[HN Gopher] Mighty Makes Google Chrome Faster
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Mighty Makes Google Chrome Faster
Author : amasad
Score : 240 points
Date : 2021-04-27 15:26 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mightyapp.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mightyapp.com)
| xkfm wrote:
| 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.
| fumar wrote:
| My off-the-shelf solution is Safari.
| leopaacc wrote:
| Safari is nice on iOS, a big fan of Brave Browser on Android/
| Windows, YouTube is positively snappy vis-a-vis Chrome
| speedgoose wrote:
| Safari is the new internet explorer though. It's popular so you
| must support it, but it has bugs and it requires specific
| development.
| sidchilling wrote:
| Is there a technical way that would prevent Mighty to read my
| passwords (if it wanted to)? Or do I have to trust Mighty won't
| do that?
| mxschumacher wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces
| afro88 wrote:
| When I pinch zoom on the images on my iphone it crashes my device
| :o
| graeme wrote:
| 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.
| s3r3nity wrote:
| Nah I'm good - I pay to keep those simple. My more complex
| workflow needs can stay on my desktop / laptop.
| IceWreck wrote:
| Puffin Browser did this, web pages were rendered in the cloud,
| but I dont think it was a video stream.
|
| I used it as a kid to play Farmville (Adobe Flash based) on my
| iPad.
| pudmaidai wrote:
| I'm almost sure they streamed the Flash player, not the whole
| page. There was no other way to render flash without
| streaming a video.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| Opera Mini used to work similarly to this app back in 2005ish.
| There was even a version for the iPhone in 2010.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Mini
| marmalar wrote:
| I will use this to stream Inception
| freebuju wrote:
| 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.
| pdovy wrote:
| 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!
| qshaman wrote:
| 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.
| jlrubin wrote:
| Not a fan of the privacy implication of using such services,
| maybe an open source self hosted version would be cool.
| fulafel wrote:
| 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.
| jlrubin wrote:
| Care to elaborate?
|
| This is strictly worse for privacy than a VPN run by the same
| company, no?
| contravariant wrote:
| You mean like running chrome over x11? Or RDP for that matter.
| jlrubin wrote:
| i've done this before and performance was meh.
| [deleted]
| torstenvl wrote:
| What does "10x less memory" mean? 10x means 1000%. I don't see
| how one application can use 1000% less memory than another.
| farrelmahaztra wrote:
| I think they mean you'll use 1/10th the amount of memory Chrome
| would use on your machine.
| jedimastert wrote:
| I need a screen cast of someone playing Stadia through it
| possiblerobot wrote:
| This product was clearly designed for a pre-M1 world.
| beefman wrote:
| Jonathan Blow's comment on twitter[1]
|
| _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:
|
| https://top500.org/lists/top500/1995/06/
|
| 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?_
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387100601784233985
| BoorishBears wrote:
| 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.
|
| -
|
| 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
| philipkglass wrote:
| 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.
| Bancakes wrote:
| 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.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| You can probably run them on a modern CPU, though. An
| i5-5400K runs at 340 gigaflops... single-threaded.
| jonas21 wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/supercomputers/summit
| philipkglass wrote:
| 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.)
| Barrin92 wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| 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.
| ksec wrote:
| 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?
| andrewzah wrote:
| This is like a parody of the current state of affairs in modern
| web development. Except it's actually serious.
|
| Sigh. I am so disappointed in our industry that tools like this
| even need to exist. It really makes me want to quit programming
| entirely.
| andiareso wrote:
| 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.
| heipei wrote:
| 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.
| smoldesu wrote:
| 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!
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| 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.
| divbzero wrote:
| Agreed. My guess is that Mighty streams DOM updates across
| the wire instead of streaming video.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Would that work for canvas-based apps like Figma, though?
