$30-50/month is a wild price point for this. Who is going to pay that? It feels too expensive both for enterprise (existing remote desktop solutions run about half the cost) and for end-users.
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.
Fwiw, we had 5 customers pay $30/mo in the last 12 hours who have been trying Mighty for a few weeks.
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.
Why might I use this instead of / in addition to Shadow (https://shadow.tech)? I'm a Shadow user, and they seem to give you beefier hardware at half the price, and it's a general purpose OS that will let you run any app (as opposed to "just" a browser).
Most people want an experience where the underlying OS and the application (the browser) interoperate seamlessly versus having to tame two desktop experiences. The primary application people think is slow is their browser by a wide margin so that's where we decided to focus as more native desktop apps become web apps. That focus lets us constrain the problems we get solve vs boiling the ocean with all of Windows.
Fwiw, we started by streaming Windows and pivoted away.
It's not clear to me that Shadow's business is sustainable. Windows licensing alone for virtualization across end-users if you buy from a reseller is $11/mo/user alone. I only know because we tried and became a reseller briefly. They also seem to use consumer GPUs that violate NVIDIA's licensing and agreements. Maybe they know something we don't.
> They also seem to use consumer GPUs that violate NVIDIA's licensing and agreements
They claim to, in reality they are sliced Quadro/Tesla cards that get a GTX 1080's worth of performance. I was wondering about the Windows licensing myself, not clear how they got around that.
Perhaps the rotate (?) the licenses somehow? That is, not every subscriber is active all the time? Imagine it as the public computers at the library. Maybe?
In any case, even at $20 p/m it feels like a strong value. That ~$1000 every four years - without ever being stuck with an out of date machine.
Yep, this is exactly what I was getting at. Shadow is one of many examples of application streaming services which aren't limited to the browser and offer similar hardware (or even flexible hardware) at a lower price point.
+1 I love their service, it's flawless and I often forget I'm using a stream. Then again, I'm on a wired Ethernet connection and a fiber line within 5ms of the datacenter so that probably helps.
What's actually crazy is that i even ditched my Ethernet cable and is running on a ubiquiti amplfi 5ghz router, and there is seemingly no difference in my location at least.
Isn't Shadow basically going out of business? Pre-orders aren't estimated to be available until October and I thought I read somewhere that they are selling off pieces of the business.
There are 2 competing offers to buy the company, as I know of. One from OVH founder Octave Klaba, the other from JB Kempf, of VLC fame. So no, I don't think it should go out of business - in the short term.
I'm not skeptical at all the people would pay for this. I worked on a cloud browser for seven years, there's a bunch of different market needs for this stuff. But $30-50 feels really high. We got feedback from enterprise customers that they were looking in the $5-15 range per user per month. That said, we pushed the security angle much more than performance, so the dynamics are a bit different.
Congrats on all the work here. Browser streaming isn't easy stuff!
Pricing is a good example of something that most people are intuitively wrong about. What you think people will pay and what people actually will pay are rarely congruent, and most of the time people guess far too low. Literally every bit of advice and writing about pricing I've ever read boils down to "Charge more than what feels right; you'll be surprised at how high you can go before you lose customers."
Also, 50% of the highest-paying customers bring more than 50%of the revenue, by definition. Often much more.
Apple keeps applying this strategy since 1990s.
Tesla bootstrapped itself off $80k cars, and only now is expanding to the "reasonable" $30k market segment.
You may not need everyone jump on your service just yet, you can start with the most needing it who are moneyed. Then you expand, economies of scale kick in, and you can introduce lower and lower price tiers, and people enjoy falling prices and getting a bargain.
Enterprise might say $5-15, but someone who controls their own budget and spends all day in the browser would easily pay more. Freelancers. Bootstrappers. The same way people pay for an IDE.
I agree they would pay more, but I'm still skeptical of $30-50. As I mentioned in a comment below, why limit it to the browser? If you've got all these resources just offer a full VDI which more typically prices in this ballpark.
> If you've got all these resources just offer a full VDI which more typically prices in this ballpark.
