[HN Gopher] Mighty: The Browser You Didn't Know You Needed but D...
___________________________________________________________________
Mighty: The Browser You Didn't Know You Needed but Definitely Do
Author : tosh
Score : 13 points
Date : 2022-06-20 20:29 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jacobhrussell.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (jacobhrussell.com)
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| It's a hot take but if you have more than 40 tabs open you have
| to fix your workflow, not pay 30 bucks a month to avoid the
| issue.
|
| 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.
| dotancohen wrote:
| I've gone over 200 tabs while researching something. Firefox
| handles the load just fine, and Tree Style Tabs provides a
| terrific interface.
|
| But I suppose 40 is a rounder number than 640, which used to be
| "all anyone will ever need" number.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| > I've gone over 200 tabs while researching something.
|
| Yes, and my point is that you had a workflow issue.
| projektfu wrote:
| Windows fixes the problem by arbitrarily rebooting and
| forgetting to remember all the tabs. Like having a significant
| other who cleans your desk for you, making you forget what you
| were doing.
| [deleted]
| aabhay wrote:
| > Mighty comes in at $30 with a 9% discount with a 12 month
| prepayment
|
| 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.
| djaahk wrote:
| Curious to see if you considered Shadow Tech[1] as well, given
| the similar price point ($30/month) and possibly wider use case
| (whole cloud pc instead of just the browser)?
|
| [1] https://shadow.tech/
| zalo wrote:
| Kasm is a self-hosted alternative that's free and avoids the
| security issues.
| colinsane wrote:
| let me get this right:
|
| - 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.
| lumberjack24 wrote:
| My brother in Christ, you have an email job and you definitely
| don't need this browser.
| dchuk wrote:
| I was actually very interested in their product when I first read
| about it...until I got a 14" M1 Macbook Pro.
|
| 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.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I think just "get more RAM" is a good blanket suggestion. A lot
| of cheap laptops come with 4 or 8 gigs of memory, which can
| pretty easily suffocate the average user's Chrome session. Even
| the 8 gig M1 Macbook Pro could get saturated pretty easily,
| swap enabled or not.
| scotcha1 wrote:
| i had the exact same experience
|
| 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
| wmf wrote:
| Mighty is cheaper though.
| b0sk wrote:
| What happens when the Mighty servers are down?
| TheDong wrote:
| Is it?
|
| 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.
| dchuk wrote:
| Assuming I don't drop this computer and smash it to bits,
| I'll be able to keep it as long as my last MBP (a 2015 I
| bought new). So conservatively, let's say 5 years.
|
| 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.
| Confiks wrote:
| > Assuming I don't drop this computer and smash it to bits,
| I'll be able to keep it as long as my last MBP (a 2015 I
| bought new). So conservatively, let's say 5 years.
|
| 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.
| metabagel wrote:
| https://www.slashgear.com/mighty-the-stadia-of-browsers-thin...
|
| "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."
| mikl wrote:
| The author says it himself:
|
| > _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.
| dralley wrote:
| https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387126330961981441?lan...
|
| "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"."
| treelovinhippie wrote:
| wizofaus wrote:
| "Error 1027 This website has been temporarily rate limited"
|
| Apparently now everyone does know they need it...
| sys_64738 wrote:
| If a browser isn't from a name company (i.e. Google, M$ or Apple)
| then it HAS to be open source. There is no trust otherwise.
| egypturnash wrote:
| This sure is an attempt at a solution to the problem of too many
| programs being written as Javascript apps that use about 200x as
| much resources as a native app.
| akarlsten wrote:
| If you can afford $30+ per month you can probably afford to
| finance a new M1-based Macbook (or even better/cheaper, a desktop
| PC) that would blow the "blazing fast" performance out of the
| water, right?
|
| 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?)
| chx wrote:
| > By providing 2 Gps of bandwidth, 40 GB of RAM, and 8 vCPUs to
| each browser instance
|
| I have a 11850H laptop with 64GB of RAM already. You were
| saying...?
| danShumway wrote:
| I vaguely remember commenting something to the same effect when
| Mighty first popped up on HN, but ignoring all of the other
| problems of streaming my web browsing off of someone else's
| computer (which is a giant problem, I have zero interest in
| routing all of my network requests through this company), I just
| can't figure out how to make ~$330-360 a year competitive pricing
| as a long term investment.
|
| 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.
| liuliu wrote:
| For people whose main work happens in browsers and have strict
| security requirements (in the sense that the corporation
| doesn't want you to have any piece of the information you
| worked on in your personal laptop).
|
| There are a few scenarios like this (law firms, accounting
| firms and trading firms).
| [deleted]
| danShumway wrote:
| > and have strict security requirements
|
| 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.
| monkaiju wrote:
| Damn, i cant think of behavior i dont want from a browser more
| than the browser not running on my computer...
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| When Microsoft, Google and Apple start offering this as your
| go-to I'll stick to Firefox exclusively. This is like NSA wet
| dreams tier. To be fair, Firefox is my main driver, I only
| really use the others to test my web applications work fine
| across browsers, or in the case of Edge for the battery life
| savings on my work laptop.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-06-20 23:02 UTC)