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| > 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.
| bg24 wrote:
| 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.
|
| Individual consumer - Not sure.
| Saint_Genet wrote:
| People really just doesn't care about infosec, do they?
| gorgonzolachz wrote:
| 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?
| lacker wrote:
| 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.
| robbrown451 wrote:
| 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"?
| sakras wrote:
| 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?
| northerdome wrote:
| 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.
| zxienin wrote:
| Why do I have the thought, that this is really not about Chrome?
| How about "Mighty Makes ${xyz} Faster"?
|
| Its VNC. And Cloudflare has pitched same [0] with different value
| dimension (security).
|
| [0] https://www.cloudflare.com/teams/browser-isolation/
| sergiomattei wrote:
| 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.
|
| It's easier to use.
| jraph wrote:
| 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.
| ProAm wrote:
| 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.
| stri8ed wrote:
| How does interactions with local resources e.g. uploading a
| file work with Mighty, or VNC?
| liuliu wrote:
| VNC let you choose between slow or low-quality.
|
| Low-latency (in terms of <10ms) high-fidelity (4k@60fps) video
| streaming is not a solved problem. It is hard engineering.
| SandPhoenix wrote:
| I've been following Mighty's development for a while through
| the founder's twitter. It seems to me like they are doing so
| much more than putting Chrome behind VNC. They've been doing a
| lot of deep technical work [0] to make sure that the experience
| of using Chrome through Mighty is as frictionless as possible,
| like delving into Chrome's scrolling algorithm to get it just
| right [1]. I don't think it's fair to dismiss what they've
| achieved on the basis that VNC can do it too, but much worse.
|
| [0] https://twitter.com/Suhail/status/1337251861175230469
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/Suhail/status/1259516709074956291
| tpae wrote:
| Does it work with plugins and extensions?
| shay_ker wrote:
| At the lowest price point, i.e. 30/month, you'd be paying $1440
| every 4 years... for a browser??
|
| I kind of understand the price point if you're getting a whole
| "computer in the cloud" kind of thing, but for _just_ a browser,
| it feels like a rip off.
|
| And you're capped by internet speeds too... yeah that's rough.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| 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.
| shay_ker wrote:
| 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!
| merwanedr wrote:
| 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.
| shay_ker wrote:
| > 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.
| yc-kraln wrote:
| I don't disagree that people will pay for this.
|
| 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.
| easton wrote:
| 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.
| dsr_ wrote:
| 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?
| up6w6 wrote:
| Isn't it better to load the web pages remotely and just send all
| the data compressed instead of streaming the screen ?
| ju_sh wrote:
| 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.
| ronyfadel wrote:
| 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.
| doubleaa93 wrote:
| Is this for multi platform ? Linux , Mac, Windows?
| animanoir wrote:
| lol.
| danpalmer wrote:
| 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.
| seoaeu wrote:
| > 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.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| 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.
| yongjik wrote:
| 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 EUR64.26/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 ~$25/mo per
| user just to pay the cloud provider.
| gpm wrote:
| 25/mo = 300/year... if you figure that box is equivalent to a
| 1200$ 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.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > 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, which isn't much more than a $50/month Mighty
| service.
|
| > 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.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| > 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.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Agreed, addressed this in my last paragraph.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| It s 2022 and humanity discovers... drumroll... The Terminal
|
| I don't know what to think of this. Looks like a bad joke
|
| Abd the fact that it's all over my twitter... Did I take the blue
| pill?
| andrewguenther wrote:
| $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.
| jpalomaki wrote:
| 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.
| Jommi wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| (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.
| fyrabanks wrote:
| 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.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > 2. Longer liftetime of company computers. No need to
| upgrade to M1 yet.
|
| An M1 MacBook Air can be had for $999.
|
| That's equivalent to 20 months of a $50/month service.
| heipei wrote:
| 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...
| Jommi wrote:
| 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.
| nly wrote:
| Many companies provide their software engineers with laptops
| that have 64GB of RAM as standard.
|
| The whole pricing thing is super interesting though, and I'm
| glad you're having success
| suhail wrote:
| 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.
| andrewguenther wrote:
| 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!
| onion2k wrote:
| _But $30-50 feels really high._
|
| 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."
| heliodor wrote:
| 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.
| andrewguenther wrote:
| 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.
| pawelmi wrote:
| > 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.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Maybe people are "enjoying" the Web in the way they
| consume $30-50/mo products, as if it is some fine movies
| or books, justifying the price.
| hkt wrote:
| I guess nobody wants to leave money on the table either.
| Easier to cut prices than hike them.