Perhaps their solution has something specific to the browser which allows them to do it really fast and cost effective. Eg. Sending just diffs of DOM to the client.
a useful comparison is other proxy/cloud browsers and especially VDI. $30/user/mo seems normal in enterprise: https://www.nutanix.com/products/frame/pricing , citrix, ... . Frame and some others were a good perf+quality jump, and maybe mighty is/will be the next
positioning for consumer/prosumer is interesting and invites changing the math! opera was notable here as a web accelerator, but also a warning sign for pursuing this as a VC-funded businesses. the internet is bigger now..
Exactly, I always wonder how much Safari is faster than competing browsers. I have dozens of open tabs and it just works. With other browsers, I cannot even work after a certain number of tabs.
Indeed, I'm really bad at closing tabs. One day I wondered how many Safari tabs I had open on my pre-M1 2018 base model MacBook Air. I went into the tab preview pane and discovered it was around 480 tabs. Mind you this was in between system restarts so some were probably suspended or something, but still. I don't even notice with both IntelliJ and VSCode open as well.
People who don’t close tabs because they unconsciously don’t want to lose their search history.
At the end of the day your search history should be fed into a personal search engine which digests the data and figures out which pages were most useful to you (maybe by helpful browser buttons)…and uploads that into some open database. This can then be the basis for a new type of search engine.
It could be implemented trivially on something like Mighty, since everyones browsers run in the same datacenter.
As a reference, I've got more than 100 open tabs on this Firefox Android (it counts them up to 99 then it displays ∞) and probably another one hundred on my desktop (Ubuntu /Gnome), split on five windows on five different desktops. I can't assess the speed of Safari because it doesn't run on my hardware. It could be faster but those Firefoxes don't feel slow and don't slow down when the number of tabs increases. I don't have a really large number of open tabs though.
I expect to pay for this with high probability. I don't think I'm in the first target batch as I'm giddy in M1 land now, but I do work on so many different machines and love the idea of a persistent environment in the cloud. I also expect to want to do genomics in my browser at some point, and thus envision a need for 100x+ more powerful browser tabs.
What would you be doing that would require 100x+ more powerful tabs? I'd imagine most process-intensive work is already being done server-side or in a desktop app, not the frontend of a browser app.
Someday I want to run a whole world simulation. Think "The Sims" except the whole world. 8 billion agents, say a million bytes per person, so 8PB of RAM. While the sim is running I want to copy and paste the URL in a new tab and change a few params to compare the results. I want things to be instant.
Today I want to visualize 100,000 rows across 1,000 dimensions in 10 different tabs.
Between Today and Someday there are endless things I want to do.
You are not explaining your architecture. The parent (and me as it happens) assume that when you paste the URL and change params then that URL is sent from your browser to a server. The server runs the simulatíon based on the params in the URL it received and returns the results to the browser. With that architecture you would need a lot of resources for the server but not for the browser. What architecture are you thinking of?
Server is just a dumb nginx server sending HTML and Javascript. No dynamic routes. Everything happens clientside (main thread and/or web workers, local storage for persistence).
Still to early to think how to sell our [ we are in the very early stage] to sell our WebApp subscription as a bundle with MightyApp. But the price will be to high [add $15 for our side]. Waiting for the future when Linux and Windows ( sadly) versions arrive. Imagine the Arduino’s guys with this. Go buddy!
This is huge challenge BTW. I am dealing with electron kind of Web App and we are thinking in sell our subscription model with a bundle with MightyApp in the future waiting for the other versions Windows ( sadly) and Linux ( imagine the Arduino users ). Wait and see. The best for MightyApp!
I agree. People just point to the exceptions and not the vast majority of products and businesses that failed.
That drop box comment was a bit off since having an offsite backup of your most important data and having it available across all your devices is super useful. However I see where he was coming from. I still have on site backups. And most of the time that’s way cheaper for massive backups.
$30-50 USD for browser inception? If I had my entire environment there I could see the usefulness. But the browser alone?
I see some comments where people are already paying. Who is using this?
Well, that's one of the points. It's easy and trivial to come up with the downsides of something. There are already a bunch of people trying to do that in every thread.
Might as well exercise the less-used part of the brain where you try to imagine the positive aspects of something.
I would care if i knew the buzz around these things is organic or genuine. Yet this thing popped simultaneously on my twitter , hn and elsewhere, clearly some marketing machine is pushing it. Overall though, technology that reduces the options of the user and gatekeeps is always net negative imho.
wasn't trying to !. Also you're absolutely right, mighty might fail as a consumer application. But rigging together a very complicated system of software will definitely fail as a product for these people.
