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It's shocking that Paul G thinks this the future. Casey Muratori said it well: Running a browser to connect to the cloud to run a browser to connect to the clo

It's shocking that Paul G thinks this the future. 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". https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387126330961981441 https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387126330961981441

qshaman 5y ago
Not too shocking. - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/mighty https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/mighty and - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer)
- ehsankia 5y ago
  I'm not sure what the point you're making is. Yes, YC/Paul backed Mighty, I assume the parent is surprised that they did and were ready to invest in such an idea. Only time will tell if it was a genius or stupid investment.
breck 5y ago
I view it as run a browser to connect to a supercomputer. And for developers, it's write software once that can be run on thin clients or supercomputers. This is very appealing to me. I write in browser data science software that you can use from your phone. The problem is it doesn't work when your datasets are in the hundreds of GB. Mighty could fix that. 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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
thih9 5y ago
> "Mighty", for example, is just a "dumb terminal" - technology we had in the 1970s. Yet it is called "the future". 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.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  Dumb terminals weren't niche, and have always been extremely accessible.
  - imwillofficial 5y ago
    How much google surfing did you do on your dumb terminal? Bam! Thought so.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  dropbox offered server storage space, something most people did not have , and it was free. everyone has a browser and internet connection already, this service is only offering faster speed.
est31 5y ago
Note that the 2D page is nowadays often an entire application instead of just a bunch of text and images. If the protocol to access a machine in a dumb terminal fashion becomes an application programming environment of its own, maybe you need dumb terminals to access that protocol in turn. 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.
passivate 5y ago
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1387065619011543040 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1387065619011543040 >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.
- andiareso 5y ago
  This. It honestly makes me so sad. It feels the vast majority (non-tech) of people just don't understand how important it is to be able to create and have control of the things you "own". Damn it's going to suck if everyone goes the way of Apple and starts to lock things down. I really hope these anti-trust suits open things back up. Whatever happened to the "Think Different" campaign in where it literally portrayed us being slaves to corporations forcing us to consume the way they wanted us to. Damn. Just so crazy. IDK why this post is putting it all in perspective, but the next decade is going to do some miles on me... It feels like we are slowly losing power. Very slowly.
  - machello13 5y ago
    Eh, if it makes you feel better it's probably not going to happen. PCs and Macs won't become any less tinkerable. Gatekeeper can be turned off with a single terminal command, iPhones and iPads are becoming more tinkerable, not less. Shortcuts basically exposes a visual scripting and automation language. It's really not doom and gloom.
    - slimsag 5y ago
transhumanism34 5y ago
Serious question: what is there to gain from being a hater / being negative / being relentlessly pessimistic? Seriously? How can we work towards a better world when people just shoot down any idea that they don't agree with instead of trying to expand their perspective?
- megous 5y ago
  Well, things can turn really bad if this catches on, and it means that you lose control over your UA. Sending keystrokes to other people's computers and getting back compressed images is a terrible interface for anything but dumb consumption of content. Forget scraping, forget automated controls, forget installing extensions/plugins/userscripts if not allowed by the cloud overlord. I can certainly understand the negativity. As a niche service, why not?
- stephc_int13 5y ago
  This idea is not future-neutral. It is VC backed and not by a nobody. I don't want it to succeed because it is dangerous.
  - transhumanism34 5y ago
    Okay I can understand you not liking the idea but the sentence "I don't want it to succeed because it is dangerous" is a crazy statement. I'm sure there were tons of people who thought the same way you did when the Wright brothers were trying to achieve human flight, "I don't want it to succeed because it is dangerous". (Obviously not the same scale of idea, but point applies
    - stephc_int13 5y ago
      I am very rarely anti-innovation. But when I think something is wrong I can't help but not being indifferent. In this case I don't think this tech really qualifies as an innovation, it is mostly the wrong patch to fix a real problem, bloatware.
    - ben509 5y ago
bgrgndzz 5y ago
I feel like, 5 years from now, that comment will be reposted daily on vague motivational twitter threads. It's the infamous ftp comment of dropbox all over again.
- nemetroid 5y ago
  ”They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”
austincheney 5y ago
Or perhaps stop throwing 300mb of JavaScript into a simple blog or news site. Not everything needs to be a SPA or track people like the KGB. Clearly the feedback loop of copy/paste/config has gotten way ahead of the reality and has entirely disconnected from anything the user cares about. At some point we should just admit the state of web implementation (it’s not just the front end) is just self-justifying posturing.
- SilverRed 5y ago
  Finally we have a technology which can server side render the frontend code.. I'm imagining a future where sites become so bloated that you have to stream the rendered result to get anything usable.
  - antihero 5y ago
    Isn't that what this is?
    - slimsag 5y ago
      That is literally what this is.
- manigandham 5y ago
  Doesn't this make the feedback loop even worse if the clients are now servers in the cloud?
somethoughts 5y ago
Just briefly skimming the description - it does seem like it shares a philosophy with Amazon Silk Browser which uses EC2 for accelerating portions of the browsing experience. [1] [2] "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." [1] https://www.wired.com/insights/2011/09/amazon-silk/ https://www.wired.com/insights/2011/09/amazon-silk/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Silk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Silk
- Twirrim 5y ago
  Wasn't Opera doing something similar too for a while?
  - ronsor 5y ago
    Rendering on the server was how Opera Mini worked (works?) for years. The low-end J2ME phones it ran on wouldn't be able to handle a full webpage even without today's JavaScript bloat.
  - bb010g 5y ago
    Opera Mini was great on cheap Windows Mobile devices because your device didn't have the power to actually lay out a page, and the bandwidth savings on your slow cellular connection made the use of images make sense. Opera Mobile was preferable on Windows Mobile devices with better chips that could handle laying out a web page and had the bandwidth to work with embedded pictures that weren't tiny.
- kevingadd 5y ago
  Silk solves a different set of problems. Silk offloads expensive things like page layout or rasterization to the server, and for a static page you could theoretically cache those too. Mighty is streaming a browser instance, wholesale, as a video stream. It's very very different both in philosophy and actual implementation.
zemo 5y ago
it's not at all shocking, you're just seeing Paul G for who he is for the first time.
neolefty 5y ago
Key feature: Maintain browser state while switching machines > 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.
- manigandham 5y ago
  Chrome and Firefox already sync your open tabs so you can what's open across all of your devices. Go here to see it in chrome: chrome://history/syncedTabs
- tosh 5y ago
  Indirection is powerful
- kevingadd 5y ago
  I've had open tab sync across all my devices (including my phone and tablet) for like a decade now. Both Firefox and Chrome offer it. Maintaining state across sessions by storing your whole browser on a server somewhere is a cute solution, until you need to access that server while traveling and now your ping to it is 300ms instead of 30.
- SnShines 5y ago
  Yep. They built something great (if there's no foul play in demo) but they don't know the correct market where this can generate revenue.
Jyaif 5y ago
I guess that this is a bet that super heavy-weight (hopefully webasm-based!) web applications will become widespread. Think Adobe Premiere Elements in the browser. 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.
graderjs 5y ago
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 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.
fsloth 5y ago
This is already a validated market segment - Citrix and other terminal services that global companies use. Only this is more hardware agnostic and does not need complex deployment.