| secondbreakfast wrote:
| For people who spend $250+ per seat in Salesforce, $30/mo for
| a blazing fast web design/coding/collaboration experience is
| - if anything - cheap.
|
| Cue @patio11...
|
| PS very impressed with MightyApp - joined the waitlist.
| Congrats :)
| breck wrote:
| 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.
| mosr wrote:
| Really interesting service.
|
| 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).
| ianwalter wrote:
| 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.
| bleuarff wrote:
| 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.
| airstrike wrote:
| Looks like JB Kempf is the Shadow CTO
|
| It's one great piece of tech, so I'm not surprised he'd
| be interested in trying to turn it around
| np32 wrote:
| From JB Kempf of VLC, and supported by Xavier Niel who is
| a huge VC in France and founder of Free, which totally
| disrupted the ISP mafia in France.
|
| This video is a great interview of JB + story of Shadow
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0c1CJT8X8A&t=20s
| ianwalter wrote:
| Thanks for clarifying. Seems like a lot of companies in
| this space (at least the ones geared towards gaming) have
| had to pivot.
| kossTKR wrote:
| Shadow is absolutely incredible. I can stream 4K 60HZ with
| 10ms of latency to a datacenter in a country nearby.
|
| I think they are close to bankruptcy though, and signing up
| takes ages.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| Interesting to hear this. I really want to use this
| service.
| suhail wrote:
| 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.
| andrewguenther wrote:
| 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.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| I wonder how M1+ Macs will impact your business, or whether
| anyone using one would benefit performance-wise from Mighty.
| arikr wrote:
| Not for many professionals it's not.
|
| 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.
| ordx wrote:
| What kind of target audience can drop this much monthly, but
| can't afford a computer with 16GB of RAM? Genuinely curious.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| 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.
| heipei wrote:
| 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?
| hkt wrote:
| Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs. (The UK's IRS)
|
| 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.
| andrewguenther wrote:
| 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.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| Right, and that's something that's also on the market,
| e.g. https://shadow.tech/
|
| _edit_ Apparently that solution uses (or used)
| unencrypted connections, making it unsuitable for most
| uses. https://old.reddit.com/r/ShadowPC/comments/a6hi2c/a
| nyone_use...
| arikr wrote:
| I have 16GB of ram and certain sites are still slow and
| chrome still lags
| andiareso wrote:
| 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?
|
| Serious questions.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| At this price point, wouldn't it make more sense to just buy a
| more powerful computer? Just buying more RAM would probably get
| the job done.
| thirdlamp wrote:
| The servers that mighty running on will also be upgraded
| overtime, so you don't really need to update
| danShumway wrote:
| > you don't really need to update
|
| 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.
| fyrabanks wrote:
| 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.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| You can rent a xeon server w 32 gb ram with gigabit internet
| and SSD for $30/mo from hetzner.
|
| Or spend $600 and get an always-on home PC that you can vnc to
| with your hi speed connection
|
| On the other hand, if this catches on, then i can see people
| airbnb-ing their servers
|
| on the third hand, if this catches on , users will soon realize
| they can spend the $30 to buy the extra RAM they re missing
| thrwn_frthr_awy wrote:
| 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.
| Bancakes wrote:
| Because inevitably someone will make a FOSS version of this
| service and post a one-click docker image.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| 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.
| ben174 wrote:
| If Elon catches wind of this we'll have robo-PC-taxi service
| soon.
| quadrature wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
| qshaman wrote:
| You can reference the same link on every Show HN ever
| posted here. Is not the "i gotcha" argument you think it
| is.
| ebin123 wrote:
| https://zedshaw.com/blog/2018-03-25-the-billionaires-vs-
| bran...
| cblconfederate wrote:
| you don't scare me! there are such comments about
| everything that has ever launched and the vast majority of
| them were right ;)
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| 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.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| 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.
| simcop2387 wrote:
| "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame"
|
| https://m.slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-
| releases...
|
| My favorite example
| cblconfederate wrote:
| i like how nobody is addressing my original points
| [deleted]
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| 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?
| raverbashing wrote:
| 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"
| whiddershins wrote:
| Netflix's Creative Cloud clusters are more targeted towards my
| use case, but I get the gist and it might be really seriously
| valuable.
| swyx wrote:
| 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.
