Mighty Makes Google Chrome Faster
mightyapp.com
mightyapp.com
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.
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.
edit Apparently that solution uses (or used) unencrypted connections, making it unsuitable for most uses. https://old.reddit.com/r/ShadowPC/comments/a6hi2c/anyone_use...
I worked there and they had these awful surface pros with hardly any memory. Their solution was to use AWS's hosted Desktop for Developers. It.. sort of worked OK.
This, by the way, was not just for a few people: because of Brexit there are thousands of people all working on making the new systems for customs etc work.
I suspect organisations that are undergoing digital transformation (as they are) will have this kind of setup. It was rife through the whole place: rubbish old IT stuff rubbing shoulders with modern SaaS.
I suspect it's more so companies can pretend all their old rules about keeping data on site can remain. Still, it's better than going back to the office.
Bless home working.
Serious questions.
Sure, but investing $2/day pays for an M1 MacBook Air in under 2 years. That's why so many of us are struggling to understand this.
It might make sense in the context of companies with weird IT department restrictions that won't let them buy new laptops but will let them spend $50/month on a service.
> it was priced higher, we’d have more incentives for companies to come and make more great software
This is also a strange logic. The definition of innovation and the benefit of competition is to drive down prices for consumers, not up. Let's not turn software into some sort of Veblen good.
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
Might as well exercise the less-used part of the brain where you try to imagine the positive aspects of something.
https://m.slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases...
My favorite example
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?
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"
He quotes a post from Drew thanking Brandon for his remarks, and spends the rest of the essay saying the thanking is an uncalled-for "level of retribution", "effective slander case". But both exchanges between Drew and Brandon (the one in 2007 as well as the one in 2018) seem friendly to me.
My impression is that when linking to Brandon's post, people are usually saying "a company can still succeed by offering something that was previously possible, by making it easier to do" and "don't be discouraged by criticism saying it's already possible". They're not saying that Brandon was a bad person or that his feedback wasn't useful or anything.
Zed also makes a big deal about Brandon not being able to delete his post - but I remember dang mentioning that they would delete posts when asked, but everyone so far has agreed to a compromise of removing the username but keeping the post, which does seem like the best solution in a case like this (where the content of the post has historical value but the author might want to disavow it).
I think the initial HN comment was justified albeit a bit nerdy, the marketing was just poor at the time. Not being able to delete a post is sort of a problem with all written media, the internet is not your group of friends at a bar. Being able to distance yourself from something that you've previously said might be a solution, an "I stand corrected" button might be a solution. Perhaps just being able to add a strikethough to an old post.
I m sure the makers have done their research and found $30/month is the optimal price of a browser of a browser. Surely a lot of businesses will be convinced it's worth the money because $bigCorp uses it as well, and cargo cults work, I'm just pointing out what money can buy at that price point.
Then someone might figure that they can rent servers for $30 /mo and sell 10 remote desktop subscriptions on it.
The BBC loses an additional 10% of users for every extra second it takes for its site to load. And when Yahoo! reduced its page load time by just 0.4 seconds, traffic increased by 9%
1 second delay reduces customer satisfaction by 16%
The longer a webpage takes to load, the more its bounce rate will skyrocket.
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.
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.
Cue @patio11...
PS very impressed with MightyApp - joined the waitlist. Congrats :)
but invite list, wooo, I got to get on it
positioning for consumer/prosumer is interesting and invites changing the math! opera was notable here as a web accelerator, but also a warning sign for pursuing this as a VC-funded businesses. the internet is bigger now..
good luck to the mighty team!
Congrats on all the work here. Browser streaming isn't easy stuff!
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.
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."
Apple keeps applying this strategy since 1990s.
Tesla bootstrapped itself off $80k cars, and only now is expanding to the "reasonable" $30k market segment.
You may not need everyone jump on your service just yet, you can start with the most needing it who are moneyed. Then you expand, economies of scale kick in, and you can introduce lower and lower price tiers, and people enjoy falling prices and getting a bargain.
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).
It's one great piece of tech, so I'm not surprised he'd be interested in trying to turn it around
This video is a great interview of JB + story of Shadow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0c1CJT8X8A&t=20s
Their tech is incredible, by far the best performing IMHO.
I think they are close to bankruptcy though, and signing up takes ages.
Technology is amazing.
Fwiw, we started by streaming Windows and pivoted away.
It's not clear to me that Shadow's business is sustainable. Windows licensing alone for virtualization across end-users if you buy from a reseller is $11/mo/user alone. I only know because we tried and became a reseller briefly. They also seem to use consumer GPUs that violate NVIDIA's licensing and agreements. Maybe they know something we don't.
They claim to, in reality they are sliced Quadro/Tesla cards that get a GTX 1080's worth of performance. I was wondering about the Windows licensing myself, not clear how they got around that.
In any case, even at $20 p/m it feels like a strong value. That ~$1000 every four years - without ever being stuck with an out of date machine.
Today I want to visualize 100,000 rows across 1,000 dimensions in 10 different tabs.
Between Today and Someday there are endless things I want to do.
Same architecture as: https://v20.ohayo.computer/?filename=discovery-of-elements.o...
Wondering if anyone did a test (speedometer or something similar) comparing Safari on average macbook vs $30/mo mightyapp.
At the end of the day your search history should be fed into a personal search engine which digests the data and figures out which pages were most useful to you (maybe by helpful browser buttons)…and uploads that into some open database. This can then be the basis for a new type of search engine.
It could be implemented trivially on something like Mighty, since everyones browsers run in the same datacenter.
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.
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.
The whole pricing thing is super interesting though, and I'm glad you're having success
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.
yes! Ideally I have around 500 tabs that I all need. I for example let your comment sit here for a while unsure if I was going to reply to it. There are more topics on HN currently under investigation. Each spawns a series of extra tabs. Cloud browsers, whole OS in the cloud, what hapend to paperspace? I open several articles that I may or may not read. When I get back to this discussion I look over the tabs it spawned and continue exploring while closing old ones... There is a window with music, one with youtube videos I might want to watch/comment on with the further research tabs they spawn. A dozen tax tabs, courier services, business card services. Dozens of tabs for websites I'm working at. jsfiddles, specs, demos. Tabs about wind turbines without propellers, road side wind turbines, covid, oil and coal reserves. And aggregators ofc
Basically, I can only do work or look at depressing shit for so long but I get back to it after watching a cat video.
When closing lots of tabs I go over the topics which helps me remember what I've looked at.
Its funny howmany people I talk with who have a single tab (usually also a single application and a single monitor) but know instinctively that their approach is better. (as if there should be only one metric) I cant begin to explain how much I'm enjoying myself.
In the old days there was webspeedreader and MyIE2 that were much more suitable for the giant session. Then there was tabmixplus and then came chrome which is pretty much a turd with 10+ tabs then web extensions killed all the good tools.
What I don't really see is why this service needs to exist to solve that particular problem (browser gets slow because too many tabs), because IMO that problem has already been solved very well by most decent browsers. They just swap out the inactive tabs and are able to restore them fast enough even on low-end systems, as long as they have an SSD. Inactive tabs that are not swapped out don't take a lot of CPU resources either. This service sells you a cloud browser with 16GB of RAM, which is pretty much the norm for laptops and desktops now, so it's not going to save you much if 'too many tabs' is causing slowness.
For a while I use different browsers simultaneously for different things. The session turns out entirely different for some reason as if one is a different person in a different location. I could see a cloud browser as something like that. I have no idea what would happen. Portability will probably influence the session.
I wish bookmarks were good enough, I use tabs in stead to preserve scroll audio and video offset and to have a bunch of tabs for a domain with related tabs next to them. Browsers have poor organization for large numbers of tabs but bookmarks are even worse.
I have no real idea how the session should be organized but I'm sure there are tons of visualizations out there that would work wonderfully. Perhaps some filters with a flow chart for the entire browsing history. Full text search? I don't know.
The price doesn't really matter as I spend way to much time online. 1 euro per day is nothing.
I thought you were trolling at first, but I realize this may actually be serious. You can lose the tab with my comment. I'm a worthless internet stranger, and if you REALLY feel the need to reply, you'll remember, anyway.
How many of those HN topics actually matter? The "may or may not read" stuff I think you can comfortably file under "does not matter" and discard for your sanity's sake.
I waste a lot of time looking at animal videos, too, but I close the tab after. I don't think that counts as something productive or necessary to revisit...
If you're closing lots of tabs, I'd hope you understand those tabs should've been closed earlier--rather than something nostalgic to revisit that never really mattered in terms of what you actually need to do?
