9 ms·

No opinion on the thread, but his current startup involves streaming a chrome instance from the cloud, which feels very "Internet in 2021"

hawthornio 5y ago
“It’s like Stadia but for Chrome”
- ggregoire 5y ago
  Showerthoughts: why not stream the entire OS at this point, with a dedicated storage? Like an EC2 with a desktop environment that you can access in a VNC-like way but with the resolution, FPS and input responsiveness similar to what Stadia/Mighty offers. Which will allow you to play Cyberpunk (Stadia) + browsing the web (Mighty) + do whatever else you want, like using After Effects (?).
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_terminal#Dumb_terminals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_terminal#Dumb_termina...
  - Espressosaurus 5y ago
    Congratulations, you just re-invented the terminal.
    - ggregoire 5y ago
      I can't play Cyberpunk in 4k 60+ FPS in my terminal.
      - randomsearch 5y ago
        Any comment like this is just a set up for “show HN” in a fortnight
        hawthornio 5y ago
        fortnite in the terminal you say...
      - rzzzt 5y ago
        Not with that attitude!
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    Since you'll need an OS (a minimal one but still) on the client side, you can reduce the bandwidth required by sending paint commands to draw the UI locally (on the client) and just send the resources on the wire as well as updates. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System
  - paxys 5y ago
    Anyone remember Thin Clients?
    - ska 5y ago
      Which iteration?
    - tonyarkles 5y ago
      First thing I thought of was Sun Rays and the magic of taking your smartcard around with you and wherever you say down your desktop would follow you around. Magic!
      - raffraffraff 5y ago
        Ah yes. Sun. A wonderful company. It was like knowing a guy who could write poetry in 15 languages, perform magic tricks, breakdance, recite Pi to a thousand digits, solve a rubix cube in 3s and yet couldn't find a job. I worked with those guys on a large project. They were amazing. I loved their Sun Rays. But if you spoke to other people in the IT community they generally never heard about their tech. "Uh. Don't they sell servers that don't run Windows?"
  - jabroni_salad 5y ago
    I'm working with a number of clients that are doing this. Either an outsourced vmware horizon deployment or Windows Virtual Desktop. Local hardware is only thin clients. No servers in-house, no desktops, no laptops. It isn't as good as local hardware, but it's good enough for most business applications and even video conferencing.
  - igorlev 5y ago
    At least a few banks have been running like this since 5+ years ago, and at least one collaborated with AWS which led to this: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-workspaces-desktop-computing-in-the-cloud/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-workspaces-desktop-c....
    - blntechie 5y ago
      AWS Workspaces got big during the pandemic. I know atleast one mega consultancy corp which rolled out like 20k workspace instances when their employees moved to WFH.
  - airstrike 5y ago
    This is literally what https://shadow.tech https://shadow.tech does I used it for about a year and it's fantastic if you have really fast (preferably wired) internet
    - ggregoire 5y ago
      That's exactly what I was thinking about. :)
    - Cilvic 5y ago
      That's sounds awesome and I'd be ready to pay alot for that. Can you use it as desktop replacement installing all applications etc.? Or is there an hour limit? The pricing of 14 € / month can't really provide an unlimited usage of 4 core/12GB/256GB SSD/GTX 1080? Also when i try to pre-order for Germany the ETA is Mach 29, 2022 ...
      - owyn 5y ago
        I've been using Shadow for a year and that's exactly what it does. It's a standard windows box and you can install whatever you want on it, and there's no usage limits. I use it to play windows games on my mac without fussing with dual booting. I played through the Witcher 3 entirely on that machine. :) Non action games are playable over Wifi, but on a wired connection it's much better. It does have its own client and disconnects if you are idle so I don't think you could run it as a server, but I never tried. The only odd issue I ran into is that it supports a virtual USB device for pass-through which is cool, but you can't use a fancy multi-button mouse as that USB device because the mouse is "special" and it's always a 2 button virtual mouse but the xbox controller worked just fine. They do have a fairly slow rollout of new hardware updates and new country support at this point, and seemed to be in danger of going out of business for a while, but so far it's still there. You can always hook up something like Dropbox to back up work in progress.
        swrj 5y ago
        You use it for gaming? What was the input lag like for the Witcher 3? I imagine you wouldn't be able to play certain genres of games (like online FPS games for example) due to high latency.
  - edoceo 5y ago
    Apache Guacamole is like webbased vnc client so any VNC server would do
  - raffraffraff 5y ago