| dpweb wrote:
| I totally would but it better be REALLY fast
| the_arun wrote:
| Why cannot Google do what Mightyapp is doing for free?
| andrewguenther wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| Project Stream & Stadia happened, iirc.
| andrewguenther wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| True, but I do believe there was a natural evolution.
| Stadia started as a Chrome project, for example.
| p0sixlang wrote:
| That's like expecting home depot to give you a free plot of
| land to put your shed on. Servers aren't cheap.
| blfr wrote:
| _$30-50 /month is a wild price point for this_
|
| _16GB of RAM and 16vCPUs. What a weird balancing of
| resources._
|
| They are probably doing things somewhat inefficiently in the
| beginning, like renting whole, generic VMs for every customer.
| Both the price and the resource balance should get better when
| they catch a little scale.
| timgriffin77 wrote:
| Ah yes, because someone who has thought about this problem for
| 5 minutes is absolutely more knowledgable about the space than
| a team that has spent 2 years building it. Hats off to you for
| the top troll comment.
| andrewguenther wrote:
| I actually worked on browser isolation products for seven
| years. No need to be rude.
|
| EDIT: Just because the attitude of this comment really grinds
| my gears: Here's my patent for network-based content
| rendering which was submitted back in 2017:
| https://patents.google.com/patent/US10878187B1
|
| Believe me, I've thought about this a _little_ more than 5
| minutes.
| simfree wrote:
| That is pretty messed up that the USPTO granted Amazon a
| patent for what Opera was doing decades ago.
| orf wrote:
| The first troll comment I'm reading here is yours. Just
| because you stare at some toast for two years until you start
| to see an image of Jesus in it doesn't mean someone else
| can't point out that it's just a burn mark.
|
| 16GB of memory for 16vCPUs is a very weird balancing of
| resources in anyone's books. Either their definition of a
| "vCPU" is actually a far smaller CPU share in order to pump
| up the numbers or they are overselling CPU hard.
|
| And yes, 50$ a month is also a high price point for this.
| [deleted]
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| 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?)
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _V8 is incredibly fast, but front-end developers have somehow
| found a way to slow it down_
|
| You're not wrong with your commentary which is basically
| surmised by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
|
| > _Chrome uses a ton of memory. Is this necessary?_
|
| 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.
|
| Edit: The launch blog post is worth a read:
| https://blog.mightyapp.com/mightys-secret-plan-to-invent-the...
| seoaeu wrote:
| 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 75C//month amortized over three years. It
| seems hard to justify paying 40 _times_ that amount for this
| service
| ori_b wrote:
| > _Correct me if I am wrong, but to an extent, isn 't the
| memory bloat inherent to Chrome's sandboxing model?_
|
| It just puts each tab into a native process, so there's no
| inherent need for the per tab sandbox to be more heavyweight
| than a native process.
| sabellito wrote:
| > but front-end developers have somehow found a way to slow it
| down [...]
|
| That take is a bit shallow, do you really believe that is the
| crux of the issue of V8 rendering being slow sometimes?
| morelisp wrote:
| 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.
| andrewzah wrote:
| Everything lately in the frontend world seems to be
| optimized for developer comfort, not performance.
| edhelas wrote:
| What about no ?
| prempv wrote:
| 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.
| claytoneast wrote:
| Why would you use a browser to visualize 1m nodes?
| MorganGallant wrote:
| 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!
| pototo666 wrote:
| This is another big if true thing. It could lead to a potential
| dominating OS.
|
| I would invest 1/10 of my annual savings into it, if possible.
| Are there any product for me to do that?
| pea wrote:
| 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.
| edhelas wrote:
| Not sure if you are sarcastic there or serious :D
| throway7654 wrote:
| 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.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| 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.
| andrew_ wrote:
| Has anyone drawn parallels to BrowserStack?
| sllewe wrote:
| 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.
| jmacd wrote:
| A Mac with the M1 chip was the greatest improvement of perceived
| speed of my browser (and internet generally).
| speedgoose wrote:
| 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.
| pjerem wrote:
| Is this really solving performance issues by streaming a video
| over the internet ?
|
| 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 ?
| agotterer wrote:
| This reminds me of blade computing from the 90s!