It's fun to abuse technology, but at the end of the day, you should ask yourself... why? Is this really making your life more complete? Are you being more productive?
AND we're not even talking about the huge nocode push happening rn which always end up as RAM hogs
AND AND we're not even yet talking about the huge clunky internal tools that some companies have their whole business revolving around.
An M1 MacBook Air can be had for $999.
That's equivalent to 20 months of a $50/month service.
Alternatively, you can finance a MacBook Air for $83/month for 12 months, and then no additional payments after that.
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.
Wish more people used these addons -- there is no reason why webpages should download megabytes of JavaScript to "improve my experience" :-)
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.
Nvidia GeForce NOW (Cloud Gaming Steaming) is $10 a month and gives you access to top of the line enterprise GPU/CPU/RAM hardware and nearly your entire Steam, Unreal, Ubi, etc libraries. I can play Cyberpunk 2077 with fully maxed out graphics settings with no perceptible latency.
https://play.geforcenow.com (There's a free tier, that gives you access to 1 hour a day of gameplay.)
EDIT: I did wonder about offsetting some of my CPU load by renting a VM out on the cloud instead of paying the $30 though. Not sure of the cost there.
I see this being similar, people who spend a lot of time in Chrome and for who the improved speeds are highly valuable in both terms of opportunity cost will not think of $30 as 'too expensive'.
The other thing is customer service, like Superhuman, with a $30 a month price tag you can actually give good customer service.
Finally, at this price tag you only need about 275,000 customers and you have $100m ARR. I don't know how long the Mighty wait list is, I do know Superhumans was last reported as 275,000.
Only time and the market will tell, but I'm really bullish on this company doing great things.
For people who spend all day in a browser, which is a lot of people, I could see it.
The problem it'll face being marketed to consumers is that every one of the big JS application sites has already deployed a mobile app that takes care of the "works on light hardware" part.
For the ad-laden, tracker-heavy news sites of the world, there are ad-blocker extensions and Brave.
Independent professionals that have to use a heavy site will opt to upgrade their spec, almost certainly; computer financing has made it so that you can pay $30-50 a month to get a whole new system - why would you pay to get a worse experience?
Now, the enterprise can afford to spend on this and it can even solve some major problems. But that's a "current enterprise" problem, and not where I see tomorrow's enterprise going. There will always be startups aiming to be savvier than this, cut out more fat and not get locked into this particular opex and security model. The basic premise relies on the Web keeping its dominant state and I suspect we're in the midst of a trend reversal against centralized systems.
And...if the current enterprise doesn't provision correctly, it's likely they'll just continue to do so and leave their employees to suffer with 2Gb laptops, because it hasn't become mission critical yet.
So, I really do suspect that while it might have a chance for a few years, it's in a race against time to get some market share and expand differentiating factors. In this respect it could have the success of a Dropbox, i.e. "get big, then run out of places to go".
The other thing is that browsers need GPUs as well. A lot of stuff is hardware accelerated in Browsers these days. Just a bunch of vcpus does not help that much.
As it is, the target audience seems to be people with too much money and yet with a shitty laptop unable to run a browser properly. I'm sure these people exist but it does not sound like a great market opportunity.
Also, from a security point of view, I don't think that a lot of Fortune 500 companies would ever agree tot this.
However, that oddly might be the path to success for this company as well: play the security angle rather than the performance angle: lots of companies worry about their employees having their laptops and phones stolen. The less data is on these devices; the better. But it will need to be iron clad and more than "We won't look! We promise". That in itself basically just screams "but we could if we wanted to". But if you think about it, a lot of office workers access internal tools almost exclusively through browsers these days anyway and most of that stuff is cloud based anyway. It's just that the terms of use, SLAs, etc. give IT departments enough warm fuzzy feelings that they don't forbid this. Office 365 is a good example. Hosts a lot of very confidential information in a lot of companies. So not a strange thought to narrow the surface between the user and that to just a remotely running browser.
Also there's the convenience angle. A lot of developers are running their development tools remotely. Github is pushing e.g. code spaces. VS code can mount things over ssh. It's becoming normal to do that. So why not do that for other things as well? Streaming games is another good example. I would not be surprised to see Google go there eventually.
1. We use GPUs and many vCPUs actually help with multi-processing since most browser tabs will peg a single CPU
2. A lot fortune 500 companies have adopted "browser isolation" products that do something similar but aren't focused around speed.
A vcpu is about 0.25 of a real core, so it's just a little high.
Browser can use multiple CPUs, but mostly for multimedia which you probably aren't using a cloud browser for.
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.
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.
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.
I’m pretty sure this set of people can’t afford 50$ for Mighty either.
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.
I'm quite probably overlooking something and I'd be curious to learn what.
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?
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.
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.
The cloud could be the worst thing that can happen to the Internet.
Privacy and Ownership should not be treated as abstract ideas.
Is this not the same as saying "The internet could be the worst thing that can happen to the Internet"?
(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)
You can also use Opera Mini in MicroEmulator for server-side rendering of web pages.
I hope every single one of these cloud-streamed remote-app or remote-OS plays fails and fails hard. They're helping lead the Internet and the computing ecosystem in an even more dystopian direction. I've been happy to see Stadia not really take off.
So lets say this succeeds. Then Google or Facebook buys it. Now all your browser sessions including passwords, keys, authentication codes, private messages, etc. are globally visible to be data mined.
Who's to say they're not doing this already?
What if this is hacked?
This is worse than that Amazon idea of giving Amazon delivery people keys to your house. In the physical world it's pretty easy to see people when they come in your front door. In the digital world you have no idea what these people are doing with your data. There is zero situational awareness.
I 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.
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.
Tech people are the minority. The market IS moving towards cloud. It's happened, it's happening, it will keep happening. Stadia may have failed now, but it IS conceptually the future of gaming. It's like you're arguing for blockbuster in a netflix world. We cannot stop this from happening, no matter how many choirs we preach to. All we can do is find ways to make this happen better.
I think it's more constructive (and technically difficult) to accept that the market is heading to full cloud and we as tech people need to find better ways of making this vibe with good privacy practices.
Personally, I would not use anything like this without knowing a lot more about their security. Even then, maybe we're still a few years out from a security perspective before I would feel comfortable storing my passwords and browsing data with a 3rd party server AND pay for it (wild). But, I could see myself doing this if my privacy was ensured.
I hope these guys really focus on innovating in that aspect, and then I hope they succeed big.
Imagine you buy into this service and they go bust: Suddenly all your history, passwords and cache: poof, gone.
It's exactly what local-first advocates tell us is the current enemy, not closed-source. See Kleppmann's latest blog post about the GPL: https://martin.kleppmann.com/2021/04/14/goodbye-gpl.html
That's irrelevant, though. The "tech people" aren't preferring local solutions because they're funny this way - they prefer them because cloud-streamed remote apps objectively sucks. It takes some knowledge about computers to comprehend how and why exactly, but it doesn't change the facts.
(To use an analogy - doctors are a minority too, but you listen to them when they say you should vaccinate.)
> The market IS moving towards cloud. It's happened, it's happening, it will keep happening.
The important question to ask is, why. Why it's happened, why it's happening? The answer has little to do with providing value to customers - it's mostly about creating ability to seek rent. Privacy issues only happen on top of that - they're not the entirety of the problem.
> I think it's more constructive (and technically difficult) to accept that the market is heading to full cloud
Or, we could fight it. Maybe it's a quixotic quest. Maybe not. The market is a dumb greedy optimizer, it flows down the profitability gradients the way water flows downhill. If you want it to flow elsewhere, you have to put obstacles in the way, or cut out a better path.
No, it's not like that at all. Nobody is arguing for going back to distributing software in boxes with floppies or CD-ROMs in them.
Reason from first principles, not by analogy. Context and details matter.
Here are some major reasons for the push to cloud. None of these reasons are immutable or universal.
(1) Wimpy mobile devices with constrained power, storage, and bandwidth requirements.
(2) Cloud is the only kind of DRM that works. It's a way to lock things up and make piracy virtually impossible. As a bonus you can still build on "open source" and placate the open source zealots who don't understand the current state of things and are still living in the 90s.
(3) Application delivery and installation/uninstallation are terrible. OSes are broken.
Here are some solutions:
(1) Moore's law, huge improvements in battery capacity, 5G, WiFi 6, etc. are eating away at this problem. This issue will die of natural causes.
(2) The hopelessly naive idea that "information wants to be free" and everything has to be "free" (as in beer) needs to die, be cut into a thousand pieces, burned, encased in concrete, and sunk to the bottom of the ocean. Nothing is free. Software takes a vast amount of labor to produce, and that must be funded. If it's not funded directly and honestly it will be funded indirectly and dishonestly (surveillance capitalism, cloud lock-in, etc.). "Everything has to be free" and piracy actually help push us toward a surveillance capitalist panopticon future.
