I'm more thinking if the target is enterprise (because it's 30$ a month), what enterprise is going to green light workers using a browser where content doesn't reside on the user's machine? I've worked several tech jobs where it's mandated to use a specific browser because it's locked-down to not leak sensitive information. Not to mention it allows users to access internal resources. IDK I'm not necessarily hating the product, just don't know how it's going to work at scale for the listed CPU/Memory/Price point
I don't usually care about companies success or failure, this none of my business, after all, but this kind of "innovation" could have extremely unpleasant side effects.
You have valid concerns but no need to hope for their failure.
Tech people are the minority. The market IS moving towards cloud. It's happened, it's happening, it will keep happening. Stadia may have failed now, but it IS conceptually the future of gaming. It's like you're arguing for blockbuster in a netflix world. We cannot stop this from happening, no matter how many choirs we preach to. All we can do is find ways to make this happen better.
I think it's more constructive (and technically difficult) to accept that the market is heading to full cloud and we as tech people need to find better ways of making this vibe with good privacy practices.
Personally, I would not use anything like this without knowing a lot more about their security. Even then, maybe we're still a few years out from a security perspective before I would feel comfortable storing my passwords and browsing data with a 3rd party server AND pay for it (wild). But, I could see myself doing this if my privacy was ensured.
I hope these guys really focus on innovating in that aspect, and then I hope they succeed big.
> It's like you're arguing for blockbuster in a netflix world.
No, it's not like that at all. Nobody is arguing for going back to distributing software in boxes with floppies or CD-ROMs in them.
Reason from first principles, not by analogy. Context and details matter.
Here are some major reasons for the push to cloud. None of these reasons are immutable or universal.
(1) Wimpy mobile devices with constrained power, storage, and bandwidth requirements.
(2) Cloud is the only kind of DRM that works. It's a way to lock things up and make piracy virtually impossible. As a bonus you can still build on "open source" and placate the open source zealots who don't understand the current state of things and are still living in the 90s.
(3) Application delivery and installation/uninstallation are terrible. OSes are broken.
Here are some solutions:
(1) Moore's law, huge improvements in battery capacity, 5G, WiFi 6, etc. are eating away at this problem. This issue will die of natural causes.
(2) The hopelessly naive idea that "information wants to be free" and everything has to be "free" (as in beer) needs to die, be cut into a thousand pieces, burned, encased in concrete, and sunk to the bottom of the ocean. Nothing is free. Software takes a vast amount of labor to produce, and that must be funded. If it's not funded directly and honestly it will be funded indirectly and dishonestly (surveillance capitalism, cloud lock-in, etc.). "Everything has to be free" and piracy actually help push us toward a surveillance capitalist panopticon future.
(3) This might be the toughest problem. Windows is by far the worst offender here with its nightmarish installation subsystem. Closed app stores are another huge problem but eventually I think anti-trust action is going to chip away at that.
That's not by any means a complete analysis. This is just a comment on a HN thread. It does hit the major points I think.
That's irrelevant, though. The "tech people" aren't preferring local solutions because they're funny this way - they prefer them because cloud-streamed remote apps objectively sucks. It takes some knowledge about computers to comprehend how and why exactly, but it doesn't change the facts.
(To use an analogy - doctors are a minority too, but you listen to them when they say you should vaccinate.)
> The market IS moving towards cloud. It's happened, it's happening, it will keep happening.
The important question to ask is, why. Why it's happened, why it's happening? The answer has little to do with providing value to customers - it's mostly about creating ability to seek rent. Privacy issues only happen on top of that - they're not the entirety of the problem.
> I think it's more constructive (and technically difficult) to accept that the market is heading to full cloud
Or, we could fight it. Maybe it's a quixotic quest. Maybe not. The market is a dumb greedy optimizer, it flows down the profitability gradients the way water flows downhill. If you want it to flow elsewhere, you have to put obstacles in the way, or cut out a better path.
While I totally agree with you, if this succeeds my hope is that it will finally push browser vendors to come up with a good authentication/authorization story. Make it totally integrated in the browser, such that I remain in control and Mighty only sees the equivalent of OAuth token it can't use to login in my name. No more custom signup forms, no more botched login flows redirecting you through 13 sites, no more passwords stored on websites... That is an innovation I would gladly welcome both as a web user and a potential web developer.
Every service needs auth. I can't believe nothing is properly integrated. I still have to click and enter a password, which fortunately the browser can create for me. I still have to receive an email and click on a link to validate my account. Web developers still have to create forms, manage the whole process, hash, salt and sauce my password and not leak it.
Your point about security is valid. But we are already past that point when we started moving all of our apps and our data to cloud.
Before Saas was popular, almost all of our data stayed in our local machine. But now everything is in the cloud. we have already lost the privacy battle.
> And I fail to see why anyone would use this, you need high speed internet capable of streaming 4k for one and if you have access to that, then chances are you also have access to a sufficiently powerful computer capable of running chrome locally.
Plenty of people who can’t afford a fast computer currently have access to a fast internet connection. The ability to substitute internet bandwidth for CPU and RAM will be very valuable for them.
Most people don't need a fast computer. For many a 5 year old average computer is good enough in terms of hardware.
What makes this hardware not great is the many developers who have fast machines who are ok using a lot of it with the software they develop. This makes the experience on older systems slow. It's unplanned obsolescence.
For chrome stuff and using the web I shouldn't need a killer system. No one should.
On the one hand: yes, $50 * 12 months would go a long way toward a machine upgrade, so it doesn't make a ton of sense purely on your-machine's-too-weak grounds.
On the other hand, I don't really run Chrome or Firefox on anything that operates on battery, because I don't like seeing the little battery icon deplete twice as fast, and it barely even matters how powerful the machine is (M1 helps, but there's still a noticeable difference). Maybe there are people who really, really want to run Chrome all the time, but also work mostly on portables and like them actually lasting as long on battery as they're supposed to. Maybe that's worth $50/m to them.
Good point. Decoding's usually pretty efficient, but you're right that use of wifi plus everything else related to this program might erase much of the power-savings.
You can get a more than enough powerful computer to run a web browser and more for $400 if you buy used, and you'll get to keep it forever. A subscription of Mighty would only last you a year for the same $400 price tag.
I imagine VNC can't do this well because it streams pixels with no optimizations other than antiquated compression (it can't even match WebRTC screen sharing), and crappy color depth.
The idea is interesting for lightweight computers e.g. chromebooks and ultrabooks, but it would irk me a lot to have my browser and personal information running on some other machine that I don't control.
What I would be super-interested in though is a self-hosted version of Mighty, that I could install on a Linux box anywhere of my choosing. For example, the server runs on my powerful desktop at home, and my ultrabook in the bedroom can be a client.
This project actually made me think that, since the X-Window protocol is practically a dead-end and everything's gotta be made with web tech now (ugh), it'd be really cool to have a version of FF or Chrome that's smart enough to send some kind of render instructions between a server-instance and a client-instance. Process server-side, render client-side, like X-Window but for web junk.
(the notion that this is completely fucking absurd since those "render instructions" are called "HTML" and I'm just describing server-side rendering isn't lost on me, but it's not my fault things have gotten so bad that having a server-side browser forward draw commands from bloated "web apps" to a resource-light client might actually be kinda nice)
I see this being extremely valuable for companies that hire contract workers, especially for UI-intensive tasks. Say you do labeling for self driving cars where you'll have to render a lot of images to the end user. Rather than giving all these users a powerful computer, you could give them chromebooks and reduce your capital cost massively.
Many thin client setups like teradici PCoiP are used by tons of film studios in post production. The last few animation Oscar winners have all been done without computers at people's desks.
There's already services like Nimble collective (bought by Amazon) that streams 3D apps to your browser like Maya, Blender etc...
WebRTC is already seeing tons of companies move to streaming content to thin client end points. Epics MetaHuman creator for example runs in the cloud.
> And I fail to see why anyone would use this, you need high speed internet capable of streaming 4k for one and if you have access to that, then chances are you also have access to a sufficiently powerful computer capable of running chrome locally
That's a weird assumption. Where I'm from gigabit (or at the very least 100mbit) fibre is the norm, which means fast 4K-ready internet cuts across virtually every socioeconomic demographic.
Just because you have a fast internet connection does not mean that all your client devices have a lot of RAM or a GPU. Even if they do, pushing computation to the cloud could mean improved battery life when you are on the go.
Would be interesting to see how far you can take a raspberry pi with mighty.
How much lithium battery degradation is due to some mobile tab going rogue?
for the moment, I would consider the concept and not so much the price. What they charge is likely not a lower bound on their internal cost structure. The product came out of beta today, so their pricing seeks to first attract those users with a high need and to test their pricing capacity. Better to try to charge too much and then go lower than to take too little.
Given that their engineering expenses are a fixed cost and the majority of their spending, they'll be able to lower prices as they scale.
Maybe I'm biased (I certainly use powerful-ish machines, so maybe I'm not the target market), but I genuinely can't relate when people on here talk about the web being slow as a category.
Sometimes a heavy web-app like Twitter will be slow on first load, but Mighty wouldn't help with network speed, right?
Slack is slow because it's slow to load actual conversation data; the iOS app is just as slow as the Electron app. This is not UI jank; it's a slow API and/or insufficient prefetching.
Jira is slow because it sucks; I've used native apps that are slow because they suck.
Other than that, I don't have many relevant experiences to point to. I'm sure for people running older machines the picture is different (the state of web engineering as a whole could certainly be improved on several dimensions), but I also doubt people stuck using slow computers can afford to spend $30-$50/month on something like this.
I'm genuinely asking: what things are slow for you? Is it just the fact that the code has to load before it can request the data (or render anything) that makes it feel slow? Or is there genuine sluggishness? What web apps are you using that I'm not?
On my nearly maxed out 16” MBP, on day one, web pages with lots of ads and fonts (typically news sites and content aggregators) were noticeably slow. On my totally maxed out iPhone 8 Plus, same experience day one. Scrolling past one of those dumb sticky videos can cause everything to jump into place, then back out, then back again. Navigating back in history can be so slow just hitting the cache that the previous (now forward entry) page shows up again and blocks rendering of the navigation.
Same with electron apps. VSCode is generally among the best. I currently have 9-10 projects open. If I accidentally trigger a font resize by missing cmd-backspace and hit + instead, I’m sitting around for 1-5 minutes waiting for everything to settle. I’ve even hit bugs where trying something app-wide then reverting hit a very slow race condition and just completely deleted my settings.json. Restart to update can take a couple minutes too, and that’s to restore visible functionality while waiting for the changelog tab to randomly show up.
Slack on iOS isn’t nearly as bad as on macOS. But that’s not Electron. I’m in 8 Slack orgs, not a large number compared to some people I know. Refreshing the window takes long enough I just go take a break.
This is on a machine with 64GB RAM, even when it’s not swapping from a couple Chrome windows.
Alright, so there are several different things here:
> web pages with lots of ads and fonts
Ad blockers are a thing. I use them on every browser (it's even possible to do on iOS). It makes a big difference.
> Scrolling past one of those dumb sticky videos can cause everything to jump into place, then back out, then back again
There are plenty of annoying dark patterns (and simply poor UX) out there being used, but what I'm trying to get at here is specifically the perception of slowness for the web as a platform. UX problems can exist in any software.
> Navigating back in history can be so slow just hitting the cache that the previous (now forward entry) page shows up again and blocks rendering of the navigation
I think you may be misunderstanding here... some sites - especially news sites - use a dark pattern where they override the back button behavior to prevent you from going back (presumably to increase "engagement", or whatever). You could argue the web platform shouldn't let them do this, but that still wouldn't have to do with "slowness" (and wouldn't be solved by the OP).
> I’ve even hit bugs where trying something app-wide then reverting hit a very slow race condition and just completely deleted my settings.json
This just sounds like a logic bug; bugs exist regardless of platform
> If I accidentally trigger a font resize by missing cmd-backspace and hit + instead, I’m sitting around for 1-5 minutes waiting for everything to settle
> Restart to update can take a couple minutes too, and that’s to restore visible functionality while waiting for the changelog tab to randomly show up
This is absolutely insane to me. I just tried changing the font size in a very large VSCode project with 10 files open and it took 1 second to change the font size for the whole app. Killing the entire app (Cmd+Q) and restarting it took 4-5 seconds.
How many files do you have open? Are you using some crazy extensions that could be poorly-written or interacting badly?
> I’m in 8 Slack orgs, not a large number compared to some people I know. Refreshing the window takes long enough I just go take a break.
Again, totally crazy compared to my experience. I just refreshed the full window for the medium-sized org I'm in and it took 2 seconds for the UI to come back, and another 5 seconds to load the conversation text (the latter is pretty bad, but as I noted in my original post, not related to performance of the actual web platform)
> Ad blockers are a thing. I use them on every browser (it's even possible to do on iOS). It makes a big difference.
True. They also break things, which I’m not a fan of for personal use. They also make manual testing of web work less consistent with what normal users experience, which I avoid.
> There are plenty of annoying dark patterns (and simply poor UX) out there being used, but what I'm trying to get at here is specifically the perception of slowness for the web as a platform. UX problems can exist in any software.
What I’m describing though is sites using common patterns having such poor performance that I can literally watch a sequence of state changes take place and categorize them as they happen. Forget the ad experience. Common tech oriented sites linked on HN which make it to the front page will frequently show me three to four layout shifts as their fonts load.
> I think you may be misunderstanding here... some sites - especially news sites - use a dark pattern where they override the back button behavior to prevent you from going back (presumably to increase "engagement", or whatever). You could argue the web platform shouldn't let them do this, but that still wouldn't have to do with "slowness" (and wouldn't be solved by the OP).
This wasn’t some back button hijack, I double checked. It was a slow website meeting what I assume is a race condition in the browser, where the state change on load coincided with my decision to stop waiting. And it happens a lot on iOS Safari on perfectly trustworthy sites.
> This just sounds like a logic bug; bugs exist regardless of platform
Sure, like I said, race condition. But exacerbated by how slowly reverting some mistake might take effect.
> This is absolutely insane to me. I just tried changing the font size in a very large VSCode project with 10 files open and it took 1 second to change the font size for the whole app. Killing the entire app (Cmd+Q) and restarting it took 4-5 seconds.
> How many files do you have open? Are you using some crazy extensions that could be poorly-written or interacting badly?
Like I said I have 9-10 projects open. Assuming I have 10 files open in each (I have more, but that wouldn’t matter if the app we’re using native controls), that’s 9-10 times the same thing you tried. Each instance is its own process pool. But they’re all responding to the same event asynchronously.
> Again, totally crazy compared to my experience. I just refreshed the full window for the medium-sized org I'm in and it took 2 seconds for the UI to come back, and another 5 seconds to load the conversation text (the latter is pretty bad, but as I noted in my original post, not related to performance of the actual web platform)
This is also not comparable to what I described, you refreshed one instance vs my 8. And again this would not be an issue using native controls, which would not be running 8 separate instances.
- - -
You seem pretty focused on defending the web and web technologies in the abstract. I’m not necessarily even disagreeing with that. Although real world usage of web tech is the reason things are so bad that I do experience the performance degradation I describe.
I’m not your typical HN anti-JS zealot. I’m just very disappointed with how bad the common web based product is.
You’re mostly right that it’s not the underlying tech that’s bad but how it’s used. But not totally. It’s the only UI platform I’m aware of that developed a huge resource intensive multiprocess model to work around the fact that common usage routinely blocks shared resources and routinely crashes.
> Slack is slow because it's slow to load actual conversation data; the iOS app is just as slow as the Electron app. This is not UI jank; it's a slow API and/or insufficient prefetching.
This makes no sense to me. On my machine, the desktop Slack client has noticeable input lag and it takes ages to perform any action. Try installing Ripcord and compare them; they are talking to the same API, but Ripcord doesn't make me want to throw my laptop out the window.