| aeontech wrote:
| I thought you were being sarcastic or joking but then I opened
| the link... truly this is not the future I thought we would be
| living in
| threevox wrote:
| 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
| kzrdude wrote:
| I have 8 quintillion tabs but with auto tab suspend
| (firefox addon). More or less a garbage collector..
| astrange wrote:
| Is there evidence that adblockers reduce browser memory
| use?
| lacker wrote:
| 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.
| arghwhat wrote:
| If you were talking about heavy CAD stuff, maybe.
|
| 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.
| nix0n wrote:
| > exposing all information accessed and sent, including
| passwords, to a third-party company
|
| They're marketing it to people whose _Google Chrome_ is
| running too slow. That's already being exposed to Google.
| alex_smart wrote:
| Do you have any evidence that Chrome shares all the
| passwords/authentication tokens/cookies of the user with
| Google?
| edhelas wrote:
| Basically reinventing the mainframe in 2021
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainframe_computer. Or the
| Minitel for the French folks
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
|
| Compressing and streaming pages was kind of the idea behind
| Opera Mini as well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Mini
|
| So nothing really new...
| pradn wrote:
| Amazon's Silk browser for its Fire devices also offload
| processing to remote machines. I'm unsure if they are still
| doing that.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Silk
| w0mbat wrote:
| 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.
| lacker wrote:
| 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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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.
| nr2x wrote:
| Hey, if we want to push past 4 degrees global warming in the
| next decade we'll need to get creative.
| edhelas wrote:
| Some will tell you "yes but here you group together
| computers" so it's energy saving...
|
| Are we also mentioning the fact that the whole browser
| navigation goes through a third party service ?
|
| GDPR will be fun on that one.
| nr2x wrote:
| Jokingly meant that instead of reducing useless CPU
| overhead from adtech/inefficient scripts, we're building
| yet another layer of waste on top.
| nutek wrote:
| 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.
| klohto wrote:
| 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.
| pjerem wrote:
| > The market clearly exists
|
| 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 )
| klohto wrote:
| Ha! Try to pray people away from their Chrome browsers,
| good luck :) They would rather pay than switch.
|
| But yes, I agree on the sustainability future. Afraid there
| isn't a solution other than Chrome losing market share or
| Google implementing the feature.
| pjerem wrote:
| Yep, so they are not going to switch to Mighty either ;)
| Jiejeing wrote:
| Who is "people"? The only people I know who are dead-set
| on using chrome are front-end developers who work hard at
| making it the new IE6
| michaelt wrote:
| 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.
| incrudible wrote:
| 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.
| globular-toast wrote:
| This is a joke right? Surely this is a joke...
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| 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?
| thirdlamp wrote:
| 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.
| tzm wrote:
| 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.
| srihariharan wrote:
| 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
| [deleted]
| incrudible wrote:
| > 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.
| reom_tobit wrote:
| 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!
| ALittleLight wrote:
| 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?
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Isn't it easier to just remote-desktop to your other laptop?
|
| If i hate doing that without paying i can setup a monthy
| donation to UNICEF
| shadowfax92 wrote:
| Really curious to try this out. I signed-up on the site, but a
| demo link would be fantastic :)
| JakaJancar wrote:
| 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.
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| i hate this planet
| morelisp wrote:
| Then good news, between modern software development
| practices, NFTs, and just plain fucking laziness and
| incompetence, there won't anything left of it soon!
| intergalplan wrote:
| If only we could render web pages server-side and send some
| kind of highly-compressible lightweight drawing instructions to
| the client.
| skavi wrote:
| Apparently Google's Blimp[0] project was exactly that before
| being abandoned.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/crosswalk-project/chromium-
| crosswalk/tree...
| andiareso wrote:
| 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.
| ampdepolymerase wrote:
| Most remote X server setups have high latency.
| intergalplan wrote:
| I was making an observation about HTML, perhaps too cutely.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| ... on a vm that runs on a browser that runs in an OS that runs
| in a VM that runs on another OS
| mxschumacher wrote:
| utility companies and chip-makers really don't have to worry
| about going out of business any time soon
| cblconfederate wrote:
| .. and then people complain about Bitcoin
| mxschumacher wrote:
| Bitcoin trumps the absurdity of the waste outlined above
| and gets worse over time
| ampdepolymerase wrote:
| If Mighty is feeling cavalier they can cut some of the JS
| sandboxing and go straight to hypervisor level sandboxing.