(3) This might be the toughest problem. Windows is by far the worst offender here with its nightmarish installation subsystem. Closed app stores are another huge problem but eventually I think anti-trust action is going to chip away at that.
That's not by any means a complete analysis. This is just a comment on a HN thread. It does hit the major points I think.
That's 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.
Many thin client setups like teradici PCoiP are used by tons of film studios in post production. The last few animation Oscar winners have all been done without computers at people's desks.
There's already services like Nimble collective (bought by Amazon) that streams 3D apps to your browser like Maya, Blender etc...
WebRTC is already seeing tons of companies move to streaming content to thin client end points. Epics MetaHuman creator for example runs in the cloud.
Sometimes a heavy web-app like Twitter will be slow on first load, but Mighty wouldn't help with network speed, right?
Slack is slow because it's slow to load actual conversation data; the iOS app is just as slow as the Electron app. This is not UI jank; it's a slow API and/or insufficient prefetching.
Jira is slow because it sucks; I've used native apps that are slow because they suck.
Other than that, I don't have many relevant experiences to point to. I'm sure for people running older machines the picture is different (the state of web engineering as a whole could certainly be improved on several dimensions), but I also doubt people stuck using slow computers can afford to spend $30-$50/month on something like this.
I'm genuinely asking: what things are slow for you? Is it just the fact that the code has to load before it can request the data (or render anything) that makes it feel slow? Or is there genuine sluggishness? What web apps are you using that I'm not?
Same with electron apps. VSCode is generally among the best. I currently have 9-10 projects open. If I accidentally trigger a font resize by missing cmd-backspace and hit + instead, I’m sitting around for 1-5 minutes waiting for everything to settle. I’ve even hit bugs where trying something app-wide then reverting hit a very slow race condition and just completely deleted my settings.json. Restart to update can take a couple minutes too, and that’s to restore visible functionality while waiting for the changelog tab to randomly show up.
Slack on iOS isn’t nearly as bad as on macOS. But that’s not Electron. I’m in 8 Slack orgs, not a large number compared to some people I know. Refreshing the window takes long enough I just go take a break.
This is on a machine with 64GB RAM, even when it’s not swapping from a couple Chrome windows.
> web pages with lots of ads and fonts
Ad blockers are a thing. I use them on every browser (it's even possible to do on iOS). It makes a big difference.
> Scrolling past one of those dumb sticky videos can cause everything to jump into place, then back out, then back again
There are plenty of annoying dark patterns (and simply poor UX) out there being used, but what I'm trying to get at here is specifically the perception of slowness for the web as a platform. UX problems can exist in any software.
> Navigating back in history can be so slow just hitting the cache that the previous (now forward entry) page shows up again and blocks rendering of the navigation
I think you may be misunderstanding here... some sites - especially news sites - use a dark pattern where they override the back button behavior to prevent you from going back (presumably to increase "engagement", or whatever). You could argue the web platform shouldn't let them do this, but that still wouldn't have to do with "slowness" (and wouldn't be solved by the OP).
> I’ve even hit bugs where trying something app-wide then reverting hit a very slow race condition and just completely deleted my settings.json
This just sounds like a logic bug; bugs exist regardless of platform
> If I accidentally trigger a font resize by missing cmd-backspace and hit + instead, I’m sitting around for 1-5 minutes waiting for everything to settle
> Restart to update can take a couple minutes too, and that’s to restore visible functionality while waiting for the changelog tab to randomly show up
This is absolutely insane to me. I just tried changing the font size in a very large VSCode project with 10 files open and it took 1 second to change the font size for the whole app. Killing the entire app (Cmd+Q) and restarting it took 4-5 seconds.
How many files do you have open? Are you using some crazy extensions that could be poorly-written or interacting badly?
> I’m in 8 Slack orgs, not a large number compared to some people I know. Refreshing the window takes long enough I just go take a break.
Again, totally crazy compared to my experience. I just refreshed the full window for the medium-sized org I'm in and it took 2 seconds for the UI to come back, and another 5 seconds to load the conversation text (the latter is pretty bad, but as I noted in my original post, not related to performance of the actual web platform)
True. They also break things, which I’m not a fan of for personal use. They also make manual testing of web work less consistent with what normal users experience, which I avoid.
> There are plenty of annoying dark patterns (and simply poor UX) out there being used, but what I'm trying to get at here is specifically the perception of slowness for the web as a platform. UX problems can exist in any software.
What I’m describing though is sites using common patterns having such poor performance that I can literally watch a sequence of state changes take place and categorize them as they happen. Forget the ad experience. Common tech oriented sites linked on HN which make it to the front page will frequently show me three to four layout shifts as their fonts load.
> I think you may be misunderstanding here... some sites - especially news sites - use a dark pattern where they override the back button behavior to prevent you from going back (presumably to increase "engagement", or whatever). You could argue the web platform shouldn't let them do this, but that still wouldn't have to do with "slowness" (and wouldn't be solved by the OP).
This wasn’t some back button hijack, I double checked. It was a slow website meeting what I assume is a race condition in the browser, where the state change on load coincided with my decision to stop waiting. And it happens a lot on iOS Safari on perfectly trustworthy sites.
> This just sounds like a logic bug; bugs exist regardless of platform
Sure, like I said, race condition. But exacerbated by how slowly reverting some mistake might take effect.
> This is absolutely insane to me. I just tried changing the font size in a very large VSCode project with 10 files open and it took 1 second to change the font size for the whole app. Killing the entire app (Cmd+Q) and restarting it took 4-5 seconds.
> How many files do you have open? Are you using some crazy extensions that could be poorly-written or interacting badly?
Like I said I have 9-10 projects open. Assuming I have 10 files open in each (I have more, but that wouldn’t matter if the app we’re using native controls), that’s 9-10 times the same thing you tried. Each instance is its own process pool. But they’re all responding to the same event asynchronously.
> Again, totally crazy compared to my experience. I just refreshed the full window for the medium-sized org I'm in and it took 2 seconds for the UI to come back, and another 5 seconds to load the conversation text (the latter is pretty bad, but as I noted in my original post, not related to performance of the actual web platform)
This is also not comparable to what I described, you refreshed one instance vs my 8. And again this would not be an issue using native controls, which would not be running 8 separate instances.
- - -
You seem pretty focused on defending the web and web technologies in the abstract. I’m not necessarily even disagreeing with that. Although real world usage of web tech is the reason things are so bad that I do experience the performance degradation I describe.
I’m not your typical HN anti-JS zealot. I’m just very disappointed with how bad the common web based product is.
You’re mostly right that it’s not the underlying tech that’s bad but how it’s used. But not totally. It’s the only UI platform I’m aware of that developed a huge resource intensive multiprocess model to work around the fact that common usage routinely blocks shared resources and routinely crashes.
It would if they pre-fetch the content based on your browsing behaviour.
The web isn't slow because it takes a second longer to load a website. The web is slow because, once loaded, the website takes 100+ ms to react to a click or a keypress. Plenty of popular websites are so far off the mark that they take half a second or more to react!
I haven't used mighty but I'm basing that on my own experience with similar technology.
I think there's a window of optimal use bracketed by low and high download bandwidth for you. if you're faster than that maybe the only speed up you get is if your machine has a slow CPU. If you're slower than that I suspect that the video streaming they're going to use will produce a lag that will make your experience worse than if you were just loading the site directly.
If mighty wanted to push that lower bound lower, instead of streaming video they might be able to stream changes to the DOM. they could compile a sort of single file version of the page on their server that included all the requests the third party resources and styles in line and then whenever there were changes in the layout we could stream those style or DOM changes down to you. As far as I can tell that's basically the minimum amount of information you need to replicate the experience. that might even help a little bit with machines with slow CPUs I sort of tree shaking styles and resources that are not used.
from this point of view with enough development mighty could be purchased by Google as a sort of deluxe subscription model for chrome with bundled premium subscriptions to various streaming services and so on. From that point of view, the bundling up of content, delivery and medium is not really a novel thing because I think similar things have happened with cable TV magazines and news to some extent.
But for the good point that you make that people at the slow or low speck ends might often not be able to afford that kind of service, that lowest of the low-end might be a real focused niche... say people on airplane Wi-Fi or in remote locations on a satellite link.
but from a purely product marketing and psychological point of view I don't think that a product needs actual technical superiority or real measurable utility to become a big hit. I think it really only needs something that makes people want to use it. mighty could position itself as a sort of luxury upgrade for people with already good specs.