But Mighty is not a solution, it is just a band-aid that will perpetuate the problem and make UI developers even more lazy because they can assume their crappy Electron apps are always running on a beefy machine in the cloud.
I've never once experienced input lag on Slack- on mobile or desktop (or laptop). The only thing I notice is a slow initial load and slowness to load conversations when I click between them.
Again, I'm not exactly using ancient computers, but that's been my anecdotal experience. I was working from a MacBook Pro that was 3-4 years old at one point, for what that's worth. Not maxed out, though I'll admit it was probably still not a slouch.
Agree. I also just completely fail to understand what the problem is here.
I have 16 tabs currently open in firefox on my MBP. Everything is snappy.
On my desktop (which to be fair, is very powerful) I have maybe 40 or so tabs, the majority of which never get loaded because they are saved by by the tree-style-tab extension, and I don't visit some of the subtrees often.
Literally the only webapp I use that feels slow any more (after I stopped using Gmail) is Notion, and they know they have perf problems. Like you mentioned, these things are slow (Gmail, Notion, Jira, whatever) because they... suck. Gmail is/was just as awful on my powerful desktop as it is on the laptop. I just don't get what this buys me.
> Slack is slow because it's slow to load actual conversation data; the iOS app is just as slow as the Electron app. This is not UI jank; it's a slow API and/or insufficient prefetching.
That's UI jank on top of network issues. Another commenter mentioned Ripcord, which is a good baseline for how fast Slack or Discord should be.
At least for myself, when I say web is slow as a category - including wider web technologies like Electron - I'm mostly thinking about UI performance. Any time a website takes more than 50-100ms to react to an input event, it's noticeably jarring. If it's consistent, it makes the experience of using that site painful. And unfortunately, this problem is common across the board in everything done with modern web tools and principles.
I commented under another reply, but I've never once experienced actual UI jank/input lag on Slack or Discord. Not once. I don't know what I'm doing differently.
Here's one theory: the web makes it super easy to add lots of little animations to apps. Discord in particular takes lots of advantage of this. Is it possible all the little animations are making things feel slightly less "instant", and being mistaken for input lag? That wouldn't impact typing, but
Having powerful machines would be one thing. I really implore you to try using a low end machine for a while and see how bad the web is. I currently use a 4gb 2015 MacBook Air and i often see Discord and other websites-masquerading-as-apps hogging upwards of 2 gigs of ram which is inexcusable. I can hardly believe that animations would contribute to lag (or perceived lag) especially because we can see a lot of completely native apps that have these "micro-interactions" and still feel fast and responsive.
On the other hand Ripcord, an alternate client for Slack and Discord sits at 50mb of RAM and single digit CPU usage.
Don't use Slack, but I have the same experience with Teams for example. Using it is torture on my desktop (i5-8500 - 6 cores and 32 GB ram). There is very noticeable lag when typing, on the order of one second. When moving the mouse around, all the animations are laggy (they take forever to start).
Of course there are what seem to be caching / network-related issues, like switching between conversations always takes forever. But there are also clearly UI issues, like when I try to scroll up in a newly-opened conversation, it scrolls a bit, waits to load, then it sends me all the way back down again before jumping around to some random position. This happens when there are no new messages in the chat and I only try to scroll a little, not go back days.
And the crown, for me: somehow, the number of letters out of order when I type is through the roof in Teams. It happens practically on every message I send, whereas this basically never happens in Telegram (where I send the same kind of short messages) or when I write long-form emails.
I generally feel the same way and sometimes ask myself if I'm living in the same world as some people. Almost everyone complains about Gmail being slow but I don't find it unbearable. I keep it open in a Firefox tab and use it all the time. I have Slack running natively (well, as native as it can get) and it seems to work fine on both my Linux and macOS machines.
I guess I'm happy as long as the keyboard response is (very) good. The only time I notice real slowdowns are when my actions get out of sync with the system. A slow terminal or text editor drives me insane and is one reason I really can't use VSCode; Sublime Text never makes me wait.
Granted, there are things that are genuinely slow for me and drive me up a wall (ie. most issue tracking) but overall, I'd say that my daily use is pretty good. It's certainly not bad enough that I would offload my browsing to some cloud based system. But like you, I'm probably not the target market here.
Maybe it's been a while since you've used a good native app. Sometimes we forget just how fast computers can be without any of the mountains of abstractions that we've piled on.
Possibly. I guess the "fastest" program I use on a daily basis is Sublime Text, which is native on multiple platforms. I never have a slowdown, even on very large files. It instantly responds to keyboard input, which is a must in a text editor. Basically, it's perfect (for my definition of perfect).
I've seen people say things like "Safari is much faster than Chrome" but I don't really see it. Sure, it can seem a bit quicker on some sites but most of the time I don't really notice it. I do notice things like CPU and energy usage between those two browsers, but I'm mostly plugged into power all day anyway so it doesn't make any practical difference which one I use. Perhaps when I get a new M1 machine (ie. 2021 16" MBP!!) I'll feel differently. Perhaps.
With slack though, it absolutely is UI jank. The interface is an absolute nightmare to use on phones (I'd say deliberately so, to force you to use their app).
That's not the problem that needs to be solved, though.
The web isn't slow because it takes a second longer to load a website. The web is slow because, once loaded, the website takes 100+ ms to react to a click or a keypress. Plenty of popular websites are so far off the mark that they take half a second or more to react!
Mighty will definitely help with network speed. If your link is Max 60 kb per second download and mighty has a 50 megabytes per second download and it's closer to the peers for those sites you visit it's definitely going to load faster and then stream down to you.
I haven't used mighty but I'm basing that on my own experience with similar technology.
I think there's a window of optimal use bracketed by low and high download bandwidth for you. if you're faster than that maybe the only speed up you get is if your machine has a slow CPU. If you're slower than that I suspect that the video streaming they're going to use will produce a lag that will make your experience worse than if you were just loading the site directly.
If mighty wanted to push that lower bound lower, instead of streaming video they might be able to stream changes to the DOM. they could compile a sort of single file version of the page on their server that included all the requests the third party resources and styles in line and then whenever there were changes in the layout we could stream those style or DOM changes down to you. As far as I can tell that's basically the minimum amount of information you need to replicate the experience. that might even help a little bit with machines with slow CPUs I sort of tree shaking styles and resources that are not used.
from this point of view with enough development mighty could be purchased by Google as a sort of deluxe subscription model for chrome with bundled premium subscriptions to various streaming services and so on. From that point of view, the bundling up of content, delivery and medium is not really a novel thing because I think similar things have happened with cable TV magazines and news to some extent.
But for the good point that you make that people at the slow or low speck ends might often not be able to afford that kind of service, that lowest of the low-end might be a real focused niche... say people on airplane Wi-Fi or in remote locations on a satellite link.
but from a purely product marketing and psychological point of view I don't think that a product needs actual technical superiority or real measurable utility to become a big hit. I think it really only needs something that makes people want to use it. mighty could position itself as a sort of luxury upgrade for people with already good specs.
Because from the point of view people who are perhaps already of that successful and wealthy mindset many of them may consider that time is their most valuable asset and the accumulated frustrations and annoyance of waiting for websites to load is something they are prepared to pay a service to get rid of and to provide them and experience which they feel is more in line with their station and their expectations of Life in general.
But you cannot really stream remote browser screen on a 60kvps download.... they recommend on their website that you need 500 mbps or something crazy like that for a low lag.
Sir I disagree. I've gotten away with streaming compressed webp frames of a moderately sized laptop viewport where each frame is between 10 to 34 KB, at a relatively respectable two frames per second. I'm not really joking it's still usable. You can push the frame rate even higher if you're prepared to accept higher compression or lower resolution.
Oh I believe you can ‘stream’ stuff at 2 fps over a 500 kbps line alright, the ‘not serious’ part is how anyone could find that acceptable. Even if all you have is 500 kbps...
If you would use your 2fps streaming browser to read, say, hacker news, every scroll operation would be hideously slow and pull in another ~60KB per second, even though the page data itself is only a few KB and never changes. Your ‘streaming solution’ only makes sense if the total amount of data to fetch for the page itself outweighs the total amount of data for all the frames you need to stream while you are using the page. Which is probably almost never, unless you always look at static single-page applications which continuously pull in data on the backend without presenting anything new at the front end. Highly unlikely.
Your logic is sound, just some experience seems to be missing.
> the ‘not serious’ part is how anyone could find that acceptable
I guess you don't have a beeline on what everyone finds acceptable. That's normal, you can only share your perspective not everybody's.
> every scroll operation would be hideously slow
I guess you haven't experienced it because what you describe is not how it works.
The two frames per second is not streaming a 60 frame per second source down to you at two frames per second it's capturing two frames per second from the source and sending them to you because that's what your bandwidth will permit.
> Your ‘streaming solution’ only makes sense if... Highly unlikely.
Only if the goal is a reduction in bandwidth used viewing the page. There are many other goals were streaming the browser makes a helluvalotta sense.
I get you had this focus on bandwidth because i think it's the main obvious focus of this thread but there's an expanded context in which these things operate. I'm sure you'd appreciate that if you'd experience it.
So Figma is written in JS and C++, compiled to WebAssembly so it runs in a browser, which runs in a datacenter, with video streamed to Mighty, an Electron app where the front-end is written in JS and some C++, running inside Chromium.
I feel like we engineers are putting too many abstractions on things. It's like we are all peddling "get rich quick" schemes to people trying to weasel our way into some super popular process. This screams like an anti-direct-to-consumer model.
STOP CREATING MIDDLEMEN! It's going to cost me 30 bucks to just browse the web where I spend another dollar amount to where someone collects a "handling fee". Jesus I feel like the world is going nuts.
Aside from your HTML interpretation there's another interesting thing that's been tried by a remote browser start up bought by cloudflare, called, I think it was, s2. They hooked into the chromium rendering engine skia drawing instructions and instead of sending screenshots or video from the remote browser to the client they sent the skia drawing instructions and then rebuilt the entire rendering of the HTML client side.
Point taken. But there's a time and a place for everything - nowadays we have the tech to stream the contents of the desktop, and quite probably to it real time. So you could say the problem HTML was solving is gone.
Then good news, between modern software development practices, NFTs, and just plain fucking laziness and incompetence, there won't anything left of it soon!
The fact that a web email client (gmail) can turn the fan on when it’s mostly text and runs in a VM written and published by the same company that wrote the email client just makes my head spin.
And the solution to this is to put the browser in the cloud? So what’s the desktop browser on your new $3,000 mbp now, like... a demo environment?
It boggles my mind that we’re not demanding the web bloat stop. Maybe figma just doesn’t really work as a web app! If I have to run my browser in a datacenter, I think it’s fair to say it doesn’t.
As a web dev I’m just embarrassed. How are we not saying “this is too much, stop making web apps that crash my computer it’s not worth it.”
I hear you on the mind-boggling but I think it's sort of like the web makes bloat visible but resource bloat is present in probably most products of our developed economies. Like if you look at an SUV driving down the street if you could visualize the amount of raw resources: energy, air water minerals (labor and its costs?) that went into producing that SUV, I think you'd be demanding that we reduce the bloat of all products of our economy. I think is a valid analogy of the sort of page weight that we're talking about.
my point is not that I'm condoning it I just happen to think that it's probably inevitable.
And there's also the analogy between sort of handmade and craftmade things that are sort of indie Craft products built outside the system and that movement of indy websites and bloat-free websites. I think they're both destined to be small slices of the eventual mainstream market.
getting even more meta societies tend to capture more energy over time and if you think about it more energy is going to end up being crystallized into more matter so we're going to produce more things and, ignoring some inflection points in technology and efficiency, use more energy to produce more things so things are probably going to bloat out.
Pop open developer tools - Gmail's JavaScript is heavily obfuscated, not just minified. (I think it's a custom, self-modifying VM that's written in JavaScript, and it fetches pieces of itself over the network, like ReCAPTCHA).
This "DRM" plays at least some role in making the optimizers in V8 work a lot harder to get anything reasonable out of the spaghetti.
Why Google needs DRM for a web email app? Beyond me.
They're too embarrassed of all the shit code they've written that makes the app slow - so they obfuscate it to try to hide how shit it is - and it turn it becomes even slower ;)
The reason we use such tactics is to increasing barrier of reverse engineering because our teams value their work. Some people claim that security through obscurity is bad. I challenge this view. I claim that every security defense such as RSA is a obscurity.
It's a matter of time until RSA breaks in the same way as Obfuscation does.
Gmail is not your let's make it weekend kind of app. It's highly sophisticated and deliver huge value.
There are lot of people who hate Obfuscation. Some are communists and others are attackers.
My wife (she works in the fraud detection department) found an interesting attacker who masqueraded as a security researcher and student of X University, but in fact he was a a criminal scum. He has reverse engineered anti-fraud scripts of many websites and published them on Github for everyone to see. His main goal was to attract malicious buyers and sell them scripts that bypass this protection. It was one of the heck of marketing.
First, encryption is not "obscurity" in the same way you think DRM is.
Second, several other email providers don't think they need to rely on some performance-killing DRM to "protect" their web app (oh no, what of all the value!).
Outlook has a part of their files minified, but doesn't use any obfuscation; apps like ProtonMail[0] and Tutanota[1] are even open source.
(I'm actually starting to migrate off of Gmail to Protonmail myself.)
Encryption is "obscurity". For example, Quantum computers will break RSA.
> Quantum computers will break RSA
Now here it will take X amount of time so is breaking any protection like DRM.
The goal of any security method is increasing attack time.
TLS got attacked, SSL got attacked. History repeats itself. Period.
> Oh, and there's no need to call people "communists", "attackers", or "criminal scum". Be civil.
Why? I have a right to use these terms. What should I use instead?
Would you call Osama Bin Laden as "His Highness Bin Laden"?
The words exists for reason. I use them in appropriate context.
People don't understand Russian soul. I'm very direct and speak my mind!
>> Second, several other email providers don't think they need to rely on some performance-killing DRM to "protect" their web app (oh no, what of all the value!).
>> Outlook has a part of their files minified, but doesn't use any obfuscation; apps like ProtonMail[0] and Tutanota[1] are even open source.
So? What's your point?
You have Linux which is Open Source and you have Windows (A lot of parts including their licencing is obfuscated)
The performance hit is minimal. ProtonMail & Tutanota are way slower than GMail and lack cutting edge features we offer.
Gmail vs Outlook is like Ferrari vs Toyota.
Gmail has great UX even my grandmother can use it.
The point is that nobody relevant is going to get stopped by this DRM. That's because nobody relevant is likely to even try copying it in the first place, and if an economically relevant party were so unwise, I expect google's legal resources are sufficient to discourage plain copying, even if a court case is never won. They might learn some tricks sure, but the chances of gmail's client side bits doing anything that novel that's also competetively important are slim to none. (And if there really is some kind of secret sauce that needs protecting, relying on DRM seems quite... optimistic. Finally, we're only talking front-end here, not backend; and surely that's at least as important a part of the value proposition here.
While there may be a case for DRM in some places, gmail is almost certainly not it.
How exactly is a post-logged-in-app obfuscation supposed to be relevant to fraudsters that game the AdWords and reCaptcha etc?
Obviously people and corporations can choose to obfuscate; their prerogative. Doesn't mean it's effective nor wise in every instance, though, does it? Gmail is entirely free to waste effort and make its app slower and less (easily) maintainable, no question there.
So your claim is that they can't automate the UI (well) via conventional browser automation tools, and can't access whatever endpoints gmail the client-side-app uses without being detected, but could if the code wasn't obfuscated?