| runbsd wrote:
| this is nightmare inducing
| [deleted]
| tjchear wrote:
| I'm no designer, but I can feel the pain whenever I pan around a
| huge figma project in Chrome.
|
| Imagine all the enterprise customers who'd be willing to pay for
| this so their designers and engineers can be more productive.
| eertami wrote:
| 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.
| contravariant wrote:
| Oh dear god, designers aren't going to start making webpages
| designed to run in _this_ monstrosity, are they?
| donkarma wrote:
| 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.
| pacifika wrote:
| 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
| capitainenemo wrote:
| 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.
|
| But Firefox is really very good with crazy numbers of tabs
| these days. https://metafluff.com/2017/07/21/i-am-a-tab-
| hoarder/
| cpeterso wrote:
| I wonder how ad networks feel about serving ads to IP addresses
| in data centers. Will Netflix allow clients running in cloud VMs
| to stream DRM video?
| rmason wrote:
| 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.
| raverbashing wrote:
| 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)
|
| To me what they excel in is in hubris.
| tyingq wrote:
| 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 :)
| blntechie wrote:
| 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).
| tyingq wrote:
| Clever, but a bit complex. I wonder if what happens if you
| use the file dialog instead of drag/drog.
| trollied wrote:
| 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?
|
| I'd like to be proved wrong.
| Androider wrote:
| 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.
| nix0n wrote:
| Many businesses are incapable of thinking more than one
| financial quarter ahead.
| divbzero wrote:
| 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.
| Androider wrote:
| 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.
| smaddock wrote:
| 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.
| rochacon wrote:
| 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.
| sfblah wrote:
| Are people actually working on this internally at companies? I
| haven't run across it. But, reading this post, it does seem
| plausible.
| [deleted]
| iamchandra wrote:
| 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.
|
| Kudos team!
| rickreynoldssf wrote:
| Yeah, um hmm, I'm going to let some computer in the cloud see
| EVERYTHING I do in browser and see all my key strokes. What could
| go wrong? Sign me up!
| IceWreck wrote:
| The Cloud is just someone else's computer.
|
| 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.
| Liron wrote:
| > 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.
| yunohn wrote:
| > Plenty of people who can't afford a fast computer
|
| I'm pretty sure this set of people can't afford 50$ for
| Mighty either.
| intergalplan wrote:
| 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.
| ufo wrote:
| I'm curious how much battery the video streaming would
| use here. Wifi tends to use a fair bit of power.
| intergalplan wrote:
| 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.
| mfer wrote:
| 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.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Harder to find a fast connection than a PC. PCs are still
| cheap
| firebaze wrote:
| I'm not sure people who cannot afford a fast computer will be
| able to spend their money on a service like this.
|
| I'm quite probably overlooking something and I'd be curious
| to learn what.
| halikular wrote:
| 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.
| mxschumacher wrote:
| 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?
| LegitShady wrote:
| At their price point buying more ram is a cheaper
| alternative. Most folks have little use for dedicated gpu.
| mxschumacher wrote:
| 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.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Isnt video streaming more intensive?
| andiareso wrote:
| Seriously though. They must be doing some crazy magic to
| make this claim...
| api wrote:
| 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.
| andiareso wrote:
| 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.
| api wrote:
| 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.
| andiareso wrote:
| 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
| rakoo wrote:
| 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.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| I am in the same club :)
|
| 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.
|
| I hope they crash quick.
| dheera wrote:
| 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.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Yeah, but this is a VC backed venture, they won't do that.
|
| The cloud could be the worst thing that can happen to the
| Internet.
|
| Privacy and Ownership should not be treated as abstract
| ideas.
| intergalplan wrote:
| 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)
| mdoms wrote:
| > 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.
| transhumanism34 wrote:
| 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!
| alberth wrote:
| So is this essentially Remote Desktop for the web?
| rank0 wrote:
| 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...
| jgalt212 wrote:
| I'm not sure I see what it's all about, but Paul G seems to think
| the world of them.