Because from the point of view people who are perhaps already of that successful and wealthy mindset many of them may consider that time is their most valuable asset and the accumulated frustrations and annoyance of waiting for websites to load is something they are prepared to pay a service to get rid of and to provide them and experience which they feel is more in line with their station and their expectations of Life in general.
Two fps at 34KB each is ~500kbps by the way, not 60 kbps
> Not sure if serious :-/
And I said not really joking so I guess you don't want to believe me XD
If you would use your 2fps streaming browser to read, say, hacker news, every scroll operation would be hideously slow and pull in another ~60KB per second, even though the page data itself is only a few KB and never changes. Your ‘streaming solution’ only makes sense if the total amount of data to fetch for the page itself outweighs the total amount of data for all the frames you need to stream while you are using the page. Which is probably almost never, unless you always look at static single-page applications which continuously pull in data on the backend without presenting anything new at the front end. Highly unlikely.
> the ‘not serious’ part is how anyone could find that acceptable
I guess you don't have a beeline on what everyone finds acceptable. That's normal, you can only share your perspective not everybody's.
> every scroll operation would be hideously slow
I guess you haven't experienced it because what you describe is not how it works.
The two frames per second is not streaming a 60 frame per second source down to you at two frames per second it's capturing two frames per second from the source and sending them to you because that's what your bandwidth will permit.
> Your ‘streaming solution’ only makes sense if... Highly unlikely.
Only if the goal is a reduction in bandwidth used viewing the page. There are many other goals were streaming the browser makes a helluvalotta sense.
I get you had this focus on bandwidth because i think it's the main obvious focus of this thread but there's an expanded context in which these things operate. I'm sure you'd appreciate that if you'd experience it.
I have 16 tabs currently open in firefox on my MBP. Everything is snappy.
On my desktop (which to be fair, is very powerful) I have maybe 40 or so tabs, the majority of which never get loaded because they are saved by by the tree-style-tab extension, and I don't visit some of the subtrees often.
Literally the only webapp I use that feels slow any more (after I stopped using Gmail) is Notion, and they know they have perf problems. Like you mentioned, these things are slow (Gmail, Notion, Jira, whatever) because they... suck. Gmail is/was just as awful on my powerful desktop as it is on the laptop. I just don't get what this buys me.
But even then: surely native enterprise software was/is just as bad?
This makes no sense to me. On my machine, the desktop Slack client has noticeable input lag and it takes ages to perform any action. Try installing Ripcord and compare them; they are talking to the same API, but Ripcord doesn't make me want to throw my laptop out the window.
But Mighty is not a solution, it is just a band-aid that will perpetuate the problem and make UI developers even more lazy because they can assume their crappy Electron apps are always running on a beefy machine in the cloud.
Again, I'm not exactly using ancient computers, but that's been my anecdotal experience. I was working from a MacBook Pro that was 3-4 years old at one point, for what that's worth. Not maxed out, though I'll admit it was probably still not a slouch.
That's UI jank on top of network issues. Another commenter mentioned Ripcord, which is a good baseline for how fast Slack or Discord should be.
At least for myself, when I say web is slow as a category - including wider web technologies like Electron - I'm mostly thinking about UI performance. Any time a website takes more than 50-100ms to react to an input event, it's noticeably jarring. If it's consistent, it makes the experience of using that site painful. And unfortunately, this problem is common across the board in everything done with modern web tools and principles.
Here's one theory: the web makes it super easy to add lots of little animations to apps. Discord in particular takes lots of advantage of this. Is it possible all the little animations are making things feel slightly less "instant", and being mistaken for input lag? That wouldn't impact typing, but
Having powerful machines would be one thing. I really implore you to try using a low end machine for a while and see how bad the web is. I currently use a 4gb 2015 MacBook Air and i often see Discord and other websites-masquerading-as-apps hogging upwards of 2 gigs of ram which is inexcusable. I can hardly believe that animations would contribute to lag (or perceived lag) especially because we can see a lot of completely native apps that have these "micro-interactions" and still feel fast and responsive.
On the other hand Ripcord, an alternate client for Slack and Discord sits at 50mb of RAM and single digit CPU usage.
Of course there are what seem to be caching / network-related issues, like switching between conversations always takes forever. But there are also clearly UI issues, like when I try to scroll up in a newly-opened conversation, it scrolls a bit, waits to load, then it sends me all the way back down again before jumping around to some random position. This happens when there are no new messages in the chat and I only try to scroll a little, not go back days.
And the crown, for me: somehow, the number of letters out of order when I type is through the roof in Teams. It happens practically on every message I send, whereas this basically never happens in Telegram (where I send the same kind of short messages) or when I write long-form emails.
I guess I'm happy as long as the keyboard response is (very) good. The only time I notice real slowdowns are when my actions get out of sync with the system. A slow terminal or text editor drives me insane and is one reason I really can't use VSCode; Sublime Text never makes me wait.
Granted, there are things that are genuinely slow for me and drive me up a wall (ie. most issue tracking) but overall, I'd say that my daily use is pretty good. It's certainly not bad enough that I would offload my browsing to some cloud based system. But like you, I'm probably not the target market here.
I've seen people say things like "Safari is much faster than Chrome" but I don't really see it. Sure, it can seem a bit quicker on some sites but most of the time I don't really notice it. I do notice things like CPU and energy usage between those two browsers, but I'm mostly plugged into power all day anyway so it doesn't make any practical difference which one I use. Perhaps when I get a new M1 machine (ie. 2021 16" MBP!!) I'll feel differently. Perhaps.
For anything else that comes to my mind todays browsers + adblock works for me. I have my 50 plus (most inaktive) tabs open all the time.
With slack though, it absolutely is UI jank. The interface is an absolute nightmare to use on phones (I'd say deliberately so, to force you to use their app).
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.
[0]: https://github.com/crosswalk-project/chromium-crosswalk/tree...
This doesn’t solve the Figma case tho.
It is an electron app, as unlikely as it sounds.
That sounds... just ridiculous.
edit: omg really
And the solution to this is to put the browser in the cloud? So what’s the desktop browser on your new $3,000 mbp now, like... a demo environment?
It boggles my mind that we’re not demanding the web bloat stop. Maybe figma just doesn’t really work as a web app! If I have to run my browser in a datacenter, I think it’s fair to say it doesn’t.
As a web dev I’m just embarrassed. How are we not saying “this is too much, stop making web apps that crash my computer it’s not worth it.”
This "DRM" plays at least some role in making the optimizers in V8 work a lot harder to get anything reasonable out of the spaghetti.
Why Google needs DRM for a web email app? Beyond me.
The reason we use such tactics is to increasing barrier of reverse engineering because our teams value their work. Some people claim that security through obscurity is bad. I challenge this view. I claim that every security defense such as RSA is a obscurity.
It's a matter of time until RSA breaks in the same way as Obfuscation does.
Gmail is not your let's make it weekend kind of app. It's highly sophisticated and deliver huge value.
There are lot of people who hate Obfuscation. Some are communists and others are attackers.
My wife (she works in the fraud detection department) found an interesting attacker who masqueraded as a security researcher and student of X University, but in fact he was a a criminal scum. He has reverse engineered anti-fraud scripts of many websites and published them on Github for everyone to see. His main goal was to attract malicious buyers and sell them scripts that bypass this protection. It was one of the heck of marketing.
Brian Krebs also had similar story on his blog.
First, encryption is not "obscurity" in the same way you think DRM is.
Second, several other email providers don't think they need to rely on some performance-killing DRM to "protect" their web app (oh no, what of all the value!).
Outlook has a part of their files minified, but doesn't use any obfuscation; apps like ProtonMail[0] and Tutanota[1] are even open source.
(I'm actually starting to migrate off of Gmail to Protonmail myself.)
[0]: https://github.com/ProtonMail/proton-mail/ (the new site, on beta.protonmail.com) [1]: https://github.com/tutao/tutanota
Oh, and there's no need to call people "communists", "attackers", or "criminal scum". Be civil.
> Quantum computers will break RSA
Now here it will take X amount of time so is breaking any protection like DRM.
The goal of any security method is increasing attack time.
TLS got attacked, SSL got attacked. History repeats itself. Period.
> Oh, and there's no need to call people "communists", "attackers", or "criminal scum". Be civil.
Why? I have a right to use these terms. What should I use instead?
Would you call Osama Bin Laden as "His Highness Bin Laden"?
The words exists for reason. I use them in appropriate context.
People don't understand Russian soul. I'm very direct and speak my mind!