qshaman 5y ago

Not too shocking. - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/mighty https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/mighty and - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer)

ehsankia 5y ago
I'm not sure what the point you're making is. Yes, YC/Paul backed Mighty, I assume the parent is surprised that they did and were ready to invest in such an idea. Only time will tell if it was a genius or stupid investment.

breck 5y ago

I view it as run a browser to connect to a supercomputer. And for developers, it's write software once that can be run on thin clients or supercomputers. This is very appealing to me. I write in browser data science software that you can use from your phone. The problem is it doesn't work when your datasets are in the hundreds of GB. Mighty could fix that. 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.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

thih9 5y ago

> "Mighty", for example, is just a "dumb terminal" - technology we had in the 1970s. Yet it is called "the future". 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.

Dylan16807 5y ago
Dumb terminals weren't niche, and have always been extremely accessible.
- imwillofficial 5y ago
  How much google surfing did you do on your dumb terminal? Bam! Thought so.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
cblconfederate 5y ago
dropbox offered server storage space, something most people did not have , and it was free. everyone has a browser and internet connection already, this service is only offering faster speed.

est31 5y ago

Note that the 2D page is nowadays often an entire application instead of just a bunch of text and images. If the protocol to access a machine in a dumb terminal fashion becomes an application programming environment of its own, maybe you need dumb terminals to access that protocol in turn. 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.

passivate 5y ago

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1387065619011543040 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1387065619011543040 >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.

andiareso 5y ago
This. It honestly makes me so sad. It feels the vast majority (non-tech) of people just don't understand how important it is to be able to create and have control of the things you "own". Damn it's going to suck if everyone goes the way of Apple and starts to lock things down. I really hope these anti-trust suits open things back up. Whatever happened to the "Think Different" campaign in where it literally portrayed us being slaves to corporations forcing us to consume the way they wanted us to. Damn. Just so crazy. IDK why this post is putting it all in perspective, but the next decade is going to do some miles on me... It feels like we are slowly losing power. Very slowly.
- machello13 5y ago
  Eh, if it makes you feel better it's probably not going to happen. PCs and Macs won't become any less tinkerable. Gatekeeper can be turned off with a single terminal command, iPhones and iPads are becoming more tinkerable, not less. Shortcuts basically exposes a visual scripting and automation language. It's really not doom and gloom.
  - slimsag 5y ago

transhumanism34 5y ago

Serious question: what is there to gain from being a hater / being negative / being relentlessly pessimistic? Seriously? How can we work towards a better world when people just shoot down any idea that they don't agree with instead of trying to expand their perspective?