|
| > I love how friendly Replit and MIghty are to one another. One
| day they will divide the world between them.
|
| https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1357097710734749700?lang=en
| illegalmemory wrote:
| 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.
| danso wrote:
| 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.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| > _Mighty streams your browser from a powerful computer in the
| cloud._
|
| So Mainframes and dumb AS400 terminals are back in vogue again.
| Computer technology is truly cyclical in nature.
| kjakm wrote:
| >> "No more cookie banners"
|
| ...I want cookie banners. When implemented correctly they let me
| turn off the cookies I don't want.
|
| >> "We commit to keeping your browser history private"
|
| Are there limits to this? Law enforcement for example? A company
| having your full browsing history sounds like a privacy
| nightmare.
| enumjorge wrote:
| 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.
| ethanyu94 wrote:
| 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.
| jacobolus wrote:
| 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.
| ethanyu94 wrote:
| 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.
| jacobolus wrote:
| 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.
| ethanyu94 wrote:
| 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
| adhoc_slime wrote:
| > 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?
| ethanyu94 wrote:
| 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.
| fyrabanks wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| ethanyu94 wrote:
| 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.
| therouwboat wrote:
| 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."
| ethanyu94 wrote:
| Sure, you can choose to insult them. Meanwhile Mighty is
| building a solution for them.
| therouwboat wrote:
| I dont think they are real. Btw. I have 170 tabs open
| right now and I really need like 5 of them, but firefox
| uses 2 gigs of ram so it doesnt matter.
| dijit wrote:
| Didn't Opera do this back in the day? Like, exactly the same
| thing? It was awful.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/operabrowser/comments/ls6on/can_som...
| kaibee wrote:
| This would've been a hilarious April Fools joke.
| dang wrote:
| " _Don 't be snarky._"
|
| " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| SomaticPirate wrote:
| With BoxedWine[1] this might be a the future of Windows in the
| Cloud! /s 1. https://github.com/danoon2/Boxedwine
| dreadpiratee wrote:
| For a product that claims to speed up the performance of Chrome,
| the website is awfully choppy and slow
| renewiltord wrote:
| Wonder if one could use this to bypass geolocks on Netflix
| content.
| pudmaidai wrote:
| I don't think it would be cost effective. VPNs cost less than
| $10
| renewiltord wrote:
| Fair point.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| >Who can access my data/browsing history?
|
| >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.
|
| What about law enforcement?
| trishume wrote:
| 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.
| afavour wrote:
| 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.
| danpalmer wrote:
| 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.
| nc wrote:
| For all the people talking about price.. it's a cheap extremely
| fast computer not an expensive browser.
| dreadpiratee wrote:
| For a product that claims to make chrome faster, your website is
| unbelievably choppy
| kziemio wrote:
| 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.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| This ridiculous. The rendering of a thin client streamed from a
| hosted VM.
|
| How is it not an April joke?
|
| There's something rotten in the state of Denmark.
| onli wrote:
| 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.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| 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.
| Axsuul wrote:
| > 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.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| 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).
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Mini#Functionality
| 83457 wrote:
| 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.
| capableweb wrote:
| 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.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| It's an idiom from Hamlet.
| capableweb wrote:
| Doh, thanks for educating a non-educated fool like me :)
| sabellito wrote:
| No one is expected to know Hamlet. That does't make you a
| "non-educated fool", yo.
| selectnull wrote:
| https://literarydevices.net/something-is-rotten-in-the-
| state...
| m3kw9 wrote:
| I'm thinking too many tabs opened is actually an UI/UX Solvable
| problem
| dandellion wrote:
| 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.
| vbsteven wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| flakiness wrote:
| 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.
| neilv wrote:
| The requests are made direct from cloud servers?
|
| 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.
| bithavoc wrote:
| 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.
| lacker wrote:
| You sure can launch like this. Go for it :D
| ahstilde wrote:
| launching a waitlist is standard. Dropbox did it in 2007,
| Robinhood in 2014, etc.
| AJRF wrote:
| 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?