I'm confused by how hostile Zed thinks Drew is being here.
He quotes a post from Drew thanking Brandon for his remarks, and spends the rest of the essay saying the thanking is an uncalled-for "level of retribution", "effective slander case". But both exchanges between Drew and Brandon (the one in 2007 as well as the one in 2018) seem friendly to me.
My impression is that when linking to Brandon's post, people are usually saying "a company can still succeed by offering something that was previously possible, by making it easier to do" and "don't be discouraged by criticism saying it's already possible". They're not saying that Brandon was a bad person or that his feedback wasn't useful or anything.
Zed also makes a big deal about Brandon not being able to delete his post - but I remember dang mentioning that they would delete posts when asked, but everyone so far has agreed to a compromise of removing the username but keeping the post, which does seem like the best solution in a case like this (where the content of the post has historical value but the author might want to disavow it).
Sorry about replying to a week old post but your link and post really made me think:
I think the initial HN comment was justified albeit a bit nerdy, the marketing was just poor at the time. Not being able to delete a post is sort of a problem with all written media, the internet is not your group of friends at a bar. Being able to distance yourself from something that you've previously said might be a solution, an "I stand corrected" button might be a solution. Perhaps just being able to add a strikethough to an old post.
You're right to point to this, but I feel the comparison is much more "unfair" in the Dropbox case. FTP+SVN (lol) is not even close to the experience Dropbox gives.
In the case of Mighty the experience is known. It is Chrome, just faster. Sure, someone might prefer to use Mighty, fair enough, but there's no "extra magic"
BTW, Dropbox was huge when it launched and everybody was using it. I don't know anybody using it anymore. Maybe it's because people are using less desktop programs and more browser apps and apps in their mobile devices. So, less "explicit" files?
Why would someone want to do all that instead of paying this company $30/month? There are lots of people who's jobs are spent in a web browser. Your examples aren't selling a solution to a problem–they are just tools. Which is fine and great for people who need them, but I simply wanted a faster browser, I'd rather use a service that is dedicated to that purpose.
i think the main selling point is the always-on browser, not a faster browser. i dont know what demand there is for faster browsers, if speed was a big deal i think most web apps would have moved to native, but almost none of them do. People who use beefy web apps are likely capable of setting up their own server which could double as a terabyte of remote storage, file sharing, any self-hosted app really.
I m sure the makers have done their research and found $30/month is the optimal price of a browser of a browser. Surely a lot of businesses will be convinced it's worth the money because $bigCorp uses it as well, and cargo cults work, I'm just pointing out what money can buy at that price point.
Then someone might figure that they can rent servers for $30 /mo and sell 10 remote desktop subscriptions on it.
The BBC loses an additional 10% of users for every extra second it takes for its site to load. And when Yahoo! reduced its page load time by just 0.4 seconds, traffic increased by 9%
1 second delay reduces customer satisfaction by 16%
The longer a webpage takes to load, the more its bounce rate will skyrocket.
I'm not onboard with this price-point either. If it's pointed at shitty chromebooks users, I get the price point even less.
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.
But you are updating. You're spending $360-600 a year on this.
RAM isn't that expensive, even if you do feel like you need to upgrade again in another 2-3 years. I can buy a completely brand new, good computer every 3 years for that price. And it will be able to handle running 100 tabs.
There are a lot of potential reasons why someone might benefit from a remote browser, but I don't think computer processing power is one of them. My phone can handle running over 100 tabs in Firefox.
I don't know, is this an adblock thing? I currently have ~950 tabs open on my 6-year-old desktop computer, and my computer isn't crashing. I think it's currently using 8-9 gigs of RAM. Maybe my system is particularly optimized, or maybe without an adblocker websites are way heavier and multitasking is a big problem? I do run uMatrix and uBlock Origin, so maybe my experience isn't typical. But the point is, for $30-60 a month I could buy another 16 gigs of RAM.
I am sure it is uBlock + uMatrix that's giving you the boost. I use both and whenever I open a regular website in Incognito mode (in case uMatrix ruleset adjustment would be too consuming for a one-off) you can feel the fans spinning up.
Wish more people used these addons -- there is no reason why webpages should download megabytes of JavaScript to "improve my experience" :-)
You're paying THEM to update their servers at a price point you could easily match or come in lower on YOUR workstation upgrades. I don't understand how people are trying to justify this cost.
