Mighty Retrospective

I wish Mighty had succeeded for a different audience. The core value prop "make figma faster" was not very compelling--people who need to use Figma can buy a mac.

You know who does struggle with slow computers and memory issues? Call center employees who have to run Front, Slack, Chrome, and probably one or two other electron-based apps.

At our startup (not in USA), these issues are so bad we've ended up getting people who earn $700usd/mo M1 macbook airs anyway because otherwise an electron-based workflow is unamnageable.

I would have loved to buy them cheaper computers instead that ran entirely in the cloud...plus extra permission management, no local storage, and other "really, really, really nice to haves" for remote workers dealing with PII.

If Mighty's value prop had been "never worry about remote wiping an employee's computer ever again, oh, and it's faster too, and it's all OPEX, and we charge you by minute instead of by the computer" I would have signed up immediately.

Streaming Chrome with some value adds must have been a short-term product right? It could only have existed until PCs caught up on processing speed (Apple's M1?).

I wonder what vision did Suhail pitch to PG to deserve high praise. Because this can't be it.

What annoyed me about Mighty was that it represented giving up on having fast, efficient software on our own machines. We COULD live in a world where 400+ tabs (typical for me) didn't require 32gb of RAM, but browser authors have chosen otherwise, and that sucks. The idea of pushing the entire browser to some other computer, and over-speccing that one, instead of actually making better software, just seemed like a cop-out.

This person's claim that Mighty customers didn't open huge numbers of tabs and use a ton of RAM makes no sense. What OTHER purpose could a $35/m cloud browser possibly serve??

While I never really believed in Mighty as a concept, I think the technology has enormous potential in some industries. A robust, performant and versatile VNC like toolkit to enable traditionally desktop software to be made available in the cloud could be be very successful.

There are many CAD, Visualisation, Rendering, Editing, and Simulation tools that are incredible CPU, GPU or Memory intensive that could be made available in a collaborative environment for the first time using some of the Mighty tech. I hope someone picks it up and explores other ways it could be used.

> RAM: Mighty allowed users to open hundreds of tabs without being worried that their RAM would be consumed. But my sense is this was not a killer feature. The benefit simply isn’t massive: the alternative is to close tabs and “clean things up”. Many people probably do this anyway because it’s visually hard to have hundreds of tabs open, so users end up closing tabs even with infinite RAM. This is evident in the data: when we gave users 32gb of RAM, 90+% of them didn’t go beyond 16. We did have the opportunity to provide users with a whole new interface of tab management – one in which tabs never have to be closed and hundreds of tabs are visually manageable. Maybe this would have been a smash hit, it’s hard to be sure.

What I want is for the address bar to give me a really quick way to jump to existing tabs, if I start to type in the address of one I already have open. The entire reason my tabs get out of control is that at some point I get enough open that I start to lose track of what's there, and repeat myself. End up with like 5 AWS tabs, only one of which I'm actually using, stuff like that. So finally I just bookmark the whole set ("just in case"—I've not once looked back at these, in almost a decade of working this way, though I bet there's some great shit in there) and start over.

Apple's "tab groups" approach being a solution, but the trouble is I forget to switch to the correct group for a given site and end up using a single jumbled-up session anyway. It needs better (more automatic, probably) UI.

The offered value was simply not worth what they were charging. I would venture to say that it would be difficult to sustainably charge anything at all for this. For most people, the alleged slowness of Chrome is good enough. Why would the normal person go through the hassle of paying for an experience that was only marginally better than something that was available for free? Their best bet was an ad-based model but that comes with its own set of drawbacks.

In general all alternative browser products that charge money face the same issue. Netscape already tested this business model in the 90s.

For this reason and for many people this app was DOA from the inception. The founder should have carefully considered this criticism instead of disregarding it and using it as "fuel" https://twitter.com/Suhail/status/1196458286347776001

Sadly it seems his new startup is jumping on the trend of generative AI. This is another product category that is doomed to failure yet has tons of tech industry fanfare (similar to web3, which is on its deathbed). For most professional artists, it's not hard to do the actual drawing, the difficulty is coming up with the subject matter / concept for the drawing. Generative AI may have a market for low quality yet high volume content creators that auto-generate content on YouTube or other social media for a modest living.

> In addition, Suhail had been trying out building a new product that was showing to be a reasonable alternative bet.

I see they've been distracted with AI art just like everyone else and had to jump on that bandwagon :).

Don't get me wrong -- Stable Diffusion is probably the fastest progressing thing on the internet in decades.

I wonder if they ever got around to implementing accessibility, e.g. for screen readers, in their remote browser. That's an interesting problem. Do you send serialized accessibility trees (and hopefully incremental updates) down to the local machine so it can implement the platform accessibility API and work with a user's existing assistive technology (e.g. screen reader)? Or do you run the AT remotely as well? I believe the former is feasible with Chromium (though I haven't yet proven it), but Cloudflare went with the latter in their Browser Isolation product, probably because converting the Chromium accessibility tree back to HTML in the local browser would compromise the security benefit of Cloudflare's product. But Mighty didn't have that concern AFAIK.

previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33583830 4 days ago

interesting that https://www.mightyapp.com/ still has not been updated with any mention of shutdown

I always found the idea to be bizarre.

The group of people for which a browser is truly horrendously slow would be on something like a low-end Windows laptop. From mid-end and upwards it's fine (or good enough) and for Mac users pretty much never an issue.

The people with such crappy hardware are exactly the group to not be able to afford 35$ a month. That's like the price of 3 or 4 streaming services combined. Just to browse!?

I appreciated this commentary. When the news from Suhail came out as quite sudden, realistically there's a team under a struggling company working tirelessly to fulfill their vision.

