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.
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.
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
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
For people who spend all day in a browser, which is a lot of people, I could see it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
It would if they pre-fetch the content based on your browsing behaviour.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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
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?
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?
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.
https://mobile.twitter.com/borrowcheck/status/13870721940401...
I believe the blog post addresses this diagonally.
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?
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".
>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.
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.
"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."
> 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.
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.
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.
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”
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.
- 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.
Then that's a problem of software, not hardware.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Its VNC. And Cloudflare has pitched same [0] with different value dimension (security).
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.
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
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.
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 ?
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!
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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"
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?
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
> 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)
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.
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'm not sure how I feel about making money off ad-blocking.
Individual consumer - Not sure.
How did we get to this point?
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.