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.
Solving problems caused by overengineering with overengineering ?
Isn't this just insane ?
If you have performance issues because you use a lots of tabs, just use a browser which is able to pause background tabs ?