It sounds like M1 was the nail in the coffin - though you'd think this is a normal question for an investor to ask re defensibility when deciding to invest in the company (a version of the classic "What if Google entered your market?"), and thus something they would have had rebuttals for?

I'd argue that this isn't a retrospective in it's truest form. I would like to have a piece that's more about the metrics, like what sort of churn they got, how was their launch perceived, what sort of market research they did/ didn't do etc. These sorts of pieces would help make the lonely startup world more transparent and accessible (it's easier to do this after the fact, rather than when keeping up appearances when trying everything to keep a company alive). Perhaps Suhail will bless us with this at some point.

Mighty would have been huge imo if they just waited a bit longer and pivoted to powering browsers inside of mobile VR/AR all day wear devices, like the upcoming Apple visor, where there are basically no resources available to be used for things like figma yet having a fast, scalable browser anywhere would be amazing.

> Mighty’s short term goal was to make people more productive with their browser.

I believe the biggest reason for their failure and lack of traction is because they misidentified their value proposition from day 1.

No, loading web pages marginally faster is not going to make you more productive. It will save you a few minutes per day in the best case scenario, nothing else.

Productivity does not come from loading speed, it comes from how quickly you can identify the information that matters on a page and absorb it.

This HackerNews page took 320ms to load, but I've been on the page for 5 minutes already. They really think saving even 90% of the load time is going to make any difference to my _productivity_?

I have some experience building infrastructure for on-demand cloud hosted desktops (HDx3DPro) for scientific users and their apps. Often wondered if there was a consumer play there too. Better someone tried and failed than never tried at all.

I appreciate the swing and I pointed this out early-on, but I wouldn't bet against Moore's Law - the hardware gets faster and cheaper. Back when they started 16GB was pretty high end, now it's more mainstream with 32GB being the high end...

And I think it's a very niche use case to have hundreds of tabs open - like, that's hoarding, like, just close some, you'll never get to all of that.

Mighty was great. If they had a Windows/Linux port it would be killer as it would have allowed you to run all kind of apps without carrying a $1.5k computer around. That was the dream.

I'd also expect their pricing to go down given economies of scale.

I lowkey wanted them to be super ambitious and one day roll out their own chips and become a full stack computer company.

I was one of the people not only perplexed by the positioning, but that they managed to raise money. Props to Suhail for selling it - it does make me wonder how many great ideas are slipping through purely from VC's requiring flashy sales skills. But I guess that could be said about almost anything.

The use case had significant value until M1 came and offered a good enough native experience. Unfortunate.

I use Arc and it deals with the memory issue differently. Only your pinned tabs are kept, the rest disappear over time. I like that functionality. Overall, I'm enjoying using it.

>CPU: We gave users a 16 core machine just for their browser, but it turns out that the web is largely limited by single core performance (think JS, layout, html parsing, etc).

I'm pretty sure that javascript being largely single-threaded was well known knowledge since day 1. Did they not know this? Did they think that mulit-threaded javascript was just around the corner?

The place where they really could have won is iOS, where browsers aren't allowed to use their own rendering engine, and system specs still lagged behind the M1.

Author here, I just noticed this was on HN! There’s lots of great points raised here that I didn’t cover. I published this with very little feedback, so I’m not surprised I missed things. I’ll go through some of the additional points, though:

* Pivoting towards enterprise. Not with speed in mind, but instead security/control/compliance.

We didn’t spend too much time here, so I can’t definitively say this wouldn’t have worked. Cloudflare had (has?) just this vision when they bought S2: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-and-remote-browser-is.... There is at least one critical roadblock that I see: wifi and networks can be spotty. If only 80% of a company’s employees have good enough internet, what do you do as an administrator? Force them to figure out notoriously difficult wifi problems? If you don’t, those that don’t like the browser will simply not use it because they’re not required to. Given this, I always thought of this as a secondary market. First, make something great, independent of being required to use the product. Then start building out other tools that make businesses more enticed. We did sell to companies in multi-seat deals, and were eager to keep pushing in this direction. Note the tag line: “A new browser to work faster”.

* CAD/Rendering/Simulation/etc instead of a Browser

The trend is that all of these are moving to the browser. However, maybe not fast enough and Mighty was too early. It’s also a more crowded market (Citrix, Teradici, now Parsec, etc) and yet smaller than the browser market (well, by users at least).

* Powering browsers inside of mobile VR/AR

We never tried this. My sense is we’d be too early (at least 2+ years?).

* Accessibility, e.g. for screen readers

This was never a big enough priority but yeah, it seems solvable. It’s more or less another API to implement.

* Loading web pages faster is not going to make you more productive

As I see it, there are two buckets of speed. The first is to make fast things faster. The second is to make slow things faster. The two can work together. The real value prop is the second, but the first is where you can bring lots of delight. But I think there is some truth to this. Of the loyal paying users that we had, they felt substantially more productive. But could this benefit offset the price + downsides? Knowing what I know now, I don’t think so. But there’s a lot of context about what’s actually possible, what a wide spectrum of people value, etc that gets me to that conclusion.

* Who really, really, has a slow browser that’s willing to pay $35/month due to it?

This was my first thought when we starting working on a Browser. One thing I learned was to hold back my gut instinct and prove the answer, instead of guessing it. The empirical answer: thousands of people that we could find through minimal marketing (just Twitter, basically). Does that mean there are a million+ people out there that also have it? Maybe.. it’s hard to tell. But my personal hope was that this quantity generalized somewhat to the 2B users of Chrome so that we could at least make a profitable business. If we got there, we could move into areas where we were solving more problems.

So to directly answer the question: I’m pretty confident this market exists. But not if Mighty also has the downsides it did (doesn’t work well in cafes, a variety of bugs, etc.)

I had expected Mighty to pivot to solving the giant problem of corporate computing security.