    That's what Citrix were doing in the enterprise space back in the 1990s. And yes, it felt like magic back then, but it was expensive as hell. I think that's the reason it didn't become "mega" successful. The technology itself was great. I'd demo it to management, they'd get how it made my job easier and allow people to work remotely, but the $$ investment in licenses and servers would immediately shut the conversation down. They'd use it in certain places, like if they had a very old / very new / very hard to configure app, they could just stream it into regular Windows NT machines. They weren't brave enough to shift desktop budget to thin clients and repurpose the aging desktop fleet into dumb Linux terminals. (And actually, the whole Microsoft Client Licence made that almost as expensive as running Windows clients). Some companies dipped their toes in the water, but I never found a single company that went all-in.
    - bdsa 5y ago
      In 2010ish I worked briefly in a school in the UK (ages 11-19) which had 3 or 4 racks of servers running Citrix XenApp, serving Office etc. and general educational and administrative applications to ancient laptops and desktops which had been (very inexpertly) reconfigured as thin clients. It ran like crap (probably didn't help that re-provisioning a server was defined as hot-swapping disks around and running NewSID or whatever it was called) and of course in large parts of the school the WiFi just wasn't quite good enough. I got a lot of calls from PE teachers trying to take the register from the far corner of the playing field. It was an extreme case of CV-driven development, I was brought in to backfill when the IT manager who had introduced all this walked out one day. He stood up at about lunchtime, grabbed his coat and said "I'm going now". The team thought he meant for lunch... By the time I was leaving under a year later, they had brought in another IT manager who (rightly!) said "what's all this nonsense" and rolled out proper clients imaged with MDT.
- KptMarchewa 5y ago
  Isn't Stadia in chrome? As, it's some kind of extension?
hardwaregeek 5y ago
Yeah...I'm skeptical to be honest. If you're running Chrome on a server, you have to fetch the website to the server, then send back to the client. Now I suppose the server could be in some datacenter with really fast internet and include some aggressive caching, but that's still two trips instead of one. I suppose if you're running major web apps in the browser, this could be a good idea. With the rise of WebAssembly, you could end up with something like a video editor or photoshop in the browser. And yeah, if big apps in the browser becomes a thing, people will want to run the big app on slower computers. But it'd have to be one beefy server to make the latency of streaming worth the performance speed up. Maybe if you keep common sites hot in the browser JIT and share it across users it'll be really fast but holy security issues Batman. I'm not super pessimistic about the idea. If there's one thing I'd bet on it's internet speeds increasing while compute speeds plateauing. But I'm not sure I'd bet my own money or 5-10 years of my life on the idea.
- liuliu 5y ago
  It surely will pivot. Low-latency high-fidelity streaming doesn't come handy, and a lot of hard engineering work. But if worked, a lot of applications. Like you said, 100Gbps NIC between your data and video editor is much better than 1T fast local storage editing rig with 10Gbps NIC to the archive. Citrix worked really well in industries that need tighter control over your digital environment. Oculus Link just started to support WiFi, and would be cool if it can go over WAN. There are some competitions, such as Parsec or Stadia, but if you can have an higher-frequency use case to iterate on, why not go with that?
- Uhhrrr 5y ago
  Besides complicated apps, I think this could be useful for dumb web pages that are making a bunch of requests. Instead of having all those requests go from the browser to the provider to the pile of services, advertisers, and spies, and back again, they'll just go from the Mighty data center to the provider and back. I'm thinking FB and pretty much any news/old media site.
nprz 5y ago
Why would people want this? With the recent concerns of censorship and getting locked out of platforms this just feels like handing even more power to some central authority that can suddenly decide who can and cannot browse the web.
- mycroftcomptro 5y ago
  Maybe testing? Companies like Browserstack offer that sort of thing as their core business. Say that you just made a big frontend change to your website. Before you release it, you can open it on the last 10 major versions of desktop and mobile Chrome/Firefox/Safari/etc. Any rendering failures that you find are the sort of bugs that can be very frustrating to debug from occasional user contacts. But it can be tricky to automate the detection of visual bugs. And what if you have to make a few clicks and execute some javascript to get to the screen that you want to test? Anyways, that's one use of browsers-as-a-service.
- nip 5y ago
  For most people that’s an implementation detail (that they are unaware of), combined with the overall lack of IT hygiene: I don’t see this being an issue (even if your points are very valid) With web apps becoming more complex by the day, having the ability do all the heavy work on a remote server and stream the resulting “webpage” back to a weak receiver with little processing power will unlock new ways of doing things: one can imagine a very slim screen that, as mentioned in the thread already, is running the full Adobe Suite from this remote server. Great battery life and responsiveness without needing an expensive GPU / CPU on the device itself.