>> Second, several other email providers don't think they need to rely on some performance-killing DRM to "protect" their web app (oh no, what of all the value!).
>> Outlook has a part of their files minified, but doesn't use any obfuscation; apps like ProtonMail[0] and Tutanota[1] are even open source.
So? What's your point?
You have Linux which is Open Source and you have Windows (A lot of parts including their licencing is obfuscated)
The performance hit is minimal. ProtonMail & Tutanota are way slower than GMail and lack cutting edge features we offer.
Gmail vs Outlook is like Ferrari vs Toyota.
Gmail has great UX even my grandmother can use it.
While there may be a case for DRM in some places, gmail is almost certainly not it.
Attackers don't care about laws. All they care about their end goal.
You have fraudsters who game the AdWords, reCaptcha etc
Gmail is a strategic tool.
>> the chances of gmail's client side bits doing anything that novel that's also competetively important are slim to none
You are underestimating value of Gmail product. I'm not allowed to share what kind of value the client side has but it certainly does.
>> While there may be a case for DRM in some places, gmail is almost certainly not it.
Again, you are underestimating value Gmail provides to consumers.
This country is a democracy. Companies can obfuscate or de obfuscate code at their wish whether there is value or not.
Privacy people can use Privacy oriented tools or go build their own seriously.
DRM is a billion dollar industry!
Obviously people and corporations can choose to obfuscate; their prerogative. Doesn't mean it's effective nor wise in every instance, though, does it? Gmail is entirely free to waste effort and make its app slower and less (easily) maintainable, no question there.
You might call them spammers but they are often fraudsters.
I'll bite once again - from personal experience, I knew Gmail is slower than ProtonMail, but I tested it anyway. I loaded both Gmail and ProtonMail, using the browser's profiler. Gmail spent 6x the time ProtonMail did in the garbage collector, and 2x the time ProtonMail spent in the JIT compiler.
DRM is a contributor to that.
You always have the option for loading "Basic HTML" and you can get Protonmail or Toyota like experience there ;)
I don't know what's your agenda really is. Attacking DRMs are bad.
You have issues like spammers abusing Gmail interface to send emails using Google IPs and there DRM rocks.
That's it. You're underestimating hard work.
Try to create a full Gmail clone over weekend.
my point is not that I'm condoning it I just happen to think that it's probably inevitable.
And there's also the analogy between sort of handmade and craftmade things that are sort of indie Craft products built outside the system and that movement of indy websites and bloat-free websites. I think they're both destined to be small slices of the eventual mainstream market.
getting even more meta societies tend to capture more energy over time and if you think about it more energy is going to end up being crystallized into more matter so we're going to produce more things and, ignoring some inflection points in technology and efficiency, use more energy to produce more things so things are probably going to bloat out.
Would you please elaborate on this? I tried to find some info but no luck. Does gmail.com actually load some virtualization technology in the browser?
I however got down voted for explaining purpose of all this. Guess attackers hate me. Whatever. Leaving HN for all good!
Youngsters these days lack sense of capitalism (and hard work) and that's why they fail to start companies that produce value to the society.
DRM Industry protects intellectual property. The entire Hollywood fully invested in DRMs because they value their hard work.
A DRM-free world is a world without capitalism, where every hard work becomes pirated and the economy starts to crumble.
Google writes gmail but they also write chrome and V8, so they are in a unique position of writing both the application and the platform it runs upon. Presumably this would allow them to make something more performant than most, not less.
For example until this month Notion was extremely slow and everyone complained. They fixed it recently and no one's complaining but the important thing here is that no one left the product for being slow. May be there is a way to reduce bloat on the web and to ship desktop apps while keeping pace with modern app dev experience but surely there isn't any right now. Maybe webassembly will help? Lets see
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?
I believe the blog post addresses this diagonally.
So I'm super excited to try Mighty for persistence and high RAM use cases (I look forward to the day when I can do intense 100's of GB data vis in my browser), but the landing page seemed out of date in a post M1 World. Of course, 99.9% of the population is not on an M1 so I'm probably being an idiot.
I 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?
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.
While I think it is accurate that the Intel hardware put in Macs the past few years was rapidly falling behind competitive AMD hardware, that same hardware was still largely dominating Windows market share. (I won't speak to Linux because maybe it's such a technology aware segment that the majority already migrated away from Intel to superior AMD hardware in the past few years.)
But the point stands that most non-macOS users were on roughly the same mediocre Intel hardware. Decent single core, but increasingly hot and inefficient in the past few years.
It also seems like Big Sur + M1 is doing something kind of special with efficient use of RAM to ensure programs load and perform remarkably well.
But yes, pretty much every intel-based laptop in recent years has suffered from mediocre CPUs.
https://mobile.twitter.com/borrowcheck/status/13870721940401...
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.
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".
Only time will tell if it was a genius or stupid investment.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
It feels like we are slowly losing power. Very slowly.
Once that happens, there will be more security and a more unified platform to develop on - no doubt - but I will be shocked if they do not also take the opportunity to lock down what software you can develop, publish, and run on Macs over time.
While a dev board would be cool, a Mac mini with the hardware UART enabled over a USB C cable is getting pretty close!
Trade offs like these arguably could help to keep general purpose computing alive, as they show it is possible to deliver a secure device to customers that can be used however you like, running whatever software you like, without iOS style "no choice available".
Dev boards aren't necessary when an entire functioning laptop only costs $999. An M1 dev board be would way, way more expensive than that and far less functional.
Subscription services (even for software on previously steady release cycles), serverless infra, cloud computing, etc... the overall business model is shifting back to buying compute time to perform a certain task, or these startups essentially re-selling general purpose compute time as marked-up specific purpose compute time. With some UI slathered on top to make it look sexy.
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?
I don't want it to succeed because it is dangerous.
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.
Many cases of mesothelioma could have been prevented if we had listened to people who thought it was dangerous.
You can't conclude from asbestos that we should shut down new ideas on the first warnings, nor can you conclude from the history of aviation that we should disregard those warnings.
You asked:
> How can we work towards a better world when people just shoot down any idea that they don't agree with instead of trying to expand their perspective?
Going back to the original comment:
> Perhaps we need a new "test", like the "Turing Test", but this time for when humans can no longer tell the difference between new technology and old technology. "Mighty", for example, is just a "dumb terminal" - technology we had in the 1970s.
You want progress. We gain technological progress through a ratcheting action. A ratchet must close over the progress it has already made in order to ensure the mechanism only moves forward.
Likewise, we only progress if the new thing is genuinely better than the old. That requires that you understand the old thing.
Do you think the metric system is better than US standard measurements? Riddle me this: why is a mile 5280 feet? What's special about that number?
There is a reason for that number. There's also a reason it probably doesn't matter in modern usage, but unless we understand why we don't need that special property, we can't be sure that the metric system is actually progressing over the older systems and not regressing.
That's why you get this comment and others pointing out that this is simply tech from the '70s. If it's 50 years old tech, there's no progress going on. They are not failing to expand their perspectives, they are recognizing that this stuff is something they're already familiar with.
It's bad enough that too much of the internet is in walled gardens. It's bad enough that one company makes most of the browser and search decisions. It's bad enough that phones have controlled app ecosystems. And just when you thought they were running out of controls to take, here's an idea where the browser won't even be on your computer. This is how you get a web that is optimized for a $50/month browser service where you can't even pick your extensions.
> How can we work towards a better world when people just shoot down any idea that they don't agree with instead of trying to expand their perspective?
For you to consider: Don't be so open-minded that your brain falls out.
I'm imagining a future where sites become so bloated that you have to stream the rendered result to get anything usable.
"When Silk is run in cloud mode, it can off-load some of the the parts of the browsing and rendering process to EC2. In cloud mode, EC2 acts as a sort of cache plus proxy for browsing, and it also can dynamically take over parts of the page rendering pipeline from the client."
Mighty is streaming a browser instance, wholesale, as a video stream. It's very very different both in philosophy and actual implementation.
Once one scratches into the technical details, the similarities end. Interesting, as you describe it, at a very high level, it does sound like Google Stadia or Nvidia GeForce Now but applied to web browsing.
> Even if you shutdown or switch to a different computer, your browser will always be on. Exactly how you left it. That means you’ll never lose tabs that remind you of something to do or contain an article you want to read later. You can quickly jump back to work.
I haven't seen that discussed here, but it seems key.
Of course Mighty is not the only way to implement it; if Mighty takes off — or even if it ends up looking like a good idea — watch Chrome natively implement something equivalent.
chrome://history/syncedTabs
Maintaining state across sessions by storing your whole browser on a server somewhere is a cute solution, until you need to access that server while traveling and now your ping to it is 300ms instead of 30.
