Mighty: The Browser You Didn’t Know You Needed but Definitely Do
jacobhrussell.com
jacobhrussell.com
"It also opens the door to legitimate privacy and security concerns. For Mighty to work, everything you type – every username, password, address, credit card number, SSN, and more – has to be routed through its servers. Every website cookie is saved there too.
Mighty's answer is that its servers and code were audited by a third-party firm in February 2021, and that its infrastructure will be audited each year. Sensitive data is encrypted, it adds, on an isolated virtual machine, and not backed up anywhere else. Automated tools, rather than humans, manage things like browser updates, and the company says it has policies that employees can't view your history. Keystrokes, meanwhile, are encrypted for transmission, and not stored.
There's not, however, HIPAA compliance, or SOC-2. Mighty says "we may look at getting compliance in late 2022." Two-factor authentication is also "coming soon," the startup says."
We plan to relentlessly invest in security.
I understand for some trusting us will not be enough and for others it will take time.
Single-core performance is obviously not a top priority for server CPUs, but is as far as I understand it very important in a browser context, where JS runs in a single thread (with certain exceptions like workers, etc.). It's interesting to note then that the top-of-the-line AMD EPYC processors, which Mighty advertises that they use, have single-core performance scores of 2400-2900 in PassMark's CPU benchmarks while the cheapest baseline M1 used in the old Macbook Air scores a 3762. It even has the same number of total cores for multi-threaded tasks! (https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html)
Same thing with the RAM, while it's perhaps the most appealing part of the proposition, it's basically a commodity and 32GB is not outlandishly expensive for your own device (especially in the desktop space).
All the other stuff is basically free if you know how to download Chrome extensions and don't live in a place with bad internet infrastructure. Not to mention the myriad privacy concerns.
Mighty is perhaps very unfortunate that Apple decided to develop and release the M1 when they did, if they never had I can imagine this offering being a lot more appealing for semi-technical creatives stuck on old Intel MBPs (which seems to be the target audience?)
"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"."
I'm supposed to spend $1000 every 3 years for just a web browser and no other computing hardware, for a machine that I don't get to keep? I just don't see it, who are the people who need this kind of performance from a web browser and who wouldn't want to buy decent machine that can also do stuff like play games or run native software? An average computer will last me 3-4 years at least, and for somewhere in the neighborhood of $1200-1300 I can get a good computer.
And it'll handle web usage just fine. Maybe this is just that I'm on Linux/Firefox, but they're bragging about 40 tabs, and that's nothing. I regularly run 500 tabs in Firefox, and have on occasion reached 1000-1500 during periods where I've completely fallen off of the organizational bandwagon and completely broken down in terms of maintenance. I'm not saying that's good, but I am saying I don't need 40 Gigs of RAM to do that. This is wild overkill for web browsing. Even if they're never closing any tabs ever, it feels weird that this company is building a browser (even just wrapping around Chrome), and they're identifying a problem with existing browser UIs and resource management, and instead of copying Firefox's tab unloading, or improving workflows so it's easier to serialize and save tabs and close them -- instead we're going all in on streaming?
Do what you want I guess, but if Firefox can pull off 500-1000 tabs with 16 Gigs of RAM on my computer, and my computer can also run native apps and games... I don't know, what's being offered here does not seem like it's worth $330 a year to me, but people are free to make their own decisions.
There are a few scenarios like this (law firms, accounting firms and trading firms).
The problem is that this browser isn't really suitable for that as far as I can tell.
I don't see really convincing strong guarantees about data security -- they're certainly making an attempt to say that your data is secure being routed through their servers, but can they prove that well enough that a reputable law firm or a hospital is going to be comfortable with it?
If they moved into something like self-hosting for firms, on-premise support, etc... I could definitely see a business use case for that.
Now, every single thing I do on this computer is instantaneous. It doesn't matter if I have 5 or 500 browser tabs open, it just keeps running as fast as anything I've ever used.
This computer fixed Chrome for me.
At $30/month, Mighty would be $30 * 12 * 5 = $1800 over that time period.
I paid ~$2500 for this computer, and use it for:
1) Browsing 2) Coding 3) Video and photo editing 4) Graphic design
So all things considered, while yes it's literally cheaper in terms of direct dollar and cents comparison, in terms of functional ROI, given that this computer runs a browser instance with zero lag or latency at all, it's a no brainer to just invest in the good laptop vs going with Mighty.
The benchmark is not whether your existing computer breaks to pieces, but whether it can do that "1) Browsing 2) Coding 3) Video and photo editing 4) Graphic design" smoothly for the coming 5 years in the newest versions of popular applications, as they inevitably get more demanding for older hardware.
That being said, I don't think the SaaS-part of the value proposition is particularly convincing, and there barely is anything else.
And as you note a cloud browser only handles web browsing.
I would guess that I need a computer that has graphics acceleration to run the mighty client at a reasonable speed. I need at least enough memory locally to run the mighty client + the base OS it runs on.
My experience of using Zoom, Youtube, etc has been that video streaming is much more intensive than rendering text webpages, like hacker news, in a local browser instance. Maybe they're sending down local draw commands instead of actual video, which maybe helps some?
I wouldn't be surprised if the system requirements for Mighty are almost identical to the system requirements for Chrome with <150 tabs and an adblocker installed.
In reality, the $30/mo for mighty is on top of a computer, not instead of one, since you still need a computer _anyway_ to use Mighty.
I don't see system requirements listed on their website to compare chrome vs the mighty client, which honestly seems like a bit of an omission for something that talks so much about performance.
It's actually insanely expensive because most of us are going to still going to buy a computer and that $30/month ($327/year with discount) would have much more value for maxing out an M1 laptop.
but i don't know if everyone will have that same ability.
It almost feels like a 'home gym' vs a 'gym membership' scenario. Upfront cost for a home gym is quite expensive, whereas the gym membership is spent over time.
All-in you may spend a lot more on the gym membership, but because you eat it over time, it feels better to a certain population of people
> I don’t think Mighty is for everyone.
I certainly don’t need a subscription service to run a browser in the cloud, when I have a computer in front of me that’s perfectly capable of running one locally.
Mighty is awful, both from a privacy and a resource conservation perspective. The computing equivalent of commuting alone to the office in a Humvee.
- modern web apps offload loads of computation to the client, bogging it down (AKA “bloat”).
- Mighty discovered that the actual bandwidth/processing needed by a client to render any page is significantly less than that forced onto the client today.
- Mighty sits in the middle of the connection to shift the processing burden off the client, and onto their own machines.
notice that (1) Mighty could sell this product either to the end-user or the web provider and (2) when the end-user buys this product they’re just subsidizing app developers and enabling them to continue to ignore bloat.
don’t do it… you’re just opting to play the role of sucker even more than you already do.
Shadow PC, Stadia, etc. have all been absolutely huge failures and they solve problems that requires a LOT more compute than what a browser needs, while being priced a lot cheaper and not having the same privacy concerns as Mighty.
But I suppose 40 is a rounder number than 640, which used to be "all anyone will ever need" number.
Yes, and my point is that you had a workflow issue.
That is _expensive_, damn. For something that used to be free, this is a very hard value proposition. In some ways, this is why we live in a poisonous, ad infested nightmare internet, but it is just so difficult for me to whip out my credit card when I have safari right here instead.
The interesting thing is that sharing big iron for web browser workloads kind of makes sense because of the bursty usage patterns.
Apparently now everyone does know they need it...
I have a 11850H laptop with 64GB of RAM already. You were saying...?
I am a huge fan of Firefox with treestyle tabs and the auto tab suspend extension.