I'll bite once again - from personal experience, I knew Gmail is slower than ProtonMail, but I tested it anyway. I loaded both Gmail and ProtonMail, using the browser's profiler.
Gmail spent 6x the time ProtonMail did in the garbage collector, and 2x the time ProtonMail spent in the JIT compiler.
6x is minimal for me considering how complex Gmail is. It's not that slow. I can use it quickly and get up running and it's okay for anyone unless you're a person who is not patient for few seconds.
You always have the option for loading "Basic HTML" and you can get Protonmail or Toyota like experience there ;)
I don't know what's your agenda really is. Attacking DRMs are bad.
You have issues like spammers abusing Gmail interface to send emails using Google IPs and there DRM rocks.
You're point is completely valid but companies rush their products to the market they dont necessarily do it for the experience they provide but to capture the market.
For example until this month Notion was extremely slow and everyone complained. They fixed it recently and no one's complaining but the important thing here is that no one left the product for being slow. May be there is a way to reduce bloat on the web and to ship desktop apps while keeping pace with modern app dev experience but surely there isn't any right now. Maybe webassembly will help? Lets see
All JavaScript apps run in the browser with its own JS engine (V8 in chrome) garbage collection, etc. This is effectively a VM I think. Like you deploy Java apps to the JVM, you deploy JavaScript apps for the “browser VM.”
Google writes gmail but they also write chrome and V8, so they are in a unique position of writing both the application and the platform it runs upon. Presumably this would allow them to make something more performant than most, not less.
It makes me happier to see HN will have less user who sees the world in binary as "good guy billionaire DRM industry lords with lots of secrecy for good" and "communists, hackers, terrorists and bin laden".
I've been excited about Mighty ever since it was first announced — I was the ideal customer: I use all the apps mentioned on the landing page all day long and was super pissed at how slow everything was on my MacBook Pro.
And then I upgraded to the new M1 MacBook Pro. It's been a week, and this one's so smooth I can never go back to my old computer. I just realized I get most of the advantages mentioned on Mighty's landing page (more tabs, fast performance, no fan noise) already. I don't think I need anything beyond my local Chrome.
Question to suhail: Do you think people who are on M1 (and in future, those who're on more advanced Apple Silicon) are your target customers? Is there a benchmark for Mighty's performance vs M1s?
Yeah, that is a fun one. My M1 Macbook Air doesn't even have a fan that would need stopping, plus it lasts longer on a charge than I'm physically capable of working. And if I was really worried about either the first thing I might try is to switch to Safari.
Similar to you. My 4 thoughts in order. 1) Yes, finally can try Mighty! 2) Wow, beautiful site! 3) Fan? Who still has a fan? 4) Using "state-of-the-art" to describe Intels?
So I'm super excited to try Mighty for persistence and high RAM use cases (I look forward to the day when I can do intense 100's of GB data vis in my browser), but the landing page seemed out of date in a post M1 World. Of course, 99.9% of the population is not on an M1 so I'm probably being an idiot.
I came to ask the same thing. "Each browser instance gets 16 vCPUs using state-of-the-art Intel CPUs running at up to 4.0 GHz." given how important single core performance is for most web apps + added streaming I doubt the Xeon setup gets close to the M1 performance.
I think Wirth's Law has already peaked as a trend. Lately the trend has been away from dynamic languages and fat bloated runtimes toward lighter weight compiled languages. The web stack (including Electron and friends) is the outlier, but eventually WASM could help fix that.
second off, i think you underestimate the world's demand for more software vs the world's demand for performant software. you're possibly being selective with your datapoints on wirth's law peaking. zoom out and view the no-code movement as programming.
WASM is just another thing that makes the web platform (and Electron binaries) a fat bloated runtime. Anything you can do with WASM, you can do with Javascript, probably as fast or faster, because it all still needs to go through Web APIs to do anything interesting.
asm.js is JavaScript, specifically a subset of it that can be consistently optimized. So if your point is "JavaScript is slow", using JavaScript as your point of comparison is a bad way to prove it.
To me Mighty seems DOA because the M1 properly solves the problem, and makes Mighty look like an elaborate hack. I asked Suhail what he thinks on Twitter and received no reply.
While I think it is accurate that the Intel hardware put in Macs the past few years was rapidly falling behind competitive AMD hardware, that same hardware was still largely dominating Windows market share. (I won't speak to Linux because maybe it's such a technology aware segment that the majority already migrated away from Intel to superior AMD hardware in the past few years.)
But the point stands that most non-macOS users were on roughly the same mediocre Intel hardware. Decent single core, but increasingly hot and inefficient in the past few years.
It also seems like Big Sur + M1 is doing something kind of special with efficient use of RAM to ensure programs load and perform remarkably well.
The form factor is limiting though. You don't have to worry about power consumption on a desktop, you don't have to worry about heatsoak or throttling. The problem was they were stuffing full desktop intel chips in their thinnest computers ever, and people were expecting that their new 6-core i9 macbook would translate into real-world performance gains.
But yes, pretty much every intel-based laptop in recent years has suffered from mediocre CPUs.
Are you claiming people could have fixed their slow Chrome experience by just getting off OSX? I’m fairly sure if you work with 200 tabs regularly, you’d see equally slow perf on Linux and Windows.
Had the same question. Eventually when everyone's on M1, why would I still need Mighty?
I assume users who can pay $30 can get a new M1 Mac? and assuming the next set of Apple silicon will be way more performant, do we even need something like mighty built on electron?
Everyone being on M1 will mean M1 devices will feel slow: the average piece of software will just expand to take advantage of the newly available performance.
How does the performance of high efficiency CPUs like the M1 scale with TDP? (e.g. If a M1 gets a fan and pushed the same TDP as typical server CPUs does it become x times faster or just die...?)
I wish they actually gave latency statistics instead of just saying "we worked really hard don't worry about it".
There's definitely potential to do well on latency, if for example you have a server in NYC and your client has FIOS the inherent network latency could be 3ms and the only challenge is the encode/decode latency. It's possible Mighty has done something better, but every other remote desktop system I've tested spends more time on encode/decode than in the network, while claiming they're great (without giving numbers).
If you have figured out encode/decode latency, show me a high speed video (including the user's hands, not a screen recording) of say a Macbook on residential internet in NYC separate from your servers clicking things, compared to that Macbook running Chrome locally. Your numbers will almost certainly be worse for local interactions like typing in a text box, but you can show how it's better for things like clicking links.
Another issue other desktop streaming systems have is that video compression makes text ugly, especially when scrolling. This isn't as big of a deal for the game streaming systems but is noticeable on a retina display desktop. It's plausible Mighty has the codec settings cranked up enough so this isn't an issue though.
If video games are able to be streamed with acceptable latency, I would assume browser would too. That being said the text compression is worrying and I would like to see a demo too of scrolling. I wonder if there's more clever ways of handling normal scrolling, or tuning the codec for such types of movements.
I thought the same, “ Mr X have been working on this for 2 years” or “ our team reversed engineered x feature of Mac OS “ means nothing nothing without real data.
Casey Muratori said it well: Running a browser to connect to the cloud to run a browser to connect to the cloud to retrieve the contents of a single 2D page to recompress and send back to the original browser is now "the future of computing".
Perhaps we need a new "test", like the "Turing Test", but this time for when humans can no longer tell the difference between new technology and old technology. "Mighty", for example, is just a "dumb terminal" - technology we had in the 1970s. Yet it is called "the future".
>Usually when people talk about grand things like changing "the future (business model) of computing," they're full of it. But not this time. Suhail has been working on this for 2 years. There's a good chance it's the new default infrastructure.
What is missing is 'business model' in parenthesis. Then maybe it makes some sense. This kind of managed service is definitely not for me, but it may be the future (business model) of computing.
Ultimately we get the technology we 'deserve'. General purpose computing was a short lived experiment but ultimately nerds could not convince or train enough lay people to appreciate the power it gave them. We're slowly sliding into a future where large corporations control basic access to computing. We're going to have to beg to be given permission to program our own devices. Its already happening on smartphones, tablets. PCs are next.
This. It honestly makes me so sad. It feels the vast majority (non-tech) of people just don't understand how important it is to be able to create and have control of the things you "own". Damn it's going to suck if everyone goes the way of Apple and starts to lock things down. I really hope these anti-trust suits open things back up. Whatever happened to the "Think Different" campaign in where it literally portrayed us being slaves to corporations forcing us to consume the way they wanted us to. Damn. Just so crazy. IDK why this post is putting it all in perspective, but the next decade is going to do some miles on me...
It feels like we are slowly losing power. Very slowly.
Eh, if it makes you feel better it's probably not going to happen. PCs and Macs won't become any less tinkerable. Gatekeeper can be turned off with a single terminal command, iPhones and iPads are becoming more tinkerable, not less. Shortcuts basically exposes a visual scripting and automation language. It's really not doom and gloom.
iPhones and iPads are becoming more tinkerable because Apple aims to ultimately merge MacOS and iOS in my opinion.
Once that happens, there will be more security and a more unified platform to develop on - no doubt - but I will be shocked if they do not also take the opportunity to lock down what software you can develop, publish, and run on Macs over time.
I've joked once or twice before (over the past few years) that we're coming back, full-circle, to mainframe-style infrastructure with dumb terminals.
Subscription services (even for software on previously steady release cycles), serverless infra, cloud computing, etc... the overall business model is shifting back to buying compute time to perform a certain task, or these startups essentially re-selling general purpose compute time as marked-up specific purpose compute time. With some UI slathered on top to make it look sexy.
Sales of development boards will continue to anyone who wants to buy, including lay people. No one is going to be prevented from "building their own PC". A majority of "nerds" in recent times have had a proclivity to take jobs with companies that seek to "control basic access to computing." I am skeptical that they are seriously trying to convince or train "lay people" to avoid their employers. More like the other way around. If these "business models" fail, nerds lose their jobs.
M1 devices actually have quite an interesting boot security model, so you can install a custom kernel and OS and boot it, without compromising the security of the platform for normal users that have never heard of an operating system.
While a dev board would be cool, a Mac mini with the hardware UART enabled over a USB C cable is getting pretty close!
Trade offs like these arguably could help to keep general purpose computing alive, as they show it is possible to deliver a secure device to customers that can be used however you like, running whatever software you like, without iOS style "no choice available".
M1 laptops are general purpose computers already. You can also install an open OS.
Dev boards aren't necessary when an entire functioning laptop only costs $999. An M1 dev board be would way, way more expensive than that and far less functional.
Assuming this comment is from a "nerd", this illustrates exactly the point I am making. Trying to "convince or train lay people" to admire companies that allgegedly seek to control "basic access to computing". Apple computers are pre-built, they are not DIY PCs.
Or perhaps stop throwing 300mb of JavaScript into a simple blog or news site. Not everything needs to be a SPA or track people like the KGB. Clearly the feedback loop of copy/paste/config has gotten way ahead of the reality and has entirely disconnected from anything the user cares about. At some point we should just admit the state of web implementation (it’s not just the front end) is just self-justifying posturing.
> "Mighty", for example, is just a "dumb terminal" - technology we had in the 1970s. Yet it is called "the future".
In that way Dropbox seems just rsync; and there are more examples like this. Cherry-picking useful functionality from a relatively niche tool and making it significantly more accessible sounds like a big feature. Perhaps this is the future.
dropbox offered server storage space, something most people did not have , and it was free. everyone has a browser and internet connection already, this service is only offering faster speed.
Just briefly skimming the description - it does seem like it shares a philosophy with Amazon Silk Browser which uses EC2 for accelerating portions of the browsing experience. [1] [2]
"When Silk is run in cloud mode, it can off-load some of the the parts of the browsing and rendering process to EC2. In cloud mode, EC2 acts as a sort of cache plus proxy for browsing, and it also can dynamically take over parts of the page rendering pipeline from the client."
Rendering on the server was how Opera Mini worked (works?) for years. The low-end J2ME phones it ran on wouldn't be able to handle a full webpage even without today's JavaScript bloat.
Opera Mini was great on cheap Windows Mobile devices because your device didn't have the power to actually lay out a page, and the bandwidth savings on your slow cellular connection made the use of images make sense. Opera Mobile was preferable on Windows Mobile devices with better chips that could handle laying out a web page and had the bandwidth to work with embedded pictures that weren't tiny.
Silk solves a different set of problems. Silk offloads expensive things like page layout or rasterization to the server, and for a static page you could theoretically cache those too.
Mighty is streaming a browser instance, wholesale, as a video stream. It's very very different both in philosophy and actual implementation.
Perhaps I should have added some qualifiers - it shares "at a high, superficial level" a philosophy with the Amazon Silk Browser in trying to cloud accelerate the browsing experience.
Once one scratches into the technical details, the similarities end. Interesting, as you describe it, at a very high level, it does sound like Google Stadia or Nvidia GeForce Now but applied to web browsing.
I'm not sure what the point you're making is. Yes, YC/Paul backed Mighty, I assume the parent is surprised that they did and were ready to invest in such an idea.
Only time will tell if it was a genius or stupid investment.
Key feature: Maintain browser state while switching machines
> Even if you shutdown or switch to a different computer, your browser will always be on. Exactly how you left it. That means you’ll never lose tabs that remind you of something to do or contain an article you want to read later. You can quickly jump back to work.
I haven't seen that discussed here, but it seems key.
Of course Mighty is not the only way to implement it; if Mighty takes off — or even if it ends up looking like a good idea — watch Chrome natively implement something equivalent.
I've had open tab sync across all my devices (including my phone and tablet) for like a decade now. Both Firefox and Chrome offer it.
Maintaining state across sessions by storing your whole browser on a server somewhere is a cute solution, until you need to access that server while traveling and now your ping to it is 300ms instead of 30.
I view it as run a browser to connect to a supercomputer. And for developers, it's write software once that can be run on thin clients or supercomputers. This is very appealing to me. I write in browser data science software that you can use from your phone. The problem is it doesn't work when your datasets are in the hundreds of GB. Mighty could fix that.
Not a new idea but an obviously in demand one. As the saying goes, if you want to invent something that will be useful in 30 years, invent something that would have been useful 30 years ago.
Note that the 2D page is nowadays often an entire application instead of just a bunch of text and images. If the protocol to access a machine in a dumb terminal fashion becomes an application programming environment of its own, maybe you need dumb terminals to access that protocol in turn.
Then there is the bloat issue. If websites were designed as lean as news.ycombinator.com, there would be no need for mighty. But they aren't. Instead we have js framework upon js framework, lots of tracking, ads, etc... you can make lean stuff using web technology, but you can't make it using the most popular frameworks. elm had this precise problem. They made their library really fast and really lean and people were like shrug, while flocking to the popular and bloated frameworks.
IDK it seems to me that Chrome and evergreen browsers have led to a stagnation in innovation of the browsing model. I feel like Mighty is a breath of fresh air. That being said, should Mighty ever become powerful, they'll likely benefit from funding maintainers to make js frameworks even more bloated so that even more people use their product... which means that they might do it. On the other hand, large user bases using products like Mighty might be a wake up call to website and browser developers that lean-ness is a real user demand, and maybe fixing it on their end, similar to how people taping up webcams led to builtin mechanical shutters.
I guess that this is a bet that super heavy-weight (hopefully webasm-based!) web applications will become widespread.
Think Adobe Premiere Elements in the browser.
If the browser becomes the main platform that people use to ship applications, this could be useful.
And why would the browser be the main platform for apps? To bypass the app store fees, to be multiplatform, to be always up to date.
One final advantage to running the browser remotely is that you don't have to deal with a certain browser engine that is lagging behind the others.
with enough development mighty could be purchased by Google as a sort of deluxe subscription model for chrome with bundled premium subscriptions to various streaming services and so on. From that point of view, the bundling up of content, delivery and medium is not really a novel thing because I think similar things have happened with cable TV magazines and news to some extent.