If the browser becomes the main platform that people use to ship applications, this could be useful. And why would the browser be the main platform for apps? To bypass the app store fees, to be multiplatform, to be always up to date.
One final advantage to running the browser remotely is that you don't have to deal with a certain browser engine that is lagging behind the others.
But for people at the slow or low spec ends might often not be able to afford that kind of service, that lowest of the low-end might be a real focused niche... say people on airplane Wi-Fi or in remote locations on a satellite link.
but from a purely product marketing and psychological point of view I don't think that a product needs actual technical superiority or real measurable utility to become a big hit. I think it really only needs something that makes people want to use it. mighty could position itself as a sort of luxury upgrade for people with already good specs.
Because from the point of view people who are perhaps already of that successful and wealthy mindset many of them may consider that time is their most valuable asset and the accumulated frustrations and annoyance of waiting for websites to load is something they are prepared to pay a service to get rid of and to provide them and experience which they feel is more in line with their station and their expectations of Life in general.
This is a strange commitment to pricacy. Not that there’s a technical barrier to employees accessing data, but something along the lines of “we wrote up a rule in the company wiki, so we trust that employees won’t violate it”
Can we do better? Sure and we will. I am really committed to that as a security conscious person.
Of course you'd hope for access control/encryption/etc. as well as it being prohibited, but this is standard across just about any industry. Somebody has access, and they're trusted not to use it.
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.
Then that's a problem of software, not hardware.
- the data only needs to be compressed once, for many viewers (vs. browser sessions, which are single-user)
- the receiving device can buffer data (vs. browser-sessions, for which the future is yet unknown)
- latency doesn't matter, because the user only perceives it at the beginning of the session (vs. every time they use an input device)
As somebody who lives in 3rd world country, I'm still baffled why somebody keep pushing for streaming everything. It feels like they are trying so hard to fix the wrong problem while oblivious to the real problems.
The actual problems is bloated software. Gmail won't be slow if their JS didn't take 10+ MB. Figma would be much faster if they ditch Electron rewrite it as fully native application.
Not to mention the sheer stupidity of Stadia. If I use Stadia for streaming video games at 4k 60 FPS, it will eat 23 GB of my data caps per hours. I need around 20 hours to beat single player games, so using stadia will cost me 460 GB just to play one game. Here's the kicker: my entire steam library are 405 GB.
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.
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.
Let's not forget developers and site owners stuffing webpages with tons of fluff, especially megabytes of JS that is mostly tracking code.
I can see €64.26/mo (~$77) from Hetzner for a Ryzen 3700X octa-core box, so assuming a box can be shared by three users (maybe from different time zones), that's still ~$25/mo per user just to pay the cloud provider.
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.
I mean I get 12-24 mo, 0% financing on all Apple products with my Apple Card.
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.
You can't even spec a MacBook Air with 4GB of RAM any more.
Base configuration MBA has 8GB of RAM. You can even finance it for $83/month for 12 months, which isn't much more than a $50/month Mighty service. But you get to keep the laptop at the end of the 12 months if you finance it.
> 8GB is probably fine for most, but if you're a designer using Figma? Maybe not
Doing anything interactive, I'd be more concerned about latency. If I had an extra 100-200ms round-trip latency on anything I do in the browser, design work would become a lot more frustrating.
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.
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?
On a serious nore. I run on 32+GB RAM on my primary machine, open all the tabs and IDEs I want and stay generally in the 11GB range.
My guess is, get yourself 16GB ram and you should be okay.
The solution to that problem is clearly to subscribe to their service so that I can stream from a less-anemic machine.
...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.
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.
Implementing the browser as a VNC client is a clever approach but seems to be a band-aid for browser performance instead of attacking root cause. Shifting the incentives for product development teams could be a more permanent solution. Perhaps by imposing stricter resource restrictions in the browser or by adding performance metrics to search engine algorithms that go beyond initial load time.
EDIT: Reading other comments, it sounds like the founders have ideas for the cloud browser that go beyond performance. I’ll be curious to see how this plays out.
I 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.
If you're comparing the cost of the browser today ($0) to the cost of this service, yes, it's steep. But if you consider the benefit you draw (lower memory use, avoid load times for pages "waking up", etc.) you're probably saving a lot of time and hassle.
I 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!
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.
Its VNC. And Cloudflare has pitched same [0] with different value dimension (security).
It's easier to use.
Low-latency (in terms of <10ms) high-fidelity (4k@60fps) video streaming is not a solved problem. It is hard engineering.
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.
With the differences being:
1. The M1 machine will most probably feel faster, Mighty can't even build custom servers with M1 processors or whatever comes next from Apple as of today.
2. The M1 machine will probably retain some value after 3 years, your Mighty subscription will retain no value, you can't resell it or anything.
3. Using your own laptop means you won't have to send your data to Mighty servers at all, as such if there's some security bug in their system it won't impact you.
4. Using your own laptop means that downtimes or unexpected service errors from Mighty won't matter to you either.
5. Using your own laptop means that if your internet connection goes down temporarily and you are using a well designed web app that handles that case you might not even notice that you went offline, with Mighty I guess the whole thing will just stop responding, which isn't great.
6. On the other hand using Mighty might allow you to run multi-GB applications remotely consuming fewer resources, but like if you need to run those kinds of applications wouldn't it make more sense to just buy a beefier machine? Mighty servers seem to be limited to 16GB anyway, plus as far as I know V8's heap for JS is hard limited at 4GB currently, these browser apps that takes tens of GBs of RAM don't exist.
At the end of the day though without even considering all the issue will Mighty even fell faster than a 16GB M1 Macbook? If yes how much faster? If not this is already a non starter. And we haven't even seen what the M2 or M5 or whatever will ship in the new Mac Pros will be able to do.
I hadn't thought also that you are going to need to have a computer to connect to Mighty anyway, are people really going to get a $300 piece of junk machine with a terrible screen for this? Even if they do that already makes Mighty even less appealing.
Technology is insane. No one would have ever designed it this way from scratch and yet, here we are.
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
Seeing tweets like this makes me sad that Twitter warps even smart people toward writing for quippiness over thoughtfulness.
The latest DoE supercomputers are mostly GPUs. Summit has around 10 PFLOPS on CPUs and 215 PFLOPS on GPUs.
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
Btw. My teeth gnash at the thought that my assumption above about the product is correct.
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.
This is like selling a monthly subscription to 16gb of RAM, which you can use only for the web browser.
I am very curious to see the future of this product and observe. Much to learn from this.
Kudos team!
>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?
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.
Given the product I’m curious is the performance of your landing page by design?
Crowing about how much less resources they consume is disingenuous. Of course it uses less resources locally when all the heavy lifting happens in the cloud.
Statements like “Mighty uses 10x less memory than Google Chrome.” are outright deception, it likely doesn’t use less memory at all, it just uses cloud memory instead of local.
I guess we shouldn’t ask about the ecological impact of all “Mighty” users having their browser running on beefy server hardware.
For $0/month Mighty users could become uBlock Origin users, or Brave users, and speed up Chrome by some similar multiple.
The "product" for sale is renting RAM and configuring an ad blocker. I wonder if their ad block plugin or ad list maintainers get any of Mighty"s fat monthly fee or if they're just selling someone else's hard work.
Solving problems caused by overengineering with overengineering ?
Isn't this just insane ?
If you have performance issues because you use a lots of tabs, just use a browser which is able to pause background tabs ?
Compressing and streaming pages was kind of the idea behind Opera Mini as well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Mini
So nothing really new…
It's clear that Google isn't going to optimize Chrome and people aren't going to switch to Firefox with Tree Tabs / Sidebery with background suspension.
Lots of browsers are implementing background suspension. Even if Google decided that they'll never implement this, it will be hard to convice potential customers to pay x$/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 )
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.
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.
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.
They're marketing it to people whose _Google Chrome_ is running too slow. That's already being exposed to Google.
If you're not preparing more than a minute out from your meeting start time.. you are the reason why meetings are bad
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.
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.
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!
So Mainframes and dumb AS400 terminals are back in vogue again. Computer technology is truly cyclical in nature.
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"?
"With that in mind, be aware that displaying arbitrary content from untrusted sources poses a severe security risk that Electron is not intended to handle."
That's not a great start is it.
With the sheer number of exploits against complex attack surface web browsers, I could see organisations using this to mostly eliminate use of the web browser locally. If you can get a trusted, audited provider to host remote cloud browser instances that ship with "always on" policy enforcement (ad blocking, site blocking, phishing filtering, data loss prevention etc.), you can move all web activity to another system in the cloud. You can erase and have new instances set up as needed (daily?).