Twitter's special move was a character limit. There are people who just want the browser and will ironically pay a premium to have that one thing done very well.
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.
I can imagine a small niche for something like this. Big corps can end up with weird IT department restrictions and capex/opex inelasticity. There are a tragic number of professionals stuck with a cheap Dell thin-and-light laptop with a 1368x768 TN display and 6 GB RAM. They can absolutely afford a better computer, but they can't get IT/purchasing to give it to them. They're unincentivized to spend their own money on a nicer computer, and even if they did want to, they could never get it on the domain and approved with IT's spyware and antispam software. But they may have a small amount of opex, their direct manager could accommodate a monthly "I need this subscription to do my job". This results in stupidly expensive Todo-list collaboration subscriptions, and cloud computers that are more expensive than local computers, and IT-bypassed remote storage systems...it's not a rationally optimal state of affairs, more like a weird corner of the chaos of modern society.
Genuine question, but would the places that are that inflexible wrt to hardware upgrades have the flexibility to allow you to use a cloud service to perform your most sensitive work?
I worked there and they had these awful surface pros with hardly any memory. Their solution was to use AWS's hosted Desktop for Developers. It.. sort of worked OK.
This, by the way, was not just for a few people: because of Brexit there are thousands of people all working on making the new systems for customs etc work.
I suspect organisations that are undergoing digital transformation (as they are) will have this kind of setup. It was rife through the whole place: rubbish old IT stuff rubbing shoulders with modern SaaS.
I hate this setup. You generally need to have anything audio/video related on the laptop anyway and these are the most CPU hungry apps. Working through remote sessions suck and are high latency even on good connections, it's really noticeable for certain things like alt-tabbing and intellisense and it works awfully for multi monitor setups.
I suspect it's more so companies can pretend all their old rules about keeping data on site can remain. Still, it's better than going back to the office.
Exactly. Also, who needs those resources just for a browser? Why not make it a full VDI instead? With those resources it feels like a waste to limit it that way.
This is my thing about it - I always hear people complaining about Chrome being a memory hog, but it never feels slow to me. I'm writing this with 15 tabs open and it's not even a worry. I only have 16gb in my laptop too.
I regularly run Docker + Slack + dozens of Brave tabs (still Chromium), and both individual tabs and my whole computer will slow down with some frequency, despite having 16GB of RAM.
Am I missing something? How does Mighty allow professionals access to internal websites and other internally hosted content. If this is priced for professionals, how is it even possible to allow workers to stream sensitive documents etc from a cloud service browser?
This argument falls apart when you consider how often this is made nowadays. Yes, for one individual product spending 1-2$ per day isn't much. If you do this however for everything people advocate it nowadays, you're suddenly spending a thousand bucks plus per month solely on subscriptions.
> it was priced higher, we’d have more incentives for companies to come and make more great software
This is also a strange logic. The definition of innovation and the benefit of competition is to drive down prices for consumers, not up. Let's not turn software into some sort of Veblen good.
> If you’re making good money, investing $1-2 dollars a day to be able to work more productively is incredible roi.
Sure, but investing $2/day pays for an M1 MacBook Air in under 2 years. That's why so many of us are struggling to understand this.
It might make sense in the context of companies with weird IT department restrictions that won't let them buy new laptops but will let them spend $50/month on a service.
For the "why would someone pay" question, I think it's quite simple.
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.
Pardon me for being rude, but this seems like a pretty naive marketing take on what they're offering. What exactly is the use case here? Employees that have hundreds of tabs open saving a couple seconds loading web pages? How much productivity is being lost there, objectively?
Once you get above 20 tabs, are you genuinely keeping track of every single one as something to return to later? Or are you just being lazy and lack the personal systems to track what's actually important or needs to be returned to later?
I've been using a 11y/o computer at home for everything--code compilation, VMs, work AND personal life--and this has never been an issue for me.
Maybe I'll give you #3, but if an employee came to me asking for this as a paid subscription, I'd shut the idea down immediately. Seems like another startup trying to fill a space that doesn't need to be occupied.