But for people at the slow or low spec ends might often not be able to afford that kind of service, that lowest of the low-end might be a real focused niche... say people on airplane Wi-Fi or in remote locations on a satellite link.
but from a purely product marketing and psychological point of view I don't think that a product needs actual technical superiority or real measurable utility to become a big hit. I think it really only needs something that makes people want to use it. mighty could position itself as a sort of luxury upgrade for people with already good specs.
Because from the point of view people who are perhaps already of that successful and wealthy mindset many of them may consider that time is their most valuable asset and the accumulated frustrations and annoyance of waiting for websites to load is something they are prepared to pay a service to get rid of and to provide them and experience which they feel is more in line with their station and their expectations of Life in general.
I feel like, 5 years from now, that comment will be reposted daily on vague motivational twitter threads. It's the infamous ftp comment of dropbox all over again.
This is already a validated market segment - Citrix and other terminal services that global companies use. Only this is more hardware agnostic and does not need complex deployment.
Serious question: what is there to gain from being a hater / being negative / being relentlessly pessimistic? Seriously? How can we work towards a better world when people just shoot down any idea that they don't agree with instead of trying to expand their perspective?
Well, things can turn really bad if this catches on, and it means that you lose control over your UA. Sending keystrokes to other people's computers and getting back compressed images is a terrible interface for anything but dumb consumption of content.
Forget scraping, forget automated controls, forget installing extensions/plugins/userscripts if not allowed by the cloud overlord.
It's bad enough that too much of the internet is in walled gardens. It's bad enough that one company makes most of the browser and search decisions. It's bad enough that phones have controlled app ecosystems. And just when you thought they were running out of controls to take, here's an idea where the browser won't even be on your computer. This is how you get a web that is optimized for a $50/month browser service where you can't even pick your extensions.
> How can we work towards a better world when people just shoot down any idea that they don't agree with instead of trying to expand their perspective?
For you to consider: Don't be so open-minded that your brain falls out.
Okay I can understand you not liking the idea but the sentence "I don't want it to succeed because it is dangerous" is a crazy statement. I'm sure there were tons of people who thought the same way you did when the Wright brothers were trying to achieve human flight, "I don't want it to succeed because it is dangerous". (Obviously not the same scale of idea, but point applies
There were reports of the dangers of asbestos back in the 1900s, and the first medical report was in 1924. It took until the '60s before people took it seriously.
Many cases of mesothelioma could have been prevented if we had listened to people who thought it was dangerous.
You can't conclude from asbestos that we should shut down new ideas on the first warnings, nor can you conclude from the history of aviation that we should disregard those warnings.
You asked:
> How can we work towards a better world when people just shoot down any idea that they don't agree with instead of trying to expand their perspective?
Going back to the original comment:
> Perhaps we need a new "test", like the "Turing Test", but this time for when humans can no longer tell the difference between new technology and old technology. "Mighty", for example, is just a "dumb terminal" - technology we had in the 1970s.
You want progress. We gain technological progress through a ratcheting action. A ratchet must close over the progress it has already made in order to ensure the mechanism only moves forward.
Likewise, we only progress if the new thing is genuinely better than the old. That requires that you understand the old thing.
Do you think the metric system is better than US standard measurements? Riddle me this: why is a mile 5280 feet? What's special about that number?
There is a reason for that number. There's also a reason it probably doesn't matter in modern usage, but unless we understand why we don't need that special property, we can't be sure that the metric system is actually progressing over the older systems and not regressing.
That's why you get this comment and others pointing out that this is simply tech from the '70s. If it's 50 years old tech, there's no progress going on. They are not failing to expand their perspectives, they are recognizing that this stuff is something they're already familiar with.
accepting everything uncritically and not recognizing when things are actually exploitative and harmful to the people that use them is not wisdom, it's naivety. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
All of the "nerds" as someone else called them up thread, would have to develop EQ, and stop holding onto their intelligence as their self-worth. The huge cultural shift that would take is not impossible, but often feels insurmountable. We're in the year 2021 and still using the term "nerd", for instance.
This is a strange commitment to pricacy. Not that there’s a technical barrier to employees accessing data, but something along the lines of “we wrote up a rule in the company wiki, so we trust that employees won’t violate it”
Yeah, I would have much hear “we have tight access control, logs, and auditing, and can’t access it ourselves without an automated email sent to you.” Right now it sounds even worse than saying nothing at all as it almost implies their are now ACLs
We did write something very similar: “Mighty does three things to protect your data: your data lives on our secure servers that are audited by 3rd party security firms, it has tight control in terms of who can access it, access is heavily audited and logged, and your most sensitive data is also encrypted.”
Can we do better? Sure and we will. I am really committed to that as a security conscious person.
I can't help but ask: As a security conscious person, how can you justify creating the service? You'll have the data and access of everything your customer does online, which for your target audience is everything your customer does on a computer. For the individual customer this is worse than Google, Facebook, Twitter combined. Also, you'll have an effective backdoor into every two-factor authentication, be it online banking, valuable Twitter accounts or AWS admins. There are massive monetary and political incentives to hack or infiltrate your service. Given your scale, you can't have comparable security measures to the big players. And given your location (US) you'll eventually receive national security letters forcing you to secretly sip off anything secret services or law enforcement wants you to.
You can put as many technical barriers in place as you want, eventually you do have to trust your employees. Sure, you could store everything client-side (or have a local encryption key), but most people don't actually want that - they want to be able to access their history from any computer they're at, they want the ability to forget/reset their password, etc. and so you're back at the company holding the secrets, and the employees need to be trusted.
Of course you'd hope for access control/encryption/etc. as well as it being prohibited, but this is standard across just about any industry. Somebody has access, and they're trusted not to use it.
This is a stop-gap before the web apps are rendered server side and streamed to the client. Not as HTML and JS, but as 4/8K 60FPS video, like Stadia or Xbox cloud. The reason is simple, your smartphone, tablet or laptop can already view a Netflix HDR 4K stream but still cannot render Gmail or Figma with acceptable performance. You can also do things like remove ads and telemetry which the service providers would really you rather not.
The app will display exactly as the provider intended, all compatibility issues will be eliminated, and the performance will be entirely uniform and in the provider's control, provided by AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Stadia for gaming is OK, but Stadia for Adobe Creative Cloud, Figma and Visual Studio is much more interesting, coming to your browser tab soon.
Wouldn't this completely break accessibility support of such web apps? This is part of the reason why omitting the DOM and rendering a UI with WebGL isn't the best idea. Maybe this could be resolved by sending the accessibility tree to the client, but it seems like a step backwards.
> This is a stop-gap before the web apps are rendered server side and streamed to the client. Not as HTML and JS, but as 4/8K 60FPS video, like Stadia or Xbox cloud. The reason is simple, your smartphone, tablet or laptop can already view a Netflix HDR 4K stream but still cannot render Gmail or Figma with acceptable performance.
As somebody who lives in 3rd world country, I'm still baffled why somebody keep pushing for streaming everything. It feels like they are trying so hard to fix the wrong problem while oblivious to the real problems.
The actual problems is bloated software. Gmail won't be slow if their JS didn't take 10+ MB. Figma would be much faster if they ditch Electron rewrite it as fully native application.
Not to mention the sheer stupidity of Stadia. If I use Stadia for streaming video games at 4k 60 FPS, it will eat 23 GB of my data caps per hours. I need around 20 hours to beat single player games, so using stadia will cost me 460 GB just to play one game. Here's the kicker: my entire steam library are 405 GB.
I take this with a similar perspective. As a complete standalone browser, I'm a bit skeptical on its adoption, as a built-in feature backed by the browser vendor (Apple/Google/Mozilla/Microsoft/etc.) to "offline this tab to the cloud" I think this gets a lot more appealing. Add billing per minute and this can be a very nice way of interacting with heavy applications through a browser.
I have been following Mighty for a while and while I'm certainly curious to try it and have no doubt that the team behind is top-notch from an Engineering perspective, I generally dislike the direction of this product.
Why? I'm sure there are valid use-cases for it (Figma, other heavy apps), especially for B2B customers, just like there are for other RBI solutions. But the way that it's hailed as a Chrome killer or "The Best Browser" by many of its fans is disingenuous because it is simply not a browser that you run yourself, and the minute you stop paying or your high speed network is unavailable you can't use that browser anymore. Nobody would think of their Netflix subscription as their own "library" that sits in their own shelf, it's a subscription.
Lastly, and this is what was the final straw, their own damn website makes my browser crawl. Try developing a marketing page on a Linux machine without HW-accelerated rendering or WebGL support please. It's ironic (or genius) that you make people wish they were using your product when they visit your own website already.
This is a great technical solution to a problem that is really about users not understanding how their use of a computer really affects performance, and companies under-spec'ing the machines they give people.
4GB of RAM in a MacBook Air is not enough for your average knowledge-worker living in their web browser. 8GB is probably fine for most, but if you're a designer using Figma? Maybe not.
Also I suspect that while most users know that lots of tabs makes their computer slow, I think most users also have a fairly fuzzy idea of what's a slow computer, what's slow internet, what else might be slowing their computer down, etc. If you're here on HN you're probably not one of these users, but they're not uncommon.
While I applaud the technical solution here, I think a lot of companies should be seeing their logos on this page as a sign that they have failed to create accessible software. If your target market is considering renting cloud compute to run your webapp, maybe that's something you need to fix.
> 4GB of RAM in a MacBook Air is not enough for your average knowledge-worker living in their web browser.
You can't even spec a MacBook Air with 4GB of RAM any more.
Base configuration MBA has 8GB of RAM. You can even finance it for $83/month for 12 months, which isn't much more than a $50/month Mighty service. But you get to keep the laptop at the end of the 12 months if you finance it.
> 8GB is probably fine for most, but if you're a designer using Figma? Maybe not
Doing anything interactive, I'd be more concerned about latency. If I had an extra 100-200ms round-trip latency on anything I do in the browser, design work would become a lot more frustrating.
> This is a great technical solution to a problem that is really about users not understanding how their use of a computer really affects performance, and companies under-spec'ing the machines they give people.
Let's not forget developers and site owners stuffing webpages with tons of fluff, especially megabytes of JS that is mostly tracking code.
> I think a lot of companies should be seeing their logos on this page as a sign that they have failed to create accessible software. If your target market is considering renting cloud compute to run your webapp, maybe that's something you need to fix.
The goal of a company isn't to create software that's runnable on as many computers as possible. It is to create a product that is valuable to their customers. If those customers are willing to spend loads of extra money running your product that is a strong signal that you are doing something right.
Alternatively, it can mean that customers don't have any other better options. Take work chat for instance, in which all of the available options are heavyweight web/electron apps. In fact for that category specifically it's a common gripe that all the options are bad and one has to select based on which is the least-bad for their particular situation.
I'm not sure the business case makes sense? A web browser is something most employees would need to be running throughout their working day. So, something like 8 hr/day. Even assuming that their claim of "16-core Xeon per browser" is slightly embellished, these machines aren't exactly cheap.
I can see €64.26/mo (~$77) from Hetzner for a Ryzen 3700X octa-core box, so assuming a box can be shared by three users (maybe from different time zones), that's still ~$25/mo per user just to pay the cloud provider.
25/mo = 300/year... if you figure that box is equivalent to a 1200$ laptop = 4 years... except you don't have to pay up front and you get to upgrade to more modern hardware as it comes out.
The flip side is you need a fast internet connection and a relatively cheap endpoint laptop.
I don't know, doesn't seem like a good deal to me, but it's not a ridiculous idea. Being able to timeshare the expensive hardware would be a good thing.
When you're financing a computer, you're still stuck with it if you stop wanting it. Not paying up front here means you can cancel your service at any time and not have to continue paying, you can upgrade to the new faster computer the second it comes available for the same price. Etc.
It's like VDI, but for apps that we originally designed as thin clients. Does that make Chrome a thin thin client? I think if a modern PC can't run your web app it's a sign that web developers have gone off the deep end, and either need to re-architect their app or ship it as Electron with a lighter web-only substitute.
Also, Cloudflare recently launched a similar thing, but it's designed for situations where you want an employee to access a service but don't trust their browser: https://www.cloudflare.com/teams/browser-isolation/. That's the only situation in which this makes any sense, and even then, if you don't trust the employee's device you are probably hosting them a virtual desktop anyway.
If you don't trust the employee's device at all, you shouldn't let them use a keyboard.
Even if your authentication is password-free (say, TOTP plus pick-the-right-icon from a set of 64), you don't want a keylogger picking up anything else, do you?
Yes I would like you to render all my browsing on your servers. Yes, all of it - my emails, social media, bank account.. What is this privacy you speak of? Never heard of it. Don't need those pesky things..
On a serious nore. I run on 32+GB RAM on my primary machine, open all the tabs and IDEs I want and stay generally in the 11GB range.
My guess is, get yourself 16GB ram and you should be okay.
Isn't typing the credentials of my bank, email, etc into a cloud browser run by someone else just as untrustworthy as using a hotel lobby browser? I might use a hotel lobby browser to look up directions or browse local attractions but I'd never log into any account knowing that all my keystrokes might be logged etc...
Yeah no cookie banners and all it takes is giving up any control of how you experience the web client side!
The thing about privacy is really interesting. Based on the price I’d think this is targeted at enterprise, but how many enterprise clients want their employees’ full browsing history going to a third party? It’s not like tech companies haven’t broken these “commitments” before.
I have worked on teams where we rushed to deploy things that we knew should be faster or more resource efficient. The incentives are simply not aligned right now — it usually pays to get stuff out even if it’s a bit slow, and the cost of browser resources are not yours to bear. This results in webpages with janky rendering (the Mighty home page itself may be guilty of this) or web apps with performance issues.
Implementing the browser as a VNC client is a clever approach but seems to be a band-aid for browser performance instead of attacking root cause. Shifting the incentives for product development teams could be a more permanent solution. Perhaps by imposing stricter resource restrictions in the browser or by adding performance metrics to search engine algorithms that go beyond initial load time.
EDIT: Reading other comments, it sounds like the founders have ideas for the cloud browser that go beyond performance. I’ll be curious to see how this plays out.
I pay >$30/mo for streaming services, and I arguably use my browser for an order of magnitude more time per day than I do for Netflix/Amazon Prime/Disney+/etc. Folks pay much more for Adobe products, which arguably are mostly desktop-only apps. If you're offloading the work of your browser to a VM/VMs in the cloud, and you derive meaningful benefit from it, I don't think the cost here is absurd.
If you're comparing the cost of the browser today ($0) to the cost of this service, yes, it's steep. But if you consider the benefit you draw (lower memory use, avoid load times for pages "waking up", etc.) you're probably saving a lot of time and hassle.
I'm sure the cost is worth it to a specific segment of power users of, say, Figma. And maybe cloud gaming? But I'm curious if there's really a larger market for this.
I have to imagine they'll eventually have to subsidize a free version by creating a really souped-up premium version that has killer features.
Or they become an acq target by Google or something, and then things could get interesting!
The whole idea is that your browser is increasingly shifting towards becoming your operating system. Think about it, people spend the majority of their time on Chrome or Desktop apps wrapped in Chromium (Electron). If you consider Mighty to be a cheap supercomputer, not an expensive browser, it makes sense to pay $30/month for that. People pay SuperHuman $30/month for better email when they can use Gmail for free, but the truth is that SuperHuman gives you much more than an interface. Even better, Mighty isn't limited to power-users. Eventually your physical computer will merely serve as an interface to your real computer in the cloud.
> If you consider Mighty to be a cheap supercomputer, not an expensive browser, it makes sense to pay $30/month for that
For sure, but at the moment it definitely is not that, and it's going to take a long long time before we get there. People have wanted thin clients for decades!