hawthornio 5y ago

“It’s like Stadia but for Chrome”

ggregoire 5y ago
Showerthoughts: why not stream the entire OS at this point, with a dedicated storage? Like an EC2 with a desktop environment that you can access in a VNC-like way but with the resolution, FPS and input responsiveness similar to what Stadia/Mighty offers. Which will allow you to play Cyberpunk (Stadia) + browsing the web (Mighty) + do whatever else you want, like using After Effects (?).
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_terminal#Dumb_terminals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_terminal#Dumb_termina...
- Espressosaurus 5y ago
  Congratulations, you just re-invented the terminal.
  - ggregoire 5y ago
    I can't play Cyberpunk in 4k 60+ FPS in my terminal.
    - randomsearch 5y ago
      Any comment like this is just a set up for “show HN” in a fortnight
      - hawthornio 5y ago
        fortnite in the terminal you say...
    - rzzzt 5y ago
      Not with that attitude!
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  Since you'll need an OS (a minimal one but still) on the client side, you can reduce the bandwidth required by sending paint commands to draw the UI locally (on the client) and just send the resources on the wire as well as updates. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System
- paxys 5y ago
  Anyone remember Thin Clients?
  - ska 5y ago
    Which iteration?
  - tonyarkles 5y ago
    First thing I thought of was Sun Rays and the magic of taking your smartcard around with you and wherever you say down your desktop would follow you around. Magic!
    - raffraffraff 5y ago
      Ah yes. Sun. A wonderful company. It was like knowing a guy who could write poetry in 15 languages, perform magic tricks, breakdance, recite Pi to a thousand digits, solve a rubix cube in 3s and yet couldn't find a job. I worked with those guys on a large project. They were amazing. I loved their Sun Rays. But if you spoke to other people in the IT community they generally never heard about their tech. "Uh. Don't they sell servers that don't run Windows?"
- jabroni_salad 5y ago
  I'm working with a number of clients that are doing this. Either an outsourced vmware horizon deployment or Windows Virtual Desktop. Local hardware is only thin clients. No servers in-house, no desktops, no laptops. It isn't as good as local hardware, but it's good enough for most business applications and even video conferencing.
- igorlev 5y ago
  At least a few banks have been running like this since 5+ years ago, and at least one collaborated with AWS which led to this: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-workspaces-desktop-computing-in-the-cloud/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-workspaces-desktop-c....
  - blntechie 5y ago
    AWS Workspaces got big during the pandemic. I know atleast one mega consultancy corp which rolled out like 20k workspace instances when their employees moved to WFH.
- airstrike 5y ago
  This is literally what https://shadow.tech https://shadow.tech does I used it for about a year and it's fantastic if you have really fast (preferably wired) internet
  - ggregoire 5y ago
    That's exactly what I was thinking about. :)
  - Cilvic 5y ago
    That's sounds awesome and I'd be ready to pay alot for that. Can you use it as desktop replacement installing all applications etc.? Or is there an hour limit? The pricing of 14 € / month can't really provide an unlimited usage of 4 core/12GB/256GB SSD/GTX 1080? Also when i try to pre-order for Germany the ETA is Mach 29, 2022 ...
    - owyn 5y ago
      I've been using Shadow for a year and that's exactly what it does. It's a standard windows box and you can install whatever you want on it, and there's no usage limits. I use it to play windows games on my mac without fussing with dual booting. I played through the Witcher 3 entirely on that machine. :) Non action games are playable over Wifi, but on a wired connection it's much better. It does have its own client and disconnects if you are idle so I don't think you could run it as a server, but I never tried. The only odd issue I ran into is that it supports a virtual USB device for pass-through which is cool, but you can't use a fancy multi-button mouse as that USB device because the mouse is "special" and it's always a 2 button virtual mouse but the xbox controller worked just fine. They do have a fairly slow rollout of new hardware updates and new country support at this point, and seemed to be in danger of going out of business for a while, but so far it's still there. You can always hook up something like Dropbox to back up work in progress.
      - swrj 5y ago
        You use it for gaming? What was the input lag like for the Witcher 3? I imagine you wouldn't be able to play certain genres of games (like online FPS games for example) due to high latency.
- edoceo 5y ago
  Apache Guacamole is like webbased vnc client so any VNC server would do
- raffraffraff 5y ago
  That's what Citrix were doing in the enterprise space back in the 1990s. And yes, it felt like magic back then, but it was expensive as hell. I think that's the reason it didn't become "mega" successful. The technology itself was great. I'd demo it to management, they'd get how it made my job easier and allow people to work remotely, but the $$ investment in licenses and servers would immediately shut the conversation down. They'd use it in certain places, like if they had a very old / very new / very hard to configure app, they could just stream it into regular Windows NT machines. They weren't brave enough to shift desktop budget to thin clients and repurpose the aging desktop fleet into dumb Linux terminals. (And actually, the whole Microsoft Client Licence made that almost as expensive as running Windows clients). Some companies dipped their toes in the water, but I never found a single company that went all-in.
  - bdsa 5y ago
    In 2010ish I worked briefly in a school in the UK (ages 11-19) which had 3 or 4 racks of servers running Citrix XenApp, serving Office etc. and general educational and administrative applications to ancient laptops and desktops which had been (very inexpertly) reconfigured as thin clients. It ran like crap (probably didn't help that re-provisioning a server was defined as hot-swapping disks around and running NewSID or whatever it was called) and of course in large parts of the school the WiFi just wasn't quite good enough. I got a lot of calls from PE teachers trying to take the register from the far corner of the playing field. It was an extreme case of CV-driven development, I was brought in to backfill when the IT manager who had introduced all this walked out one day. He stood up at about lunchtime, grabbed his coat and said "I'm going now". The team thought he meant for lunch... By the time I was leaving under a year later, they had brought in another IT manager who (rightly!) said "what's all this nonsense" and rolled out proper clients imaged with MDT.
KptMarchewa 5y ago
Isn't Stadia in chrome? As, it's some kind of extension?

