Whist, a new cloud-hybrid browser
whist.com
whist.com
Privacy is also one of the reasons we've decided on the hybrid approach. Websites with sensitive information (your bank, etc.) can be used on local, incognito, or Tor tabs, all of which are not offloaded to Whist's servers and run 100% locally.
So instead of explicitly bookmarking a page, not closing a tab is the indicator that you may be more interested in this page in the future than any page you visited in the past. In the meantime, you don't think that having many bookmarks requires more RAM.
As for the faster load times, I can see the lure, but I think it's a sellout. I'd like to know the resource footprint and incentivize website makers to make websites possible to run on computers without cloud GPUs.
Other than the fact that this browser doesn't solve problems that I'd like to have, I think that more browsers is both necessary and good. While they may rely on Google's browser engine technology (Blink), having more front-end diversity surely contributes to a better browser market.
When I open the browser after closing it, the session is restored with all but the current tab offloaded so it opens quickly and using very little resources.
My current session has tens of tabs, only a handful of them active. It uses about .5% CPU when idle, and less than 1Gb RAM.
But then I think there is another side to this. Windows has always continued with this cycle of planned obsolescence. The latest iteration was the worst. My copy of Microsoft Office 2019 slowed to a crawl after the Windows 11 update. Then, I had to buy a 365 subscription. That Office license was supposed to be good for life. I won’t forget that!
So I set up an older computer with 4 gigs of ram with Mint. It is snappy. I bought Crossover. It runs Word, but not PowerPoint. Unfortunately, it is difficult to get a copy of Office 2016 that is stable with Wine/Crossover. So again I am stuck paying the Microsoft Mafia. Honestly, I am fine with paying. What I am not fine with is them adding no new features, and bogging down my hardware so I need to buy another machine.
I also feel acutely the need to get control of my email back from Google, as many others do.
The reason I, and I think a lot of others want privacy is because they are sick of the obsolescence kill switch. Give me light hardware and web applications that can get as much cloud processing power to run as needed, and I would be happy. But I really need to trust that cloud provider and I don’t trust Microsoft. After all, they are using emails to get URLs to scrape for Bing. Not good.
Maybe this is a nice balance of a cloud operating system and local control.
And that's a $1000 that I have to spend every few years, for just a mediocre experience (Since by the time it's 4-6 years old, it's virtually unusable for anything but the simplest of websites).
Maybe if people just wrote more HTML+JS rather than these big hefty "500kb of JS" React-based websites, this wouldn't be necessary. But as it is, $120/year is actually very cheap if it actually solves the problem it claims to solve. (Even $300/yr wouldn't be unreasonable tbh, esp if it's on my employer's card since work tabs are the hefty tabs for me)
Sometimes when I woke the computer up from sleep, Firefox would be crazy laggy. I suspect some resource leakage but at least RAM and CPU were fine. Closing and reopening the browser would work around it.
For full cloud tabs support, we'll be charging a subscription fee as an add-on on top of the browser. We're still figuring out exactly what the pricing tiers will be, but we expect it to be in the 10-15$ range.
To be honest: my fist take was "this has to be satire" - but this is really a product. Wow.
Whist differs by being built in a native browser on your computer, rather than being fully offloaded to the cloud, and supports both local and cloud tabs (so that you can adapt your workflow based on which web apps you are using, how strong your Internet is, etc.)
For more details on the exact differences with Mighty and with other browsers, we have a comparison chart on our website
It would be helpful if you somehow included the browser name as I had to use Google Images for this. It's not very convenient.