If I wanted to burn a hole in my wallet, I'd pay for Mighty, sure. The average user won't see a big benefit to this for a long time though.
The price point is too high for cheap users and the feature set is too small for power users, IMO.
Working on multiple Figma instances while having things like Notion and Slack in the background is a real-life situation for a lot of people nowadays. Even a $3000 MacBook Pro suffers to handle it, but you could easily do it with a 2013 Macbook Air via Mighty. Think of it as renting a new computer. Also most entry-level users have to run these for work/school but can't on cheap hardware.
Yeah, what you're describing sounds like a work station. Maybe Mighty will allow companies to buy super cheap laptops + Mighty for their non-tech folks to get up & running fast?
Ah, classic HN. There can't possibly be a post on here about something new without someone going off about how $more_complex_technology already exists.
Your parent probably meant that there is nothing specific to Chrome in this technology, which / because it looks like VNC, not that the technology is useless because there is already VNC.
It's because we're not impressed with people reinventing the wheel and putting a new sticker on it. History repeats itself. We've seen it before. Maybe this is drastically different, innovative or helpful, but so far its just meh.
1. I don't have the problem of feel like Chrome being slow, and I don't hear this complaint much. The complexity of the web is not increasing as quickly as computers are increasing in power. This seems like a temporary and niche problem to be working on.
2. Reliable low latency streaming on wired connections is pretty straightforward, and should work fine. This is an easy problem.
3. Reliable low latency streaming on wireless connections is an unsolvable problem due to the nature of physics (basically), and will be an endless source of frustration. There's a reason no FPS gamer would ever play on wifi by choice. It will work fine at times and then randomly start sucking right as you're trying to do something important.
4. If it turns out this is useful in some cases, Google can easily do a better job than Mighty. And there's no reason this couldn't be done by AWS and Microsoft as well. It's trivial for a major tech company to do this better than Mighty does. They already built Stadia and the rest. Unlike when Dropbox launched, these companies aren't sleeping on stuff like this anymore.
You can basically either pay for this for ~3 years or buy an M1 machine for the ~same amount of money.
With the differences being:
1. The M1 machine will most probably feel faster, Mighty can't even build custom servers with M1 processors or whatever comes next from Apple as of today.
2. The M1 machine will probably retain some value after 3 years, your Mighty subscription will retain no value, you can't resell it or anything.
3. Using your own laptop means you won't have to send your data to Mighty servers at all, as such if there's some security bug in their system it won't impact you.
4. Using your own laptop means that downtimes or unexpected service errors from Mighty won't matter to you either.
5. Using your own laptop means that if your internet connection goes down temporarily and you are using a well designed web app that handles that case you might not even notice that you went offline, with Mighty I guess the whole thing will just stop responding, which isn't great.
6. On the other hand using Mighty might allow you to run multi-GB applications remotely consuming fewer resources, but like if you need to run those kinds of applications wouldn't it make more sense to just buy a beefier machine? Mighty servers seem to be limited to 16GB anyway, plus as far as I know V8's heap for JS is hard limited at 4GB currently, these browser apps that takes tens of GBs of RAM don't exist.
At the end of the day though without even considering all the issue will Mighty even fell faster than a 16GB M1 Macbook? If yes how much faster? If not this is already a non starter. And we haven't even seen what the M2 or M5 or whatever will ship in the new Mac Pros will be able to do.
I hadn't thought also that you are going to need to have a computer to connect to Mighty anyway, are people really going to get a $300 piece of junk machine with a terrible screen for this? Even if they do that already makes Mighty even less appealing.
The browser was supposed to be a thin client, but it's gotten so thick that people will now pay to run it in the cloud and stream it to... a thin client.
Technology is insane. No one would have ever designed it this way from scratch and yet, here we are.
I was going to jump in the "who is going to pay for this bandwagon" but, knowing silicon valley, some _js_framework_ cult leader will give them a shout out, then their herd will start retweeting , someone at a VC will notice, drop a couple of millions, and before you notice they have a 1B valuation. I certainly wish them the best.
The public version of the Web started taking off in 1995, around the time Netscape Navigator was released. Here's the World Supercomputer List for 1995:
A Coffee Lake GPU in a random laptop is almost double the performance of the top of that list.
So what we are observing is, since the Web started, it has become so much slower that a supercomputer would no longer be able to run it? Does that make sense to anyone?
I used to work in high performance computing using Department of Energy supercomputers. You can't run 1990s era HPC applications on a GPU. Nor can you run a full web browser on a GPU. GPUs are not magic go-faster devices. They're really good at executing certain kinds of operations and terrible at others.
Seeing tweets like this makes me sad that Twitter warps even smart people toward writing for quippiness over thoughtfulness.
Blow does this constantly, with his takes on programming languages as well. He almost exclusively comes from a game-development background but constantly makes overly broad statements.
Agreed. He also argued on Twitter that no one should need Linux containers because ELF exists. He ultimately backtracked to something like "well really we just need to go back in time and avoid dynamic linking of any kind and put everything in ELF binaries and then build Kubernetes off of that". Which I don't entirely disagree with--personally ELF kinda sucks and that's not the first thing I would do with a time machine and it also doesn't solve for isolation at all (container isolation is imperfect but I think it's worth something) and the whole content addressability and layer caching thing goes out the window (but Blow would also argue--and I quite agree albeit not so absolutely--that we don't need GB-sized binaries), but I can appreciate the simplicity of a simpler package format.
I can run a https client and ssh on a esp32. There is no reason Element (chat app on electron) would use half a gigabyte of RAM for some text, a unicolor flat theme, and some realtime video call. It's just experiment over experiment, we've lost the art of making simple software.
Sure, you can't run a 1990s-era HPC application unmodified on a GPU, but you can write applications that are functionally equivalent (take the same inputs, produce the same outputs) that do the heavy lifting on the GPU.
The latest DoE supercomputers are mostly GPUs. Summit has around 10 PFLOPS on CPUs and 215 PFLOPS on GPUs.
Yes, I agree with that. But it also takes a lot of software work. Getting decent performance on a GPU for an existing scientific application requires something closer to a full rewrite than the usual porting effort to a novel CPU architecture. That is one of the reasons that people are writing new scientific applications to target GPUs from the beginning rather than just adapting mature older programs to GPUs. (Though there is some of both approaches.)
I agree with the sentiment the web has gotten slow for no reason in some ways, but at the end of the day not everything that has made the web so "heavy" is Js developer self-pleasuring and ad-tech.
A modern browser has PDF rendering, video rendering, 3D, AR/VR, a camera viewer, an RTC platform, a screencaster, and much much more. If you tried to run the equivalents of all of this from back in the day at the same time, you'd also bring those old PCs to a crawl too.
I feel like I see the argument that tweet makes a lot and the answer if you look at what browsers are expected to do now is... yeah actually it does.
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There is a real problem of what we're doing with all that power sometimes, but the drive was created by real need from users. The wild west days of installing a new piece of software for every single utility were great for technical people, but not so great for making the PC an accessible piece of technology
This is a very very weird product. From the site which looks like a nice pitch btw, this basically looks like a VM that only serves as a browser. What problem does it solve?
Btw. My teeth gnash at the thought that my assumption above about the product is correct.
The only real use case I see for this is for anyone working from an under powered machine who needs to run _really_ resource heavy web apps. If your working in tech, chances are you're running with at least 16gb ram and a half decent CPU. I'm sure there's some edge cases where this _could_ be useful, but certainly not at that price point.
Can you install Chrome extensions? Does it support things like adblock? What are some concrete use cases and examples of who this is for?
The marketing talks about the ability to have more tabs open... In my experience, once you go beyond about 25 tabs (15" mbp) they basically become impossible to mentally manage.
Maybe rather than having 50+ chrome tabs open, people need to learn how to manage resources on their machines.
After the pain of many, many years of dealing with IE, I will never again use a Microsoft browser, no matter how nice it looks. Fool me once, and once only.
This only makes Chrome faster until you saturate your remote instance's memory with open tabs. The faster isn't really there. A 16gb machine on your desk would run Chrome just as fast. Technically faster cuz no input lag.
This is like selling a monthly subscription to 16gb of RAM, which you can use only for the web browser.
If this is really the future, and users are willing to pay $300+/yr for 16gb of RAM, device manufacturers could eat Mighty's lunch by selling laptops with dedicated browser RAM.
Huge respect for YC and Suhail. I understand what Mighty is solving. Also, I understand there are more Chrome users. But...
1. I want everyone to take a look at it after using Safari on M1, this solution sounded obsolete already. 2. The-Balaji mentioned Mighty is not building browser but a web based OS. Well, yes! I liked that part. 3. And, the price of Mighty is too much! When compared to the M1 performance per MBP cost - it is the cheapest yet highly performing device. Why would I use Chrome? That too a hosted model of Chrome. 4. Building a solution around Chrome and a problem caused by Chrome have been puzzling for me. Chrome itself is a memory hungry machine. To solve that problem, we can't just go for a radical problem while other FREE alternatives are there. Is this for Chrome fan base?
I am very curious to see the future of this product and observe. Much to learn from this.
This is a privacy nightmare. This maybe fine for work where my privacy is compromised as is. But outside, this is a thinly veiled data grab. That will come.
>Your data will never be shared with another person or entity. There are strict policies internally about viewing someone’s browser history: it is prohibited. Humans don’t access your information unless we’re given permission by you. We use automated tools that access your instance in order to update your browser’s software to keep making Mighty better.
Dan Kaminsky died three days ago, and someone recommended on the news thread his talk "The hidden architecture of our time", which goes about process isolation, cloud computing and infosec.
I watched it today, and funnily enough, he started by showcasing a fully working chrome browser inside a chrome tab, being serviced from a virtual machine of some cloud provider.
I have an 8 core i9 @ 2.4 and 32GB Of RAM and opened this page in Safari and good grief it’s the worst performance of a web page I’ve ever seen, not joking. It’s practically unusable.
Given the product I’m curious is the performance of your landing page by design?
I hate this kind of marketing BS. Mighty does not make Chrome faster, it just runs it on more powerful hardware in the cloud.
Crowing about how much less resources they consume is disingenuous. Of course it uses less resources locally when all the heavy lifting happens in the cloud.
Statements like “Mighty uses 10x less memory than Google Chrome.” are outright deception, it likely doesn’t use less memory at all, it just uses cloud memory instead of local.
I guess we shouldn’t ask about the ecological impact of all “Mighty” users having their browser running on beefy server hardware.
The website also infers that Mighty runs an ad-blocker, which itself is a huge boost to browser performance.
For $0/month Mighty users could become uBlock Origin users, or Brave users, and speed up Chrome by some similar multiple.
The "product" for sale is renting RAM and configuring an ad blocker. I wonder if their ad block plugin or ad list maintainers get any of Mighty"s fat monthly fee or if they're just selling someone else's hard work.
WebTV did this in the 90s. Web pages were reformatted and rendered on the server, then sent down to the WebTV box (originally over modem). Microsoft bought the company, called it MSN TV.
To me the interesting difference with mainframes is that you were generally taking advantage of the extra processing power available on the mainframe. Whereas this is more like taking advantage of the extra RAM available on the cloud machines. But yeah the spirit of it is very similar.
There is a recurrent pattern where systems are rebalanced where resources allow for 'more'. Centralized comes first because concentration obviously helps having more resources then market distributes capabilities (desktops/laptops). And now people are going the other way, maybe because local resources are not growing fast enough.
It isn't insane, it's just an engineering tradeoff. Streaming a browser takes more of some resources, probably bandwidth, processing power for video decoding, and the cost of the remote hardware. But it takes less RAM on your local machine. If you are running out of RAM and not running out of the other resources, this tradeoff makes complete sense.
Streaming your web browser and thereby exposing all information accessed and sent, including passwords, to a third-party company because you had too many unused tabs open is insane nonsense.
Yeah, chrome sucks and logs your every move, but it's not live streaming passwords and giving a third party the ability to just... Take over the session while you were logged in to online banking.
On one hand, you can pay ~$30/mo to have somebody else do your web browsing for you. On the other hand, you can use an adblocker (free), Brave Browser (free), and just not have 8 quintillion tabs open. I'm trying to be open minded here but this seems really over-engineered to me
What's the problem though? The market clearly exists (right now), so I don't why blame the company trying to get a share and help with this issue.
It's clear that Google isn't going to optimize Chrome and people aren't going to switch to Firefox with Tree Tabs / Sidebery with background suspension.
Well, it sounds like a parody product because browsers are supposed to be the lightweight, fast clients for the things we've offloaded to cloud servers.
By tradition, web browsing is the quintessential lightweight task, letting laptop vendors report "10 hours of web browsing" and the budget-conscious to say "8GB of RAM is more than enough for everyday tasks like browsing facebook"
Hearing that someone runs their web browser on a cloud server is like hearing someone has hired a personal assistant for their personal assistant.
Lots of browsers are implementing background suspension. Even if Google decided that they'll never implement this, it will be hard to convice potential customers to pay x$/month to solve a problem already solved by others browsers.
And my issue was not about wether the market exists or not. It's about an unreasonable solution to an unreasonable problem.
Market clearly exists if you are able to mass product diesel-powered personal jetpacks for $49.99. But it says nothing positive about our future. (but i'd be glad to try it at least once anyway :D )
I don't think they stream video back. It could make more sense to take over memory consumption and CPU/GPU heavy threads in a compressed binary format, especially from background tabs and restore them on demand.
"Get a reminder about your meetings one minute before they start so you can stay focused on your work until it's time. No more hunting down the meeting link."
If you're not preparing more than a minute out from your meeting start time.. you are the reason why meetings are bad
I don't see the actual business case for this at all.
Most businesses amortise a laptop/PC over a number of years. Would you rather pay $10/month/user for this cloud service, or spend the additional $360 (laptop/PC lifespan for a business that can amortise the asset over 3 years) in the first place to get more powerful hardware locally, and benefit all apps rather than just the web browser?
In case you're seriously wondering, it's vastly preferably for a business to spend $10/month in opex instead of $360 amortized over 3 year in capex. That's why everything is going rental and outsourced, even the plants in your average fancy office are rented by the month.
Being a naysayer is no fun so here’s a positive question: given you know that your website’s speed is bound by network and not compute, what crazy sites could you build? What could you do with a WebAssembly + WebGPU stack that isn’t being done?
Many things are moving to the browser, I wouldn't be surprised to see CAD or video editing running in a browser. They could then be OS agnostic, collaborative, introduce some kind of versioning instead of the project_v3_final.psd chaos.
I thought this was a shitpost at first... rather than spending time to decrease Chrome's memory footprint their solution is to just run it on a bigger machine in the cloud?
I know a couple of people that like to open lots of tabs and also swear by Tree Tab. I haven't used it personally because I rarely have more than half a dozen tabs open at a time.
Tree tab is a must for me when doing research. This morning I closed a few Firefox windows. The largest had 421 tabs, the others around 150-200 each. I might be a compulsive middle-mouse-button and new-tab user.
Yeah, call me skeptical about this. Yes the technology is probably interesting, still.
It's a nice example of what happens when people have more money than actual issues. You're not solving the actual problem, you're just working around it by shifting the place where it happens (which is a good thing in a lot of cases, but not necessarily here)
Interesting reading through all the negative comments here. Maybe this is an indictment of the state of the web, but it seems to clearly solve a problem a lot of people have.
Also have to imagine the long term vision is beyond just accelerating the web as it is now. This opens up possibilities for moving resource hungry applications to the cloud, expanding beyond just a browser to be more of an OS, white-label installs for brands to offer a cloud app, etc.
That this has been tried before (Silk, Stadia, etc) IMO is validation that this idea has legs and just needs the right timing and execution. No idea if Mighty will be what makes that go mainstream, we'll see!