hardwaregeek 5y ago

Yeah...I'm skeptical to be honest. If you're running Chrome on a server, you have to fetch the website to the server, then send back to the client. Now I suppose the server could be in some datacenter with really fast internet and include some aggressive caching, but that's still two trips instead of one. I suppose if you're running major web apps in the browser, this could be a good idea. With the rise of WebAssembly, you could end up with something like a video editor or photoshop in the browser. And yeah, if big apps in the browser becomes a thing, people will want to run the big app on slower computers. But it'd have to be one beefy server to make the latency of streaming worth the performance speed up. Maybe if you keep common sites hot in the browser JIT and share it across users it'll be really fast but holy security issues Batman. I'm not super pessimistic about the idea. If there's one thing I'd bet on it's internet speeds increasing while compute speeds plateauing. But I'm not sure I'd bet my own money or 5-10 years of my life on the idea.

liuliu 5y ago
It surely will pivot. Low-latency high-fidelity streaming doesn't come handy, and a lot of hard engineering work. But if worked, a lot of applications. Like you said, 100Gbps NIC between your data and video editor is much better than 1T fast local storage editing rig with 10Gbps NIC to the archive. Citrix worked really well in industries that need tighter control over your digital environment. Oculus Link just started to support WiFi, and would be cool if it can go over WAN. There are some competitions, such as Parsec or Stadia, but if you can have an higher-frequency use case to iterate on, why not go with that?
Uhhrrr 5y ago
Besides complicated apps, I think this could be useful for dumb web pages that are making a bunch of requests. Instead of having all those requests go from the browser to the provider to the pile of services, advertisers, and spies, and back again, they'll just go from the Mighty data center to the provider and back. I'm thinking FB and pretty much any news/old media site.

nprz 5y ago

Why would people want this? With the recent concerns of censorship and getting locked out of platforms this just feels like handing even more power to some central authority that can suddenly decide who can and cannot browse the web.

mycroftcomptro 5y ago
Maybe testing? Companies like Browserstack offer that sort of thing as their core business. Say that you just made a big frontend change to your website. Before you release it, you can open it on the last 10 major versions of desktop and mobile Chrome/Firefox/Safari/etc. Any rendering failures that you find are the sort of bugs that can be very frustrating to debug from occasional user contacts. But it can be tricky to automate the detection of visual bugs. And what if you have to make a few clicks and execute some javascript to get to the screen that you want to test? Anyways, that's one use of browsers-as-a-service.
nip 5y ago
For most people that’s an implementation detail (that they are unaware of), combined with the overall lack of IT hygiene: I don’t see this being an issue (even if your points are very valid) With web apps becoming more complex by the day, having the ability do all the heavy work on a remote server and stream the resulting “webpage” back to a weak receiver with little processing power will unlock new ways of doing things: one can imagine a very slim screen that, as mentioned in the thread already, is running the full Adobe Suite from this remote server. Great battery life and responsiveness without needing an expensive GPU / CPU on the device itself.