> Once you get above 20 tabs, are you genuinely keeping track of every single one as something to return to later?
yes! Ideally I have around 500 tabs that I all need. I for example let your comment sit here for a while unsure if I was going to reply to it. There are more topics on HN currently under investigation. Each spawns a series of extra tabs. Cloud browsers, whole OS in the cloud, what hapend to paperspace? I open several articles that I may or may not read. When I get back to this discussion I look over the tabs it spawned and continue exploring while closing old ones... There is a window with music, one with youtube videos I might want to watch/comment on with the further research tabs they spawn. A dozen tax tabs, courier services, business card services. Dozens of tabs for websites I'm working at. jsfiddles, specs, demos. Tabs about wind turbines without propellers, road side wind turbines, covid, oil and coal reserves. And aggregators ofc
Basically, I can only do work or look at depressing shit for so long but I get back to it after watching a cat video.
When closing lots of tabs I go over the topics which helps me remember what I've looked at.
Its funny howmany people I talk with who have a single tab (usually also a single application and a single monitor) but know instinctively that their approach is better. (as if there should be only one metric) I cant begin to explain how much I'm enjoying myself.
In the old days there was webspeedreader and MyIE2 that were much more suitable for the giant session. Then there was tabmixplus and then came chrome which is pretty much a turd with 10+ tabs then web extensions killed all the good tools.
It's definitely interesting to see how people's workflows can be so different, I get by with at most ~10 tabs, and close things as soon as I'm done with them. At the end of the working day, I prefer to have at most 2 or 3 left. I sincerely start to experience existential anxiety when the number of tabs goes up too much :-P. Probably related to some subconscious feeling that I need to 'do something' with all these tabs and when they increase in number it starts to feel like I'm 'running behind'. Different people, different workflows, that's perfectly fine.
What I don't really see is why this service needs to exist to solve that particular problem (browser gets slow because too many tabs), because IMO that problem has already been solved very well by most decent browsers. They just swap out the inactive tabs and are able to restore them fast enough even on low-end systems, as long as they have an SSD. Inactive tabs that are not swapped out don't take a lot of CPU resources either. This service sells you a cloud browser with 16GB of RAM, which is pretty much the norm for laptops and desktops now, so it's not going to save you much if 'too many tabs' is causing slowness.
I keep the things I need to do in a separate window. If it gets to crowded I drag some less important ones to a different window. I get anxiety when behind but also if I forget to live. Switching between topics effectively is hard if you are not used to it and it definitely eats away my focus if I don't pay attention.
For a while I use different browsers simultaneously for different things. The session turns out entirely different for some reason as if one is a different person in a different location. I could see a cloud browser as something like that. I have no idea what would happen. Portability will probably influence the session.
I wish bookmarks were good enough, I use tabs in stead to preserve scroll audio and video offset and to have a bunch of tabs for a domain with related tabs next to them. Browsers have poor organization for large numbers of tabs but bookmarks are even worse.
I have no real idea how the session should be organized but I'm sure there are tons of visualizations out there that would work wonderfully. Perhaps some filters with a flow chart for the entire browsing history. Full text search? I don't know.
The price doesn't really matter as I spend way to much time online. 1 euro per day is nothing.
> yes! Ideally I have around 500 tabs that I all need. I for example let your comment sit here for a while unsure if I was going to reply to it. There are more topics on HN currently under investigation. Each spawns a series of extra tabs. Cloud browsers, whole OS in the cloud, what hapend to paperspace? I open several articles that I may or may not read. When I get back to this discussion I look over the tabs it spawned and continue exploring while closing old ones... There is a window with music, one with youtube videos I might want to watch/comment on with the further research tabs they spawn. A dozen tax tabs, courier services, business card services. Dozens of tabs for websites I'm working at. jsfiddles, specs, demos. Tabs about wind turbines without propellers, road side wind turbines, covid, oil and coal reserves. And aggregators ofc
I thought you were trolling at first, but I realize this may actually be serious. You can lose the tab with my comment. I'm a worthless internet stranger, and if you REALLY feel the need to reply, you'll remember, anyway.
How many of those HN topics actually matter? The "may or may not read" stuff I think you can comfortably file under "does not matter" and discard for your sanity's sake.
I waste a lot of time looking at animal videos, too, but I close the tab after. I don't think that counts as something productive or necessary to revisit...
If you're closing lots of tabs, I'd hope you understand those tabs should've been closed earlier--rather than something nostalgic to revisit that never really mattered in terms of what you actually need to do?