megous 5y ago
Well, things can turn really bad if this catches on, and it means that you lose control over your UA. Sending keystrokes to other people's computers and getting back compressed images is a terrible interface for anything but dumb consumption of content. Forget scraping, forget automated controls, forget installing extensions/plugins/userscripts if not allowed by the cloud overlord. I can certainly understand the negativity. As a niche service, why not?
stephc_int13 5y ago
This idea is not future-neutral. It is VC backed and not by a nobody. I don't want it to succeed because it is dangerous.
- transhumanism34 5y ago
  Okay I can understand you not liking the idea but the sentence "I don't want it to succeed because it is dangerous" is a crazy statement. I'm sure there were tons of people who thought the same way you did when the Wright brothers were trying to achieve human flight, "I don't want it to succeed because it is dangerous". (Obviously not the same scale of idea, but point applies
  - stephc_int13 5y ago
    I am very rarely anti-innovation. But when I think something is wrong I can't help but not being indifferent. In this case I don't think this tech really qualifies as an innovation, it is mostly the wrong patch to fix a real problem, bloatware.
  - ben509 5y ago

bgrgndzz 5y ago

I feel like, 5 years from now, that comment will be reposted daily on vague motivational twitter threads. It's the infamous ftp comment of dropbox all over again.

nemetroid 5y ago
”They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”

austincheney 5y ago

Or perhaps stop throwing 300mb of JavaScript into a simple blog or news site. Not everything needs to be a SPA or track people like the KGB. Clearly the feedback loop of copy/paste/config has gotten way ahead of the reality and has entirely disconnected from anything the user cares about. At some point we should just admit the state of web implementation (it’s not just the front end) is just self-justifying posturing.

SilverRed 5y ago
Finally we have a technology which can server side render the frontend code.. I'm imagining a future where sites become so bloated that you have to stream the rendered result to get anything usable.
- antihero 5y ago
  Isn't that what this is?
  - slimsag 5y ago
    That is literally what this is.
manigandham 5y ago
Doesn't this make the feedback loop even worse if the clients are now servers in the cloud?

somethoughts 5y ago

Just briefly skimming the description - it does seem like it shares a philosophy with Amazon Silk Browser which uses EC2 for accelerating portions of the browsing experience. [1] [2] "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." [1] https://www.wired.com/insights/2011/09/amazon-silk/ https://www.wired.com/insights/2011/09/amazon-silk/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Silk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Silk

Twirrim 5y ago
Wasn't Opera doing something similar too for a while?
- ronsor 5y ago
  Rendering on the server was how Opera Mini worked (works?) for years. The low-end J2ME phones it ran on wouldn't be able to handle a full webpage even without today's JavaScript bloat.
- bb010g 5y ago
  Opera Mini was great on cheap Windows Mobile devices because your device didn't have the power to actually lay out a page, and the bandwidth savings on your slow cellular connection made the use of images make sense. Opera Mobile was preferable on Windows Mobile devices with better chips that could handle laying out a web page and had the bandwidth to work with embedded pictures that weren't tiny.
kevingadd 5y ago
Silk solves a different set of problems. Silk offloads expensive things like page layout or rasterization to the server, and for a static page you could theoretically cache those too. Mighty is streaming a browser instance, wholesale, as a video stream. It's very very different both in philosophy and actual implementation.

zemo 5y ago

it's not at all shocking, you're just seeing Paul G for who he is for the first time.

neolefty 5y ago

Key feature: Maintain browser state while switching machines > 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.

manigandham 5y ago
Chrome and Firefox already sync your open tabs so you can what's open across all of your devices. Go here to see it in chrome: chrome://history/syncedTabs
tosh 5y ago
Indirection is powerful
kevingadd 5y ago
I've had open tab sync across all my devices (including my phone and tablet) for like a decade now. Both Firefox and Chrome offer it. Maintaining state across sessions by storing your whole browser on a server somewhere is a cute solution, until you need to access that server while traveling and now your ping to it is 300ms instead of 30.
SnShines 5y ago
Yep. They built something great (if there's no foul play in demo) but they don't know the correct market where this can generate revenue.

Jyaif 5y ago

I guess that this is a bet that super heavy-weight (hopefully webasm-based!) web applications will become widespread. Think Adobe Premiere Elements in the browser. 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.

graderjs 5y ago

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 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.

fsloth 5y ago

This is already a validated market segment - Citrix and other terminal services that global companies use. Only this is more hardware agnostic and does not need complex deployment.