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| 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.
| billiam wrote:
| Why not just educate workers and students to put more RAM on
| their laptops?
| pudmaidai wrote:
| Because the people who made this are not the same people who
| profit from selling more RAM.
|
| Education should come from the hardware sellers, if anything.
| js2 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| johanbcn wrote:
| 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.
|
| That talk was from five years ago.
| astrange wrote:
| This product seems to be a modern version of Opera mini (2005)
| or a Citrix client (which I used for web browsing over dialup
| in... the 90s?).
| whazor wrote:
| 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.
| kgin wrote:
| Are there people who will pay $30/month to run Chrome in the
| cloud rather than just use Safari?
| mxschumacher wrote:
| is Chrome to blame or the web applications we typically run?
| nepthar wrote:
| I too am left scratching my head trying to understand who the
| intended target audience is.
| feelthepress wrote:
| How does Mighty make Chrome faster? Is it a Chrome plugin?
| sanketsaurav wrote:
| 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?
| sim_card_map wrote:
| Just wait a couple of years until more software bloat and M1
| becoming slow. Wirth's law.
| vthallam wrote:
| 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?
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| 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.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| "If everyone's on M1, no one is"
| kristofferR wrote:
| Yeah, I looked through the page and didn't see anything that
| looked better than my M1 Macbook Air experience.
| incrudible wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
| api wrote:
| 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.
| incrudible wrote:
| 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.
| swyx wrote:
| first off, cool HN username
|
| 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.
| heipei wrote:
| 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.
| javierbyte wrote:
| 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.
| whiddershins wrote:
| The impact of the m1 in the way you are describing, is likely
| to be a moment in time.
|
| I believe the blog post addresses this diagonally.
| asadlionpk wrote:
| I am in the same bucket as this. I wonder if suhail expected
| this / derisked for this.
| breck wrote:
| 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.
| postalrat wrote:
| It's like OSX users had a taste of what most non-OSX users have
| been experiencing for years and suddenly the future is here.
| seriousquestion wrote:
| It's shocking that Paul G thinks this the future.
|
| 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".
|
| https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387126330961981441
| austincheney wrote:
| 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.
| passivate wrote:
| https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1387065619011543040
|
| >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.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Just in time for a dystopian cyberpunk future baby! I for one
| have already started work on my nifty "cyber deck"
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| 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.
| Bancakes wrote:
| I don't see any apple M1 dev boards.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| 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.
| andiareso wrote:
| 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.
| qshaman wrote:
| Not too shocking. -
| https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/mighty and -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer)
| breck wrote:
| 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.
|
| Technology moves in sin waves.
| [deleted]
| thih9 wrote:
| > "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.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Dumb terminals weren't niche, and have always been extremely
| accessible.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| How much google surfing did you do on your dumb terminal?
| Bam! Thought so.
| [deleted]
| est31 wrote:
| 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.
| bgrgndzz wrote:
| 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.
| transhumanism34 wrote:
| 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?
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| This idea is not future-neutral. It is VC backed and not by a
| nobody.
|
| I don't want it to succeed because it is dangerous.
| transhumanism34 wrote:
| 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
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| I am very rarely anti-innovation. But when I think
| something is wrong I can't help but not being
| indifferent.
|
| In this case I don't think this tech really qualifies as
| an innovation, it is mostly the wrong patch to fix a real
| problem, bloatware.
| megous wrote:
| 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.
|
| I can certainly understand the negativity.
|
| As a niche service, why not?
| drusepth wrote:
| 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.
| Graffur wrote:
| "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
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| 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?
| fabiospampinato wrote:
| 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.
| FaisalAbid wrote:
| 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).
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| I wonder what the forensics community think about this.
| rsa25519 wrote:
| > No more cookie banners or ads.
|
| I'm not sure how I feel about making money off ad-blocking.
| paulborza wrote:
| Just use the new Chromium-based Edge. It comes with Sleeping Tabs
| feature https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2020/12/09/sleeping-
| tabs...
| alasdair_ wrote:
| 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.
| ori_b wrote:
| Don't worry. It's a Google browser with a Microsoft logo.
| speedgoose wrote:
| And Google's trackers replaced by Microsoft's trackers.
| That's a major difference.
| postalrat wrote:
| I'll trust microsoft over any ad tech company's trackers.
| celsoazevedo wrote:
| Microsoft runs their own ad network.
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