It's fun to abuse technology, but at the end of the day, you should ask yourself... why? Is this really making your life more complete? Are you being more productive?
So you have a highly valuable worker where you can afford to pay 1% of their salary for increased efficiency but somehow you can't afford the $1000 to upgrade their machine? Hmmm...
Or you already upgraded the machine and require more efficiency :)
Or the upgraded machine comes with other differences that worker doesn't want :)
It doesn't need to be each of this reasons, and it doesnt need to be a combination, but im just pointing these out as possible ways to justify the pricing.
(1) Sure, but installing more memory works as well and is typically possible without upgrading the CPU a la (2). I'm also not really sure what (3) is about--I'm a bit familiar with WorkOS, but I'm not familiar enough to understand how Mighty is competing.
The 3rd point is clear if you read the mighty website. They advertise improved functionality and hotkeys for common work webapps. That's definitely part of a push to become an OS for work (not workOS).
With that kind of money, you can almost lease nice laptop almost that comes with a browser. I've been looking at options for this recently. 50/month should get you something decent if you commit to that for 2-3 years. That's 1800 over 3 years. E.g. one of the fancy Aple M1 mac book pros would cost about 1300, I believe. The air is cheaper.
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.
apple needs to double down on safari, it really lags behind Chrome right now, and likely won't ever be a dev's first choice until they adopt v8 or release the underlying engine. Chrome is the new IE, its the only browser I'm allowed to use on my work computer
I have a 2013 Macbook Pro and I want to keep using it forever. Now if it (Mighty) helps me focus and save 1 hour of my time per month my work, I'll pay up the $30/mo. However, I'd like to pause my subscription whenever possible. I am a consultant. Time is money. Can it save me an hour per. month? How many hours will I spend customizing it? Will my existing plugins work? What layer of Chrome did they optimize? Security implications? I'll be looking for answers to these questions. The founder is someone with a level head and I trust them enough to not chase after "made up" problems.
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.
I can't see it being a thing on the consumer end, so it has to be enterprise.
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".
All they need is to get a few large companies on board, and then to convince Web developers that it's no longer necessary to think at all about front-end performance. The rest of us will be forced to follow suit when a critical mass of Web sites require beefier hardware than we can afford to buy ourselves, and faster connections than we can even get access to due to Comcast and Time Warner not giving a shit about speed.
This kind of service lives and dies based on the experience customers initially get. It makes sense to put the price tag on a level where you can provide top-notch service, even if it means serving less customers at first.
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.
This is a bit like Superhuman. Who will pay $30 a month for faster gmail? Turns out a lot of people and they love it. Sure a lot of people won't and will continue using free email services but those that do really value it and give it a high NPS.
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.
as a happy Superhuman user paying $30/month for slightly faster Gmail: yes. its absolutely worth it for tools you use daily to be as fast as humanly achievable.
They actually tried! There was a Chromium project called Blimp for a while which supported browser streaming, but it got shut down after less than a year in development. Had some major dev power behind it too, not sure what happened.
I was head of the Blimp team at Google and could tell you exactly what happened, although it’s probably not something I can discuss too much publicly. Great project, great team, turned out to be very hard and involved making major changes to Chrome to do what we wanted. And unlike Mighty we were not willing to charge users a ton of money to use it. Fast, cheap, high quality: pick two :-)
Very different projects than what Blimp was. Blimp was integrated into Chromium's rendering pipeline itself to stream draw commands directly to the client browser.
Imagine Apple partnering with telcos to do this off M2 racks then Google doing the same with Chrome split into a client and Linux container - $10/month for "Chrome Pro".
The first troll comment I'm reading here is yours. Just because you stare at some toast for two years until you start to see an image of Jesus in it doesn't mean someone else can't point out that it's just a burn mark.
16GB of memory for 16vCPUs is a very weird balancing of resources in anyone's books. Either their definition of a "vCPU" is actually a far smaller CPU share in order to pump up the numbers or they are overselling CPU hard.
And yes, 50$ a month is also a high price point for this.
I actually worked on browser isolation products for seven years. No need to be rude.
EDIT: Just because the attitude of this comment really grinds my gears: Here's my patent for network-based content rendering which was submitted back in 2017: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10878187B1
Believe me, I've thought about this a little more than 5 minutes.
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.