Fascinating concept and yet I find something about it really disturbing... the exact opposite of the future I'd hope for. It just sounds so inefficient. Maybe I'm looking at it wrong or something.
Also, maybe I'm just being pedantic, but exactly what is the meaning of "10x less memory"? Is that the same as "One tenth the memory"?
I saw the founders tweeting yesterday about launching today, but the page still shows a button to request access. Makes me wonder if I could also launch like this.
Interestingly Mighty seems to be a browser built with Electron, and Electron's docs themselves say [1] this is not what Electron was build for and it's discouraged for security reasons.
"With that in mind, be aware that displaying arbitrary content from untrusted sources poses a severe security risk that Electron is not intended to handle."
I'm a bit confused: Google Stadia (and the Amazon/Nvidia) HN has a deserved reputation for missing the obvious value add of a service, so I'd like people to correct me but - isn't this basically Stadia, except it costs 5x as much, and you can only "play" Chrome?
There's a specific niche where this kind of technology makes quite good sense, although it looks like the current focus is primarily B2C.
With the sheer number of exploits against complex attack surface web browsers, I could see organisations using this to mostly eliminate use of the web browser locally. If you can get a trusted, audited provider to host remote cloud browser instances that ship with "always on" policy enforcement (ad blocking, site blocking, phishing filtering, data loss prevention etc.), you can move all web activity to another system in the cloud. You can erase and have new instances set up as needed (daily?).
Web browsing locally would then be restricted by firewalls to only work on high security local systems (which themselves are not pulling in any external dependencies) - you could eventually lock the local browser down to only speak to a very limited internal IP range.
While this won't work for risk taking internet-first organisations, there's governments and enterprise users who would love something like this, as it helps them reduce their risk exposure on client devices - as long as the remote video and input protocol is robust and memory safe, it starts to become incredibly difficult for a lot of attacks to succeed against their protected systems. This also potentially removes the need in some cases for people to carry 2 laptops - one for higher security activities, one for public internet level activities. If this software can be assured to a suitable level and isolated appropriately, it could be an interesting solution to a very boring problem!
This is likely the target for the product. Still, at a relatively small number of seats, maybe 200? an IT service administrating Chrome through the Google Apps service you're likely already paying for becomes more economical.
I'd probably agree with that, but for high assurance use cases, this is probably still incredibly attractive. Being able to ensure JavaScript and other web content isn't executing in your network, and the link out to that system is understood and risk managed could be powerful for them.
Keeping public internet work separate from local webapps would certainly help to avoid a fair number of vulnerability classes (as public browsing would take place in a totally separate environment without filesystem access or access to local resources, without access to local credentials, cookies, or network resources).
To all the people baffled here, try switching from one laptop to another. I recently did and had almost zero porting time.
My doc's are in notion/docs, passwords and preferences on chrome
There was a small amount of code files, even those I didn't really need.
It's not apparent how browser reliant we are till we actually move from one system to another.
This is the future. The price point is a topic thats up for debate, sure. But the general idea is absolute genius
But I already use different devices. I have a desktop for development, a MacBook for random laptop needs, a Surface Pro that I use mainly for reading and annotating PDFs and watching videos, and my phone. Chrome, on each of these, keeps all my accounts, passwords, and history in sync. If I wanted to switch laptops I'd expect to largely just sign in to Chrome on the new one. How does this improve on that?
> To all the people baffled here, try switching from one laptop to another. I recently did and had almost zero porting time. My doc's are in notion/docs, passwords and preferences on chrome
So you saved five minutes of copying over your chrome profile?
> It's not apparent how browser reliant we are till we actually move from one system to another.
I still don't get it. Why do you need a browser to run in the cloud? Your old laptop had chrome installed. Your new laptop will have chrome installed. If all your files are "in the cloud" then literally the only thing you need to move is your chrome profile. If it's just about your bookmarks and logins, you can sync those already.
I guess it depends on how you do things. For me, I use Pocket to save links to things I want to read, 1Password for my passwords.
Moving browser involves me opening my phone and typing a few login details in some sites (Google, actually that’s about it).
Worst case, I have to download some new extensions (Firefox Containers, UBlock Origin).
All done in about 2 minutes.
Not hating on the idea, but the notion that everyone is so reliant on browser-sync I think is being overstated here. Although I would be very interested to see some hard data on the topic!
This is awesome, because enables futuristic devices which otherwise wouldn't be possible. Untethered smartglasses, holographic wrist watches etc.
Miniaturization of compute is insufficient to implement such devices. And even if compute could be miniaturized to render interactive web pages with a coin-sized device, the sorry state of battery technology would render it impractical.
With 5G we only need enough compute and power to run a modem and a Mightyapp renderer.
There are potential privacy upsides as well. Even compared to tunneling your traffiv to a "vpn" service, this might be more resistant against traffic analysis.
If you are tunneling between home (A) and "vpn" provider (B) that terminates your traffic and sends out it to the public internet, and you are browsing websites C and D, both sharing the ad / tracking site E. 1. It's easy for anyone observing traffic between A and B to deduce from the traffic patterns what kinds of requests you are exchanging between C and D, 2. It's easy for someone obsrving traffic between A and B, and colluding with tracking site E, to correlate your address at A with your browsing behaviour on sites C and D by correlating A-B flows with information gathered by E.
In the Mighty type architecture, the leaked signal from the flow between end user and Mighty servers will be harder to match to the HTTP(S) traffic based on packet timing and sizes. But not necessarily hard enough unless there are purpouseful andi-TA measures employed. Hence I said "potential" privacy advantages.
Both of these scenarios place equal amount of trust in service operator - the difference is in security is against other adversaries.
I don't think that there is much of a TA benefit -- you make a request (and let's assume it's just a packet count/timing analyzer) and 10 packets burst out of your device to Mighty, then 10 packets burst out from Mighty to the destination. How is that not equally analyzable?
> Both of these scenarios place equal amount of trust in service operator - the difference is in security is against other adversaries.
This is where I would strongly disagree. With a VPN they can analyze your endpoints, but assuming E2E encryption, they cannot see your actual packets. Whereas Mighty is definitionally a MITM browser, they can see everything. Therefore you are trusting Mighty incredibly more than a VPN provider.
> you make a request (and let's assume it's just a packet count/timing analyzer) and 10 packets burst out of your device to Mighty, then 10 packets burst out from Mighty to the destination
By my understanding, the web browser runs at the Mighty server farm and it's streaming it to you using a RDP or Stadia style system. So, it's more like you send 10-ish packets containing input events (like mouse motion and click) using the Mighty client protocol, and as a result the Mighty service does 150 web requests that happen due to loading the new web page (probably around 10k packets). While the page is loading, the Mighty service sends you screen updates that are again much different than the packets the Mighty service is receiving in response to the web requests.
Yes, these can still be temporally correlated, even though the correspondence is much more distant than in the VPN case (where you can just observe the similar sized packets). But there's potential to fix it rather easily, by eg using chaff traffic to the client in idle periods, and/or by pulsing updates out to all users to the service in sync, etc.
The offer kinda looks like an April Fools joke to be honest.
> A browser that's always on.
Not when you experience a shortage of service and freeze all your users from doing basic work, not just on one service, but everything else.
They have a point though.
The plague of front-end is that most developers just don't care about performance. Take Redux for example, which for a while was considered a golden standard by many. When you look into it, you see that when one little thing changes in one big global store that has everything, everything else is notified and a comparison is run to see if that item has changed. (If I'm wrong, I'm sorry, but this was the impression I got when I was evaluating that framework). But if I'm not wrong and that's really the way it is, the fact that this framework was accepted by so many, just proves the point that most developers think all their end users have a high-powered Mac.
I could say something similar about virtual dom abstractions. I understand that there were no alternatives earlier (today we have Svelte), but you could still do a good front-end with classic dom-manipulation that was super fast, and with some thought put into it - well organized.
I think it's more of a statement that the state of browsers, the web, etc. neccessitates this sort of solution. This is like the underclass taking the trash out of the shining skyscrapers in the middle east by hand: a symptom of a system so broken that people do insane things to pretend that it's not broken.
It seems to me that if this becomes a successful (consumer) product it will either become free – or be replaced by the free version. The free version would generate revenue through advertising or by data collection and user surveillance.
Since Suhail is following this thread, I'd be curious to know if he'd ever consider that route.
oh really? my cell service is not going that way. In fact, it's going the opposite way. Verizon, without me saying OK, is trying to force as many of my phone calls (which I pay for) over publicly available wifi. Free for them, money for me.
Progress is lumpy and prone to manipulation by companies who an exert undue influence.[1]
But even so, in 2021 you can make a free video call around the globe for free. You could be using Facetime or Duo or Skpye or one of the many, many other options that provide that core service. For free.
Ultimately Verizon isn't charging you for a phone call. That might be what's on the bill, but they're really charging you for some service level of connectivity. For a lot of people around the globe a phone call is a functionally free service on top of that connectivity.
1. I'm not familiar with the state of US telcos to comment on the situation there, but even if your cell service might not be going that way, cell plans in EU, Australia and New Zealand have essentially hit flat rate monthly fees for unlimited calls and data.
I wonder what the founders felt when they saw the M1 benchmarks.
It seems that Apple’s solution to underpowered laptops is giving them serious power.
If I were the founders I’d be queasy.
Can't wait to see all the security problems by logging into your bank account from "somewhere" in the cloud. I think the idea is wrong, not everything has to be a subscription, especially not a web browser.
I'm curious how they deal with local printers, file downloads, file uploads, links that launch things like a native local Zoom app, etc. That wasn't fun last time we did this with thin clients and Citrix :)
I found this in their hiring page regarding file uploads.
> We’ve implemented cross-platform Drag and Drop file uploading. When you drag a file into a Mighty window on macOS, we simulate that same sequence of Drag-and-Drop events on Linux. We trick Chromium into thinking it's uploading a file from the Linux filesystem while, behind the scenes, we stream the file from the user's Mac; we accomplish this using Filesystem In Userspace (FUSE).
I wish Apple could release a laptop with a higher frequency screen. My MacBook M1 is super fast but my Asus i9 with its 240hz screen is a lot more smooth for Web browsing. It's also more noisy and it has a ridiculously small battery life. A M1 with 144Hz would be nice.
Privacy is really a concern here. They want me to send all of my key strokes to them? Get out of here.
But they are providing me a smooth development experience-- there is definitely a need of this.
My 16GB MBP starts dying very easily with chrome, docker and intellij opened. Don't get me started on what happens when I am sharing screen on zoom.
So maybe we need a sweet spot here.
How about they sell it as a self deployable software which I can run on aws and own the cost of the software abs hardware. And maybe economics work out in the favour of customer to try this combo out?
There seems to be a lot of people very focused on keeping a lot of tabs open in their browser. For me, I browse the web, hit CTRL+D for a site that I would like to visit again later, and then close all my tabs automatically by simply quitting the browser. Why do people hoard URLs in the tabstrip? I guess that's how people use the web+browsers now, and my approach is very unique and unpopular.
I know for me I have several Firefox profiles for different things, and doing cumbersome things like creating a new Firefox profile for task `x` is too much for people, but splitting sessions up is a big win both for privacy and productivity. If I'm in a browser tailor made for email, there is a better chance I will focus only on email and not trying to do something else.
Compartmenting your browsing like this is good for privacy because secrets can't spill over into other sites since your more sensitive browsing is done in a separate session, insulated from work email, and cookies can't correlate activity, and build a profile of you. Bonus points if you do all your political browsing in things like the Tor Browser Bundle or use privacy-aware browsers like Brave or Firefox. But that's just me!
I don't understand the negativity. I have tried similar technology and the speed bump was immediately noticeable, and that was rendering the client all in JS (this was the tech underneath Cloudflare's zero trust browser). The potential for central management is there so my guess is the product ends up being some sort of enterprise browser that provides both security and extends the life of existing IT infrastructure.
I was pretty sold on the concept and features of this browser until I started thinking, "hm... if this is streaming, they're gonna have to charge a monthly rate to use this."
So I filled out the questionnaire to request access (to find out the pricing) and the _cheapest_ option to the "how much would you think about paying" was $10/month.
I would expect this could find a place in the workplace where a company subsidizes employee use for workplace browser use but... I don't see this gaining any traction from the average consumer.
I don't think I'd pay more than a couple bucks a month (at most) for a web browser when my current one (and literally any alternative) already works great -- and even if they didn't, there's also tons of free plugins for managing tabs/sessions/etc AND already tons of general-purpose streaming services (like Shadow) that don't just limit you to a browser... at a seemingly lower price.
FWIW, I typically have 20+ windows open at a time (to context-switch between projects), each with 30+ tabs (each loosely mapped to a to-do item). I'm also not on a Mac, so maybe I'm just not the target market.
>> Your Internet speed while using Mighty is over 1 Gbps.
> How's that work if it isn't?
They mean your mighty instance is connected to the sites you're browsing over a fast link to the web servers, essentially. They're trying to colocate with a lot of the big sites in datacenters in order to get the best round trip times and bandwidth to those sites.
But yeah your own _personal_ internet speed needs to at least be able to handle a 4K60 video stream.
The whole concept is still incredibly wasteful and dystopian, but the part about your speeds when connected to the sites over mighty makes some sense.
With your early users, you might try to figure out their actual use cases. I imagine some of them might be evaluating it as an alternative for the same purposes for which they'd use a VPN service.
And if they're using it that way, you might make sure you're not going to get blocked by sites in a way that would kill your business.
Just close the tabs - I don't get why people keep so many open. Even when web developing 6 or so is probably the max I ever have open (apart from when opening links in other tabs to read in a few minutes).
I find more are just a distraction and a reminder to waste time. If I want to read HN I just type "Command-T ne Return" and chrome completes the URL and takes me there.
Honestly, I can see the value proposition for saving battery life on a laptop if you're doing something resource intensive in browser. I mean, if you still have to stream video I wonder how much battery most people would save.
But why would anyone want to outsource their web browsing to a third party? If this is something you need, you should setup a homeserver and RDP into it...
Unpopular opinion (for some reason): People in my home country would benefit vastly from this product. My dad's computer's main reason for crashing is due to memory intensive browsing.
I think this is a great idea. It's fascinating to see the default human behaviour for not understanding a new idea is to be relentlessly pessimistic about it. Best of luck Suhail!
What I'm learning about Mighty reminds me of a recent development at work: I have to use an ETL tool that is terribly resource hungry and consumes 5GB+ of RAM without doing much. My macbook pro only has 8GB of memory, so running Chrome and some other applications gets me close full memory usage. The result are frequent and frustrating crashes of the ETL tool. New hardware is not an option for the moment, so we decided to give Amazon Workspaces [0] a try.
It's basically a big Windows desktop (16GB RAM) running in the Cloud that I can just access like any other window. It consumes around 500MB of memory on my machine itself.
For highly interactive or latency-bound applications this is probably not an option but for asynchronous work (me launching jobs that take 5 minutes to run) I really appreciate this flexible cloud extension to my current setup.
I'm surprised by the amount of skepticism I'm noticing here. I have been following Suhail's work on Mighty for a few months and I was very much looking forward to it.
One use case that where I think this would make my life easier is in the big-data / ML space where I'm trying to visualize large quantities of data. JS, WebGL and other supporting tools are all available today, but it's quite painful to load a graph visualization with 1M nodes and make it responsive without spending a lot of time optimizing the JS code. As a data scientist when I'm simply hacking stuff and want a quick prototype it's nearly impossible.
Graphistry [https://www.graphistry.com/] has a decent setup for graphs viz, but it didn't quite fit my needs. I've also tried JS running on a large machine (with GPU) and VNCed to it. That experience was quite poor.
Making the visualization a web-app is the fastest approach we could think of for prototyping. What other options are there for an interactive visualization? Quite curious..