Web browsing locally would then be restricted by firewalls to only work on high security local systems (which themselves are not pulling in any external dependencies) - you could eventually lock the local browser down to only speak to a very limited internal IP range.
While this won't work for risk taking internet-first organisations, there's governments and enterprise users who would love something like this, as it helps them reduce their risk exposure on client devices - as long as the remote video and input protocol is robust and memory safe, it starts to become incredibly difficult for a lot of attacks to succeed against their protected systems. This also potentially removes the need in some cases for people to carry 2 laptops - one for higher security activities, one for public internet level activities. If this software can be assured to a suitable level and isolated appropriately, it could be an interesting solution to a very boring problem!
Keeping public internet work separate from local webapps would certainly help to avoid a fair number of vulnerability classes (as public browsing would take place in a totally separate environment without filesystem access or access to local resources, without access to local credentials, cookies, or network resources).
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
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!
If i hate doing that without paying i can setup a monthy donation to UNICEF
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.
If you are switching that much, just sign into freakin' Chrome and turn on sync.
Miniaturization of compute is insufficient to implement such devices. And even if compute could be miniaturized to render interactive web pages with a coin-sized device, the sorry state of battery technology would render it impractical.
With 5G we only need enough compute and power to run a modem and a Mightyapp renderer.
This is strictly worse for privacy than a VPN run by the same company, no?
If you are tunneling between home (A) and "vpn" provider (B) that terminates your traffic and sends out it to the public internet, and you are browsing websites C and D, both sharing the ad / tracking site E. 1. It's easy for anyone observing traffic between A and B to deduce from the traffic patterns what kinds of requests you are exchanging between C and D, 2. It's easy for someone obsrving traffic between A and B, and colluding with tracking site E, to correlate your address at A with your browsing behaviour on sites C and D by correlating A-B flows with information gathered by E.
In the Mighty type architecture, the leaked signal from the flow between end user and Mighty servers will be harder to match to the HTTP(S) traffic based on packet timing and sizes. But not necessarily hard enough unless there are purpouseful andi-TA measures employed. Hence I said "potential" privacy advantages.
Both of these scenarios place equal amount of trust in service operator - the difference is in security is against other adversaries.
(Traffic analysis is a term of art in security engineering & SIGINT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_analysis)
> Both of these scenarios place equal amount of trust in service operator - the difference is in security is against other adversaries.
This is where I would strongly disagree. With a VPN they can analyze your endpoints, but assuming E2E encryption, they cannot see your actual packets. Whereas Mighty is definitionally a MITM browser, they can see everything. Therefore you are trusting Mighty incredibly more than a VPN provider.
By my understanding, the web browser runs at the Mighty server farm and it's streaming it to you using a RDP or Stadia style system. So, it's more like you send 10-ish packets containing input events (like mouse motion and click) using the Mighty client protocol, and as a result the Mighty service does 150 web requests that happen due to loading the new web page (probably around 10k packets). While the page is loading, the Mighty service sends you screen updates that are again much different than the packets the Mighty service is receiving in response to the web requests.
Yes, these can still be temporally correlated, even though the correspondence is much more distant than in the VPN case (where you can just observe the similar sized packets). But there's potential to fix it rather easily, by eg using chaff traffic to the client in idle periods, and/or by pulsing updates out to all users to the service in sync, etc.
> A browser that's always on.
Not when you experience a shortage of service and freeze all your users from doing basic work, not just on one service, but everything else.
They have a point though.
The plague of front-end is that most developers just don't care about performance. Take Redux for example, which for a while was considered a golden standard by many. When you look into it, you see that when one little thing changes in one big global store that has everything, everything else is notified and a comparison is run to see if that item has changed. (If I'm wrong, I'm sorry, but this was the impression I got when I was evaluating that framework). But if I'm not wrong and that's really the way it is, the fact that this framework was accepted by so many, just proves the point that most developers think all their end users have a high-powered Mac.
I could say something similar about virtual dom abstractions. I understand that there were no alternatives earlier (today we have Svelte), but you could still do a good front-end with classic dom-manipulation that was super fast, and with some thought put into it - well organized.
I think it's more of a statement that the state of browsers, the web, etc. neccessitates this sort of solution. This is like the underclass taking the trash out of the shining skyscrapers in the middle east by hand: a symptom of a system so broken that people do insane things to pretend that it's not broken.
It seems to me that if this becomes a successful (consumer) product it will either become free – or be replaced by the free version. The free version would generate revenue through advertising or by data collection and user surveillance.
Since Suhail is following this thread, I'd be curious to know if he'd ever consider that route.
oh really? my cell service is not going that way. In fact, it's going the opposite way. Verizon, without me saying OK, is trying to force as many of my phone calls (which I pay for) over publicly available wifi. Free for them, money for me.
But even so, in 2021 you can make a free video call around the globe for free. You could be using Facetime or Duo or Skpye or one of the many, many other options that provide that core service. For free.
Ultimately Verizon isn't charging you for a phone call. That might be what's on the bill, but they're really charging you for some service level of connectivity. For a lot of people around the globe a phone call is a functionally free service on top of that connectivity.
1. I'm not familiar with the state of US telcos to comment on the situation there, but even if your cell service might not be going that way, cell plans in EU, Australia and New Zealand have essentially hit flat rate monthly fees for unlimited calls and data.
> 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).
Privacy is really a concern here. They want me to send all of my key strokes to them? Get out of here.
But they are providing me a smooth development experience-- there is definitely a need of this.
My 16GB MBP starts dying very easily with chrome, docker and intellij opened. Don't get me started on what happens when I am sharing screen on zoom.
So maybe we need a sweet spot here.
How about they sell it as a self deployable software which I can run on aws and own the cost of the software abs hardware. And maybe economics work out in the favour of customer to try this combo out?
I know for me I have several Firefox profiles for different things, and doing cumbersome things like creating a new Firefox profile for task `x` is too much for people, but splitting sessions up is a big win both for privacy and productivity. If I'm in a browser tailor made for email, there is a better chance I will focus only on email and not trying to do something else.
Compartmenting your browsing like this is good for privacy because secrets can't spill over into other sites since your more sensitive browsing is done in a separate session, insulated from work email, and cookies can't correlate activity, and build a profile of you. Bonus points if you do all your political browsing in things like the Tor Browser Bundle or use privacy-aware browsers like Brave or Firefox. But that's just me!
So I filled out the questionnaire to request access (to find out the pricing) and the _cheapest_ option to the "how much would you think about paying" was $10/month.
I would expect this could find a place in the workplace where a company subsidizes employee use for workplace browser use but... I don't see this gaining any traction from the average consumer.
I don't think I'd pay more than a couple bucks a month (at most) for a web browser when my current one (and literally any alternative) already works great -- and even if they didn't, there's also tons of free plugins for managing tabs/sessions/etc AND already tons of general-purpose streaming services (like Shadow) that don't just limit you to a browser... at a seemingly lower price.
FWIW, I typically have 20+ windows open at a time (to context-switch between projects), each with 30+ tabs (each loosely mapped to a to-do item). I'm also not on a Mac, so maybe I'm just not the target market.
> Your Internet speed while using Mighty is over 1 Gbps.
How's that work if it isn't?
> 2 more hours to stay in flow
How are you going to improve my battery life by that much when I run a 4K monitor that makes it impossible?
It's also full of claims that would be labeled as [citation required] if it was on Wikipedia.
> uses 10x less memory
Where are the profiles? Where's the network timing graph?
You can get most of the way there by using Auto Tab Discard.
They mean your mighty instance is connected to the sites you're browsing over a fast link to the web servers, essentially. They're trying to colocate with a lot of the big sites in datacenters in order to get the best round trip times and bandwidth to those sites.
But yeah your own _personal_ internet speed needs to at least be able to handle a 4K60 video stream.
The whole concept is still incredibly wasteful and dystopian, but the part about your speeds when connected to the sites over mighty makes some sense.
With your early users, you might try to figure out their actual use cases. I imagine some of them might be evaluating it as an alternative for the same purposes for which they'd use a VPN service.
And if they're using it that way, you might make sure you're not going to get blocked by sites in a way that would kill your business.
I find more are just a distraction and a reminder to waste time. If I want to read HN I just type "Command-T ne Return" and chrome completes the URL and takes me there.
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...
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!
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.
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.
That what Firefox was doing for me (i had 2000+ tabs - had to block Windows perf monitor staff which was just burning practically all CPU trying to "monitor" that Firefox :). Had to start using Chrome (company stuff), and it is like an order of magnitude downgrade, in particular when it comes to tabs.