>Mighty uses 10x less memory than Google Chrome. Load hundreds of tabs without it stalling, freezing, and slowing down your computer.
That what Firefox was doing for me (i had 2000+ tabs - had to block Windows perf monitor staff which was just burning practically all CPU trying to "monitor" that Firefox :). Had to start using Chrome (company stuff), and it is like an order of magnitude downgrade, in particular when it comes to tabs.
So, Mighty sounds like a great solution to a self inflicted problem of a slow and resource hungry Chrome. Of course one could probably just fix the Chrome ... Whom i'm kidding?! I've worked on 2 browsers (pre-Firefox Mozilla is one) and of course there is practically no way of it short of deep rewrite.
I wonder though about copyright issues here. The creative layers who killed Aereo could possibly apply the same logic of "public broadcasting even if to just one person" to the Mighty too.
As others have said, the pricing seems completely out of range for the average home user. But for enterprise users, how frictionless is it going to be for IT and legal departments to sign off on a service that touches all of your browser-related work and data? Before you argue "Yes but Google/Amazon/Microsoft/Salesforce...." — yeah, but there's a big difference between entrusting a well-established cloud services company and a new streaming startup.
As a power user (who is, admittedly, overly anal about how many tabs I have open at once), this kind of dumb terminal doesn't feel that appealing. I need a laptop that's powerful enough to drive 2 high-res external monitors and do the data crunching tasks in the background, on top of web browsing. A potato terminal that can handle just the streaming isn't going to be much fun.
If they can get this running on an iPad that would be incredible. The real value of Mighty isn't for users who can afford a MacBook Pro. It's to unlock the utility of a dumb terminal and provide lightning fast performance on a underpowered device. And freed from Apple's shackles they put on Mobile Safari.
Looks really cool! This was my biggest pain before buying a M1 MBA. In the "running Slack/Figma/SaaS web apps" space, are they competing directly against low-energy, more-powerful chips like the M1? Whereas I can imagine lots of use-cases where it's impractical to buy a machine like that.
I'm not understanding the difference between this and webgap.io which seems a lot cheaper for same service. I have actually tried webgap.io and it offered modest but noticeable improvement in page load speed for sites in US.
FTR I live in rural Hongkong(there is such a thing) with line speed avg less than 12 Mbps.
I saw this on twitter yesterday and assumed it was someone retweeting an april fool's joke ... I guess I was wrong? This seems ... insane? Going back to thin clients because the very fat clients we have are too slow to render ad-infested web pages fast enough? Am I missing something here?
This clearly isn't marketed towards me (I'm happy running firefox locally), but from what I can tell I'd like to use every part of this product except the core offering.
- Mirror my tabs in the cloud? Great!
- Opt+Tab to navigate my overflowing tab bar? Sure!
- Cmd+J to instantly join meetings? This might be the killer feature for me honestly
- Search through all my google docs from anywhere? Sure, why not?
The problem is, I can get most of this through google calendar alerts and firefox extensions. I wonder how their value prop will evolve over time, because right now I don't see it being worthwhile for anything except crash recovery. With M1 Macs being as quiet and power-efficient as I've heard, it sounds like the main market these folks are targeting (execs/higher ups that aren't as tech-savvy) would rather just use newer machines?
M1s are heavy on processing power but not too heavy on RAM, and it seems like this offering makes the most sense for people running low on RAM, so perhaps M1s are a logical market.
The issue here is bad frontend engineers and people buying laptops and expecting good performance.
Everybody is so happy with the apple M1 but it is only as powerfull as a ryzen 3600, a 180$ cpu
If you write well your web it will perform in most devices
apple just has the worst ratio "computing power / dollar"
Mighty will eat thru your $1k budget in 2 years with subscription fees alone. And you haven't even bought a budget laptop to run Mighty on yet. Mighty does not save you money.
Also not sure where you got the 20 hour stat. Mighty's marketing claims a 2 hour boost. And I'd take it with a grain of salt since active use of Mighty is like running a video streaming service in the background.
when talking about the M1 I had in mind the apple mini pc
If you really need a laptop just go with anything comparing the specs
In my prev job laptop was required and I had a really good thinkpad, much better than any apple laptop on the office
If you don't need a laptop, just get a desktop, much more computing power per dollar expend
Kudos to suhail and others who pulled this off. The biggest challenge Mighty has, is that its offering a technical solution to a very technical problem, which many users dont fully understand.
On one end of the spectrum, we have the tech savvy users who would more likely care a lot about privacy, security and not have another layer in the middle which could potentially undermine it. On the other end of the spectrum, we have users who wont really understand the difference between slow computer and slow internet. I am not sure, how mighty can make it any faster.
The biggest challenge here is to educate the market you're going after. I see more of a B2B play here, where companies could use mighty instead of sending heavy client laptops to employees.
Apple has shifted the whole dynamics and I can see more products like this coming very soon. Earlier network was costly, RAM was cheap .. Now network is becoming cheap and all macs are the same except RAM.
Product will come filling this new dynamics.
First, I don’t understand how this is possible. Not technically; I get that. I don’t understand how the industry has accepted W3C standards that have such awful performance that it’s actually faster to render off-site and send video frames. What is the point of HTML? Just use VNC from the web service.
Secondly, it sounds like a security nightmare to expose an uncontrolled single point of failure. But it’s probably better than a consumer endpoint browser, because your OS is secure, while modern consumer operating systems are so full of junk that it’s impossible to defend plaintext, so video it is.
I get it. It’s a brilliant counterintuitive hack. I want it to be stupid, but it’s not.
I've asked colleagues who keep lots of tabs open why they do it, and the answer they generally give me is so that they can keep track of things. Is this why most people have lots of tabs open?
I often use Cmd+Option+Q to quit my browser, which also closes all tabs. I've never had a problem going back to wherever I need by typing in the address bar. The smart results quickly identify what I need and I select that result from the list (e.g., type the first few letters of a recent Google doc title, and it's there)
Can someone who does like a lot of tabs open explain the benefits?
I don't reopen them all. I close all my tabs a couple times a day. The next time I'm browsing I might open something I had open before, but typing 3-4 characters of its title into the address bar and hitting return is quicker than searching for the correct tab to click on
While I appreciate that this company is trying to solve a real problem many people have and generally the trend of software has been to move more things into the cloud, my personal trend has been the opposite. I prefer apps that run locally. Of course as someone who understands computers I have that option but at the same time I learned how computers work precisely for the sake of having that option.
Personally my solution to the “slow web” problem is to disable JavaScript completely for casual browsing. It works beautifully.
It’ll be interesting to see how the pendulum swings back from this, if it ever does.
Maybe someone from Mighty can answer this: is user data encrypted (using E2E encryption obviously) when I am not currently using Mighty?
Obviously any architecture like this implies that user data is used unencrypted in the server memory, but I would not want my browser history stored in persistent media accessible to anybody besides myself.
In addition to history, perhaps the bigger issue is that I am kind of lazy and like to use my browser to store passwords. Are these regularly accessible from within the VM or is it stored encrypted with a master password like with Firefox or commercial password managers?
Let's say this ends up being 30$/month (I've no idea how much it will cost, but I saw this number floated above).
Let's say you replace employee machines every 2 years.
Doesn't it make more sense to just spend 720$ extra per employee on hardware? It'll be a much better experience, with much less risk (what if mighty is unsustainable and closes down?), and that machine will still have value in 2 years, unlike throwing money at a cloud subscription.
Fwiw, I still feel the pain on a top of the line 16" MBP. For many tech workers, a laptop is what they get, and what they rely on in terms of portability vs performance trade off. Using this is probably more convenient than getting beefier hardware, which I suspect is gonna have to be a bulky souped up workstation.
TL;DR: it makes Chrome faster by running it in the cloud and streaming it to your machine.
One thing I don't see anywhere on the page: pricing. No-one is going to run a giant fleet of cloud servers out of the goodness of their own heart, so either I end up paying for this service or they extract some icky level of personal information to pay for it. The site says "Your data is your data. You’re not the product", so I assume it's the former. But without any pricing details I can't really evaluate whether this is worth trying or not.
My personal method of making Chrome faster is to use Safari. It consumes way less battery and sites run more than smoothly enough for me. Everyone's situation differs, obviously, but I'm more comfortable running that locally than depending on a remote service (and a very stable internet connection!) to do my essential everyday tasks. At a bare minimum I'd want this to have an option to "downgrade" to local browsing for when I'm tethering, etc.
If you sign up to hear from them they ask how much you'd be willing to pay for it. The options are <$10/mo, 10-20, 20-30, 30-40, 40-50, and 50+. To me this suggests they are looking at charging similarly to tools like Superhuman which is $30 a month.
Why not just use Firefox? Are you not worried by the announcement of FLoCs to replace cookies? Are we really ready to give all of our lives to Big G and Big G only?!
START USING FREE/LIBRE BROWSERS. Before is too late.
To me this doesn't really make much sense to me as its own product, but it seems ripe for an acquisition play. This would make an excellent addition to say the Office 365 or Dropbox suite of tools.
I wonder if you can install extensions to the cloud browser. And whether the service can add intelligent ad blocking.
But the real question is, of course, of trust. If I were using the service, they would literally see my screen, with all the private and sensitive info on it. They can't but watch my screen to be able to video-compress and transmit its contents.
Let's rule out the lowly idea of the service itself stealing customers' data. Let's consider a three-letter agency, or even a court order + a gag order. Wiretapping your screen just gets easier.
Can anyone estimate the environmental impact of running your daily browsing this way as compared to locally on a laptop? I can see factors in both directions, curious how others would estimate it.
I haven't heard my fan in a year (literally) and I have not noticed any significant slowdowns in my daily work, which involves two monitors and 50+ tabs.
Think about future in 10 years from now, I see what mighty's end goal might be. They are trying mass market EaaS (User Experience as a Service) where we can run all high performing operations in cloud in browser as simple as transfer a file to Dropbox. So i would like to be such a world where access barrier to high performance systems is brought down. Imagine combining mighty+replit+video editor boom . This would be as revolutionary as dropbox, when Google presented Map Reduce paper on commodity hardware.
This made me laugh out loud. What a commentary on the current state of front-end development.
- Chrome uses a ton of memory. Is this necessary?
- V8 is incredibly fast, but front-end developers have somehow found a way to slow it down (maybe through gigantic React apps that recompute the entire state tree with every user interaction?)
Correct me if I am wrong, but to an extent, isn't the memory bloat inherent to Chrome's sandboxing model? Having worked on a similar project, I firmly believe remote rendering is not only better speed wise but also efficiency wise. In some cases, might be better security wise, too.
Browsers are probably what I need keep open all the time along with other IDEs; and of the two, I'd prefer to teleport the Browser away to free up RAM (speak nothing of the battery). Right now, I see Firefox take up 75% of the available RAM starving other applications. Enabling swap only makes matters worse; and slows the PC to a crawl whenever page swaps to/from disk, which is usually the case when navigating between different IDE windows and the browser.
Given the amount of SaaS apps and the pace of its adoption across enterprises, Mighty, if it solves the problem it set out to, is likely to laugh all the way to the bank.
The thing is that RAM is really cheap. Right now on my machine Firefox is using 5GB of RAM, which at current prices would cost about 75¢/month amortized over three years. It seems hard to justify paying 40 times that amount for this service
As someone coaching "experienced" (many years, little depth) front-end developers in better practices, I absolutely believe a shitload of performance is left on the table because they write tremendously inefficient code. I'm not talking about "tricky" stuff, but "accidentally quadratic" kind of stuff, or a map where a filter would do.
I'm genuinely interested to understand your point of view to have that impression, as your argument is a bit broad and someone disingenuous could argue that everything other than C/assembler is optmised for developer comfort.
I don't think the ratio of bad:good new developers varies much by the stack, but I think some stacks push developers "up or out" more than others. Browser frontend has some of the least pressure here because the performance problems are generally paid by someone else's computer.
Backend inefficiencies traditionally will eventually saturate your RAM / CPU / I/O ("clouds" removes some of this but you still pay in the end - they also increase pressure in other areas since you're now always running alongside other things). In the browser you just need to be faster than the user's expectation or need, and user expectations are today at record lows and needs at highs (more and more "daily life admin" is web-only or web-first).
I also think "tribe 3"[0] developers are both more likely to gravitate towards the frontend, more likely to not think about performance, and (definitionally) more likely to not want to learn about fundamentals affecting performance.
My impression is opposite to yours, perhaps due to the type of software development we do.
I can't remember how many times a performance problem was "sorted" by increasing CPU and RAM limits on a cloud instance. It just so happens that it's much, much easier to do that on the cloud instance than on a user machine.
Of course performance problems do show up that need to be solved, just way less common than just spending more resources.
What I do agree with you (and I have no data on this just personal impressions that are most likely affected by observation bias, as I suspect is the case with you as well), is that in these waves of new programmers not going through the normal university route (which is absolutely perfectly fine in my book), they usually start off with front-end development these days, skewing the experience level ratio to more entry level people, and thus making entry-level mistakes. Perhaps 10 years ago the entry tech was Rails/PHP.
This would make sense if somehow Chrome was a powerful platform that could take advantage of high-powered hardware in the cloud. In practice, Chrome is extremely limited in how it can actually use the hardware and thus nobody is writing high-end applications to target Chrome.
Therefore, realistically the only thing that you can meaningfully speed up with this is already woefully inefficient web apps, in case your hardware isn't up to par. However, at that price point, you should just buy better hardware.
Same. Seriously. It's been really exhausting lately. It feels like everyone would rather sell out as fast as possible instead of spend quality time building something that performs. Programming has only brought me joy when I get to do it on my own. For anything else, it's the most draining thing in the world.
My last two positions have been an absolute drain on my well-being. No one cares anymore about being a good person. Everyone wants to make a quick-buck and is willing to sacrifice thousands of employees and consumers to do it. This age in the developed world is the absolute worst in human history.
Lol. You are not entirely wrong. Find a job that is exciting to you, and pays your bills. That is what I am doing. It may not be the most exciting thing in the world, but it is to me, and that's all I care about.
So this is like a virtualized Citrix terminal without the encumbrance and with enough performance not to drag you down? Makes perfect sense for large corporations.
Taking Citrix as example since the specific market served by them has existed for decades. Virtualized personal computing services are a segment of course as well.
(I wonder why they pivoted away from just Windows desktop but maybe this is an easier entry point to market given browser performance seems to be the specific huge paint point).
Fifteen years ago I worked for a hosting company for a couple of years. I was stunned how much faster that I could browse using one of the companies unused servers hooked up to those big pipes.
If VSC had existed back as well as Chromebook's I might very well have moved off a PC. I'd personally rather have a fiber connection but seeing as how no one is offering me one this could prove quite useful but I need to have VSC included in the package.
Is it that much different than the mobile browsers that rendered the page on a server and just sent a compressed representation to the phone? A variant of opera did that and worked so much better than regular browsers on weak phones. This targets different devices, but it could work equally well.
Opera Mini would send binary markup and heavily compressed images [0]. The final rendering and any interactions happened on the user’s device. This service is basically remote desktop (RDP/VNC) to a copy of Chrome running in The Cloud. Opera Mini was also the most popular in a different Internet landscape (no SPAs, smaller sites overall, tiny non-touchscreen dumbphones).
On a related topic, I actually chose my phone around ~2004 based on the full Opera Mobile browser being included (Nokia 3650 I think it was). The ability to bring up and use almost any site and browse around in a 2 inch screen like a little portal into the web was great. It was much much better than any other mobile browser I had used because it was fully rendering instead of converting for mobile (though that may have been an option). Was one step away from what people started to experience with the touch phones that came out a few years later.
I know this is not a new idea, and this is precisely why I think we should know better.