So, Mighty sounds like a great solution to a self inflicted problem of a slow and resource hungry Chrome. Of course one could probably just fix the Chrome ... Whom i'm kidding?! I've worked on 2 browsers (pre-Firefox Mozilla is one) and of course there is practically no way of it short of deep rewrite.
I wonder though about copyright issues here. The creative layers who killed Aereo could possibly apply the same logic of "public broadcasting even if to just one person" to the Mighty too.
As 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.
FTR I live in rural Hongkong(there is such a thing) with line speed avg less than 12 Mbps.
- 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?
If you write well your web it will perform in most devices
apple just has the worst ratio "computing power / dollar"
Also not sure where you got the 20 hour stat. Mighty's marketing claims a 2 hour boost. And I'd take it with a grain of salt since active use of Mighty is like running a video streaming service in the background.
If you don't need a laptop, just get a desktop, much more computing power per dollar expend
On one end of the spectrum, we have the tech savvy users who would more likely care a lot about privacy, security and not have another layer in the middle which could potentially undermine it. On the other end of the spectrum, we have users who wont really understand the difference between slow computer and slow internet. I am not sure, how mighty can make it any faster.
The biggest challenge here is to educate the market you're going after. I see more of a B2B play here, where companies could use mighty instead of sending heavy client laptops to employees.
Maybe it has little previews or something?
Secondly, it sounds like a security nightmare to expose an uncontrolled single point of failure. But it’s probably better than a consumer endpoint browser, because your OS is secure, while modern consumer operating systems are so full of junk that it’s impossible to defend plaintext, so video it is.
I get it. It’s a brilliant counterintuitive hack. I want it to be stupid, but it’s not.
I've asked colleagues who keep lots of tabs open why they do it, and the answer they generally give me is so that they can keep track of things. Is this why most people have lots of tabs open?
I often use Cmd+Option+Q to quit my browser, which also closes all tabs. I've never had a problem going back to wherever I need by typing in the address bar. The smart results quickly identify what I need and I select that result from the list (e.g., type the first few letters of a recent Google doc title, and it's there)
Can someone who does like a lot of tabs open explain the benefits?
Why would you close your tabs only to reopen them again?
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.
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?
Imagine all the enterprise customers who'd be willing to pay for this so their designers and engineers can be more productive.
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.
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.
START USING FREE/LIBRE BROWSERS. Before is too late.
Education should come from the hardware sellers, if anything.
But the real question is, of course, of trust. If I were using the service, they would literally see my screen, with all the private and sensitive info on it. They can't but watch my screen to be able to video-compress and transmit its contents.
Let's rule out the lowly idea of the service itself stealing customers' data. Let's consider a three-letter agency, or even a court order + a gag order. Wiretapping your screen just gets easier.
Also if you have a MacBook and you hate the fan, install Turbo Boost Switcher: http://tbswitcher.rugarciap.com/
I haven't heard my fan in a year (literally) and I have not noticed any significant slowdowns in my daily work, which involves two monitors and 50+ tabs.
- 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?)
That take is a bit shallow, do you really believe that is the crux of the issue of V8 rendering being slow sometimes?
That's hardly to do with V8, front-end, and React, wouldn't you agree?
Backend inefficiencies traditionally will eventually saturate your RAM / CPU / I/O ("clouds" removes some of this but you still pay in the end - they also increase pressure in other areas since you're now always running alongside other things). In the browser you just need to be faster than the user's expectation or need, and user expectations are today at record lows and needs at highs (more and more "daily life admin" is web-only or web-first).
I also think "tribe 3"[0] developers are both more likely to gravitate towards the frontend, more likely to not think about performance, and (definitionally) more likely to not want to learn about fundamentals affecting performance.
My impression is opposite to yours, perhaps due to the type of software development we do. I can't remember how many times a performance problem was "sorted" by increasing CPU and RAM limits on a cloud instance. It just so happens that it's much, much easier to do that on the cloud instance than on a user machine. Of course performance problems do show up that need to be solved, just way less common than just spending more resources.
What I do agree with you (and I have no data on this just personal impressions that are most likely affected by observation bias, as I suspect is the case with you as well), is that in these waves of new programmers not going through the normal university route (which is absolutely perfectly fine in my book), they usually start off with front-end development these days, skewing the experience level ratio to more entry level people, and thus making entry-level mistakes. Perhaps 10 years ago the entry tech was Rails/PHP.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Taking Citrix as example since the specific market served by them has existed for decades. Virtualized personal computing services are a segment of course as well.
(I wonder why they pivoted away from just Windows desktop but maybe this is an easier entry point to market given browser performance seems to be the specific huge paint point).
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.
How is it not an April joke?
There's something rotten in the state of Denmark.
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.
I would invest 1/10 of my annual savings into it, if possible. Are there any product for me to do that?
[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/silk/latest/developerguide/what-...
Also based on my experience with Stadia it will be magic 90% of the time and so frustrating the other 10% of the time that you throw the whole thing out the window.
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.
In a way it lets one (more likely a corporation or independent professional) to pay for a stable and secure way to not have a software that they depend on and already have no control over from being suddenly unusable on their machine.
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.
If this was at a, say, $5 price point, I don't think there'd be that many people putting up a stink.
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.
For at least a decade of my life, I was a 200+ tab person. Paying any amount of money to make my computer slightly more responsive versus the time I lost just clicking through (literally) hundreds of tabs to find something versus logging it--let alone simply searching for the same thing again and hitting the links that float to the top because I've visited them--doesn't make any sense to me.
As I see it, the "problem" here is not that you need to have 200+ tabs open at any given time. The problem is precisely that you have 200+ tabs open at any given time.
If you have the ability to keep track of 200+ tabs, exactly where they're located on your screen, and can switch back and forth between those and your actual work within a matter of seconds then kudos to you. You're actually a genius, and your employer should definitely consider purchasing this ongoing subscription for you.
[edit]: Just looked at your history and realized I'm probably replying to an astroturf account, so joke's on me, I guess.
200+ tabs open for $30+ a month per employee is the hill you decided to take a stand on?
We could also continue to talk about the points we both raised earlier, or that could all get lost in the weeds :)
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?
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.
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.
>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
A real solution: emacs buffer management style for my tabs please? Maybe web pages that don't need a gig of ram for a tab or two? Please?
I'm mostly CPU limited actually, not RAM limited, RAM usage usually never goes over ~12GB out of 32GB available.
Past the ~450 tab mark CPU usage will skyrocket with even a single video call open however.
I'm seeing people saying 'this is amazing. I will pay for this' without even having tried it or any alternatives. I don't know about you but doesn't seem natural.
> I 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
Of course the business model limits the number of people that would try it however, perhaps the target market would be businesses interested in controlling the browsing of their employees. For security and other purposes.
All the best Suhail and congratulations on your launch.
Screen recording: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1P_OV6bRrpji-Jcd5WHGO5CQWkvw...
https://www.reddit.com/r/operabrowser/comments/ls6on/can_som...
(While writing this I realised I already had an example, and it's Notion)
That might just be my laptop though.
I believe they're focused on solving security problems though, not performance.
Perf market feels pretty narrow, but corporate security is huge market, and Amazon in the space would really justify the solution here.
Where can I invest?
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.
EDIT: No clue if they're just streaming frames to you or they are giving you DOM elements. Latter would be cool but more annoying to pull off.
The fix is to either upgrade to M1 or make the Linux switch.
The fix is not a "cloud browser".
Cloud browser is terrible for a million reasons.
I will use Mighty but would like to find quick remote desktop software in general, any recommendations?
Will this measurably improve CPU usage for 300+ suspended tabs on an modern i7+ machine? What streaming tech is used to keep inactive tab CPU usage low?
Mighty could have a sweet list of use cases but how do they justify month billing for every minute that you do not use it?
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?
Plus you don't know if tomorrow Google comes with a solution that’s will make chrome faster
Remember what’s happened to TwitPic?
I guess, I might pay if the js engine was literally 2x faster. But I do not see that happening.
If I hear a heap of social proof about its perf, I'll have another look.
Sidenote: bloody Atlasssian web apps. And LucidCharts.
I used it as a kid to play Farmville (Adobe Flash based) on my iPad.
I'm not sure how I feel about making money off ad-blocking.
Individual consumer - Not sure.
How did we get to this point?
[1]: https://blog.mightyapp.com/mightys-secret-plan-to-invent-the...
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.
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.
But Firefox is really very good with crazy numbers of tabs these days. https://metafluff.com/2017/07/21/i-am-a-tab-hoarder/
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."