If our computers are not fast enough to run thin clients (what a web browser is) to display documents then I think we should do something about it instead of trying to offload the bloat somewhere in the cloud.
> If our computers are not fast enough to run thin clients (what a web browser is) to display documents then I think we should do something about it instead of trying to offload the bloat somewhere in the cloud.
Except you might be stuck waiting forever for this to happen. Mighty provides a practical solution, today.
Agree with you except the last part, what does this has to do with Denmark? Plenty of silly ideas comes from all corners of the world, probably more from SV than anything, but people are not blaming that on the government of California/USA.
Anyone knows the current state of Amazon's Silk browser[1]? It's a similar product; do the heavy lifting (network fetch, HTML parse etc., etc.,) on the server (EC2 machines) and stream the final result to the client.
IMO the audience for Mighty ($30/month + BYO crappy computer) over something like an M1 MacBook Pro ($1200) is very small. Yes your Chrome will be faster when you have a fast internet but at all other times (other apps, slow internet) your computer will suck or be unavailable.
Also based on my experience with Stadia it will be magic 90% of the time and so frustrating the other 10% of the time that you throw the whole thing out the window.
I think it's a confusing proposition to claim Mighty makes Chrome faster, which in fact it's replacing Chrome with a cloud-based video streaming service - a totally different architecture and operational model.
For consumer scale, I think decentralized (edge compute) wins. Possibly a good product for enterprise. Regardless, Mighty has a great team backed by top investors. No doubt they'll innovate their way through it.
The web has become so slow that we need to rent out NASA supercomputers to process those CSS files and decide where the DIVs and SPANs go. What a world.
This is very clearly targeted at running heavy SPAs, so I don't see this as a step in the direction of taking general computing from our hands, as many in this thread do.
In a way it lets one (more likely a corporation or independent professional) to pay for a stable and secure way to not have a software that they depend on and already have no control over from being suddenly unusable on their machine.
It's shocking that there aren't many positive comments. I've met people who had 200+ tabs in their browser, using 10 GB+ of memory on Chrome. Good luck telling them to use a thin client/buy a faster computer/change their workflow. Do the people suggesting those solutions realistically think their advice will be followed, or are they just showing off how smart they are? https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=wow%20thanks...
Suhail came up with a solution to a real problem (Chrome is slow so I get less work done), but just because you don't have that problem, it's absurd for anyone to want this? It doesn't matter if the solution isn't a sexy new technology, or there are cheaper clunkier alternatives, who cares, all I care about is getting more work done. $30-50/month is nothing, if I just get 1 hour back a month it already pays for itself. I know plenty of people who value their time way more than $50/hour - if they can get more work done with a faster browser, getting Mighty is a no-brainer.
Edit: comments like "Maybe rather than having 50+ chrome tabs open, people need to learn how to manage resources on their machines." in another thread drive me crazy. Ok, how are people going to learn this? Are you going to teach them? Statements like that are not helpful because nothing will get done and we will still be at square one.
I pretty much always have >200 tabs open, and it sometimes gets up to more like 1000. (Currently I have about 100 windows open, some of them with dozens of tabs.)
Works fine in Safari, somewhat in Firefox, but Chrome chokes and falls to pieces.
The easy short-term fix to this problem is: stop using Chrome and switch to a different browser. The medium-term solution is to improve the way Chrome handles resources for heavy browsing workloads.
Running every webpage on a remote server is a ridiculous response.
All the browsers could still be better with these kinds of workloads though. Someone working on browsers should spend a few months or years considering how to suspend and cut off system resources to background tabs, make sure no browser tasks are accidentally quadratic in number of tabs or windows, etc.
Why is running every webpage on a remote server a ridiculous response? I don't really care what the software is doing as long as (/if) it solves my problem. I agree switching to a different browser is the easy short term fix, but that might not work for some people. The medium-term solution is not really a response because that's completely out of your control.
I mean the medium-term response from someone who wants to make it their full-time work project to solve this problem for everyone. For someone who doesn’t have the political clout to change Chrome directly, a plugin or fork could probably also be made to solve the problem.
Personally what I’d like to see in a browser is a more explicit and configurable policy about how many resources to devote to background tabs.
The remote-execution solution is incredibly bandwidth-heavy, costs money, hands all browsing data over to a third party, creates an unnecessary dependency on a startup company that might fail or get bought at any time, and takes a ton of control out of end-users’ hands.
I highly doubt a plugin would work, but maybe a fork could work. It does seem like Mighty is collaborating with the Chrome team to make improvements to Chrome directly: https://twitter.com/Suhail/status/1385237770633846784
>creates an unnecessary dependency on a startup company that might fail or get bought at any time
This is the story of any new company trying to build anything
How many of those 200+ tabs are you actually tracking versus a bunch of windows you blindly close out later because they didn't actually matter? What is the upper limit on productivity? Being able to keep 500 tabs open at the same time? Also, there are 100% existing systems to keep track of sites you genuinely need to follow-up on that have already solved "a real problem."
If this was at a, say, $5 price point, I don't think there'd be that many people putting up a stink.
I personally don't have 200+ tabs, so I can't speak to this problem, but I don't think you are going to make much inroads telling people to change how they work. So rather focusing on hypotheticals, I'm glad that Mighty provides a solution that doesn't require much friction or behavior change.
Why is $5 an acceptable price? Why not $10, $50, $500?
Edit: You agree that having 200+ tabs is a problem right? Why haven't the people with 200+ tabs adopted the solutions you speak of? Perhaps those solutions aren't good enough, or perhaps they don't want to change the way they work. Either way, if those solutions really "solved" the problem, we wouldn't be observing people with 200+ tabs in the world.
Because spending $500 dollars a month versus having the control to close a tab you don't really need to track is inane. Would you pay that recurring fee out of your own pocket to improve your own productivity? That doesn't seem like a reasonable proposition to me.
For at least a decade of my life, I was a 200+ tab person. Paying any amount of money to make my computer slightly more responsive versus the time I lost just clicking through (literally) hundreds of tabs to find something versus logging it--let alone simply searching for the same thing again and hitting the links that float to the top because I've visited them--doesn't make any sense to me.
As I see it, the "problem" here is not that you need to have 200+ tabs open at any given time. The problem is precisely that you have 200+ tabs open at any given time.
If you have the ability to keep track of 200+ tabs, exactly where they're located on your screen, and can switch back and forth between those and your actual work within a matter of seconds then kudos to you. You're actually a genius, and your employer should definitely consider purchasing this ongoing subscription for you.
[edit]: Just looked at your history and realized I'm probably replying to an astroturf account, so joke's on me, I guess.
I'm not 100% against this being an astroturf campaign, but there's literally never been a single idea the past 6-7 years you've felt this strongly to post about, ad nauseam, until this exact thing?
200+ tabs open for $30+ a month per employee is the hill you decided to take a stand on?
We could also continue to talk about the points we both raised earlier, or that could all get lost in the weeds :)
You must be working with idiots, because my coworkers can follow even more complicated orders than "close your unneeded tabs or your computer will be slow."
I have ~300-400 tabs open pretty much all the time, using The Mighty Suspender in Chrome. Works great, don't really have any desire to stream my browser from a remote server.
I'm mostly CPU limited actually, not RAM limited, RAM usage usually never goes over ~12GB out of 32GB available.
Past the ~450 tab mark CPU usage will skyrocket with even a single video call open however.
My problem isn't necessarily that this isn't a good product in the sense that it solves a problem people have in a profitable way, but rather that this problem exists in the first place and the trends technology is taking to solve it.
> I've met people who had 200+ tabs in their browser, using 10 GB+ of memory on Chrome. Good luck telling them to use a thin client/buy a faster computer/change their workflow.
I don't know what point you're making here, would this person also be more likely to pay for this service? or less likely to purchase more ram/a better computer so be more easily convinced to pay for this service?
The point is, these comments are not unique or valuable insights. I'm sure users already know they can buy a better computer or more RAM, so why haven't they upgraded? How will the comments on HN change their behavior? Something must be stopping them from doing those things. Maybe Mighty is the solution that will get the job done. Suhail is the only one providing a new solution while everyone else is saying the status quo is good enough even though clearly some people out there still have a problem.
no one is stopping you to pay for this superior alternative to 'clunkier' offerings. but to say he came up with the 'solution' is disingenuous.
I'm seeing people saying 'this is amazing. I will pay for this' without even having tried it or any alternatives. I don't know about you but doesn't seem natural.
I am one of these people, and what I have to do is once every couple of quarters go through my open windows and tabs and edit them down by going through them and deciding to (a) read them and close them (b) close them without reading, or (c) drag the tab into a window to save it for later.
A real solution: emacs buffer management style for my tabs please? Maybe web pages that don't need a gig of ram for a tab or two? Please?
I will happily pay $30/month for Mighty. The browser is literally where I spent 100% of my time. The pattern of hosted/virtualized browsers is well understood for over a decade but mostly built and delivered poorly for the low end of the market. I love this idea, and I am happy Suhail is building this. (I am not an investor or a customer, yet.)
If it works well, I wouldn't be opposed to using it. $30 is kind of steep, but a web browser is something I spend the vast majority of my computing time using. Depends on how good the tab management is, and how fast it starts up locally on my computer. Some websites are so shitty I don't even want to open them on my own computer.
Personally, I believe Mighty is basically a new type of browser. What Chrome OS is supposed to be.
Of course the business model limits the number of people that would try it however, perhaps the target market would be businesses interested in controlling the browsing of their employees. For security and other purposes.
All the best Suhail and congratulations on your launch.
Fat server, thin client might be an attractive model for businesses if all they had to do was issue cheap laptops and reap powerful hardware performance. But Mighty only targets web applications? How many slow web applications do people use as a core productivity tool anyway?
(While writing this I realised I already had an example, and it's Notion)
There are too many skeptics.
THIS IS DROPBOX MOMENT!
I wont sleep on this.
Mighty is the future, it gives convenience to the users.
Who cares if it renders my bank account, email, password, etc on their server (don't we all already put a lot of trust/confidential data on Google?)
Users only care about CONVENIENCE.
Not sure how big the target market will be for this. Wonder if they've done research to see what %, or how many users have more than 10 tabs open at once? I don't see any performance issues at all even on machines from 2012 unless there's more than 10 tabs open, sometimes even more tabs can perform just fine.
As someone with a past life on the Ops/Sysadmin side of the house, this is a enterprise nightmare.
Enterprise may not be the targeted market at this point, but its a cash cow that would be hard to chase (Especially given M1 hurts the consumer side). A number of VDI/Terminal protocols solved this problem a long time ago.
Let's say my Computer is 32 Core Xeon with 128GB of Memory. If Chrome is already slow on my computer, what makes it fast on their server? Or do they limit the amount of Tabs per server to retain that speed? And if they do, what is stopping me from running hundreds if not thousands of tabs for one flat rate?
So I have a question. Does Mighty also improve my internet speed? There is a point on the landing page about breaking the bandwidth barrier, but I'm kinda confused. I have a pretty terrible internet connection, so will Mighty solve that too (along with the obvious faster Chrome value proposition)?
What they're trying to say is that for example, let's say it takes you 10 seconds to load a webpage because of about 100MiB of assets to download and process and ultimately render. It could possibly take them <1 second to download all the assets and render it and then send you the right DOM elements immediately.
EDIT: No clue if they're just streaming frames to you or they are giving you DOM elements. Latter would be cool but more annoying to pull off.
I'm super excited about Mighty - not only because they're solving a real problem that a lot of people have, but some of the underlying technology (ultra-low-latency streaming of headless apps) is applicable to a wide range of apps, not just Chrome. Hope the launch goes well!
For enterprise this could make sense, you decrease the service area (no desktop OS, only a browser). Enterprises often have difficulties scaling their remote desktop solutions. But then again, enterprises can have difficult requirements which could make scaling hard again.
While I am on the Mighty waitlist, I am skimming this thread to find quick alternatives for remote desktops that are fast? (shadow.tech waitlist until march 2022..OK..)
I will use Mighty but would like to find quick remote desktop software in general, any recommendations?
With The Mighty Suspender (formerly The Great Suspender), I'm much more CPU limited than RAM limited these days.
Will this measurably improve CPU usage for 300+ suspended tabs on an modern i7+ machine? What streaming tech is used to keep inactive tab CPU usage low?
A guess: Suhail did not begin with a mission of “reduce Figma’s RAM consumption.” He began with a mission of “disrupt Google’s monopoly on the browser.” Then he retconned the short term business plan he thought could achieve the true long term mission.
It will know every website you visit and also takes your money. It will be very easy to target you with ads. What a valuable idea for following people who chase speed over privacy.
IIRC, Amazon Silk browser used to promise something like this, but seems like settling on a traditional browser design. I wonder where it went and what pushed to that decision.
I thought as of ~2017 with Quantum all the major browsers are already using the GPU and parallelizing rendering as much as possible, how does Flow do it differently?
Product solves a valuable problem. Not gonna make any assumptions about price that's for the market to decide. If it works it works but excited to see feedback
I would love to see this on iPad and iPhone. I haven’t been too bothered by Apple’s rules, but in this case you can clearly see how they stifle innovation.
product solves a valuable problem so interested to see how the market reacts. Not gonna make any assumptions about price as that's up to the market to decide. i personally don't have problems with chrome so I obviously wouldn't pay that anything for it but other people might.
I think it has a broader vision. Basically it is laying the groundwork for lots off enterprises in specific verticals in future when they can switch to Mighty app in the cloud. The underlying assumption is that chrome as a platform should continue to grow.
From a HN lense this product feels silly, but the target market I believe is non engineers with beefy machines, who will view this as just a really fast browser. I think it's clever and all the best to the founding team! (ex mixpanel).
This has been posted to death at this point, and it blows my mind that people still think this is interesting. Remember how lackluster Stadia was with video games? Imagine how fun it will be with Airtable and Figma!
> Remember how lackluster Stadia was with video games?
First you don’t need to remember, it’s still there.
Second I don’t see your point, quite the contrary. Stadia is criticized for the lack of games and doubts about longevity, but it runs extremely well. On a decent wired connection people can’t tell the difference with running the game locally.
If anything, having tried Stadia makes my doubts disappear about this kind of technology.
With the added complication of video encoding not being particularly suited to text, colors getting mucked with, theme and accessibility settings different between client and host, etc.
In theory, you could stream Canvas updates similar to how you could stream DOM updates. In reality, turns out I was wrong and Mighty actually does stream video using hardware-accelerated H.265 encoders. [1]
Do we really need this though? Web browsers are slow because of all the javascript running on them, not because we all don't have Intel Xeons clocked in at 4 GHz.
I even have Firefox sitting at 5 GB ram usage right now for 150 tabs. I don't think I've ever had an issue with performance on browsing the Internet.
Most probably, the bottleneck is bandwidth/CPU for most users.
Typical pcs have 8gb ram. If Firefox is using 5gb then the system is under memory pressure.
Assuming they have slack or discord and Spotify running for example
Firefox is really only using 5 gigs because the system has so much RAM in the first place. It's just their default tuning options. If the RAM is needed for slack/discord/spotify, then just restart Firefox. It'll make use of a fraction of what is left.
You can also reduce Firefox RAM usage in about:config and by reducing the number of content processes in settings.
I worked on a similar solution to this and we had a price point of $5/month per user...
EDIT: 16GB of RAM and 16vCPUs. What a weird balancing of resources. Chrome is typically memory bound, not CPU bound. This also explains why it would be so wildly expensive compared to anything else out there.
EDIT2: A lot of the replies I'm getting seem to think my implication here is that no one would pay for this or it would be easier for people to build this themselves. I'm not saying that at all, I'm just critiquing the price point. There's huge market demand for browser isolation, I've worked on products in that field, I just haven't encountered any customers willing to pay $30-50/month for it.