12 ms·

Whist, a new cloud-hybrid browser

111 points by dcposch 4y ago

dhruv4 4y ago
Wow! Congratulations y'all! I love this, especially for building Webflow apps
tejalp 4y ago
very cool!
rocketry101 4y ago
nice!
andreseg 4y ago
Congrats on the launch! Tried early on - looking forward to trying again and intrigued by the hybrid approach.
bjbrooks 4y ago
this looks great!
ammersoliman 4y ago
This is awesome! Does this support history syncing?
- pnoel 4y ago
  Yes! Whist will support all native Chrome features like history sync-ing :)
darinf 4y ago
I’m excited to try this out. The idea of cloud hosted browsers is not new, but this approach seems really promising. In this era of connectivity and cloud compute, it makes so much sense.
TommyWise5 4y ago
Congratulations y'all!! I cannot wait to try it in my Toshiba.
lhnz 4y ago
How does this compare to Mighty (https://mightyapp.com https://mightyapp.com)?
- pnoel 4y ago
  Whist and Mighty are similar in that they are browsers that offer cloud-offloading. Whist differs by being built in a native browser on your computer, rather than being fully offloaded to the cloud, and supports both local and cloud tabs (so that you can adapt your workflow based on which web apps you are using, how strong your Internet is, etc.) For more details on the exact differences with Mighty and with other browsers, we have a comparison chart on our website
  - gildas 4y ago
    > For more details on the exact differences with Mighty and with other browsers, we have a comparison chart on our website It would be helpful if you somehow included the browser name as I had to use Google Images for this. It's not very convenient.
- thevarunraja 4y ago
  The comparison is present on the website homepage. Check it out. It's a hybrid browser(supports local and remote tabs) as opposed to a cloud only browser
thebitrot 4y ago
nice just sent a request access. I am curious how long will the wait time be for getting access to try this?
- pnoel 4y ago
  If you are on macOS, you'll get access to Whist in the second half of July. If you're on Windows, it will likely be in August or September :)
k4tz 4y ago
Congrats on the launch!
sshine 4y ago
I like the alternative of treating tabs more like bookmarks better. So instead of explicitly bookmarking a page, not closing a tab is the indicator that you may be more interested in this page in the future than any page you visited in the past. In the meantime, you don't think that having many bookmarks requires more RAM. As for the faster load times, I can see the lure, but I think it's a sellout. I'd like to know the resource footprint and incentivize website makers to make websites possible to run on computers without cloud GPUs. Other than the fact that this browser doesn't solve problems that I'd like to have, I think that more browsers is both necessary and good. While they may rely on Google's browser engine technology (Blink), having more front-end diversity surely contributes to a better browser market.
- night-rider 4y ago
  I only recently learned that people like to tab-hoard, hence addons like one-tab that collapses your tabs into a neat page for revisiting later. That’s just how people use their browser. They assume their machines can hold all those tabs in the background but are then shocked when their CPU fan whirs violently. Remember a browser is the most complex piece of software on your system apart from the OS and has to do many things simultaneously.
  - cassianoleal 4y ago
    I use Auto Tab Discard [0], which offloads tabs after a period of time. They still show as normal tabs (with a "ZZZ" icon to indicate it's been discarded), and the website reloads when I switch to them. When I open the browser after closing it, the session is restored with all but the current tab offloaded so it opens quickly and using very little resources. My current session has tens of tabs, only a handful of them active. It uses about .5% CPU when idle, and less than 1Gb RAM. [0] https://add0n.com/tab-discard.html https://add0n.com/tab-discard.html
ohCh6zos 4y ago
What kind of privacy grantees does Whist make? Having more of the browser in the could could open up new opportunities for snooping either to sell data, or by state actors. Do you have a warrant canary?
- pnoel 4y ago
  The Whist privacy guarantee is that we've engineered our system so that no one, not even us, can see what's going on in your cloud tabs. We'll be releasing a blog post about how our system is engineered, stay tuned! Privacy is also one of the reasons we've decided on the hybrid approach. Websites with sensitive information (your bank, etc.) can be used on local, incognito, or Tor tabs, all of which are not offloaded to Whist's servers and run 100% locally.
  - ohCh6zos 4y ago
    That's awesome, it seems like you've thought through privacy! It'd be above and beyond, but is it possible to self-host my own cloud backend?
    - pnoel 4y ago
      Potentially! We could make this happen, it probably wouldn't even be that much work. It's more of a question of whether enough people/companies would be interested in self-hosting, which is something we'll keep an eye out for
      - moltar 4y ago
        I would definitely self host. Already self host a VPN.
        pnoel 4y ago
        Noted, we'll keep this in mind as we go forward then
  - 4y ago
dean_hathout 4y ago
Really cool! Love the flexibility of the Accelerated mode especially.
djparker724 4y ago
Excited to try this out - just requested access!
pam-b 4y ago
This is super cool. Good for people with slow/older computers and also presumably reduces the surface for web based attacks
- heipei 4y ago
  Yeah, the kind of people that need high-performance productivity apps for their jobs but can't afford to upgrade to a $1000 M1 Macbook Air but will be able to spend what I assume will be more than $10 / month indefinitely /s
  - jjdirac 4y ago
    Bro I _have_ a $1000 M1 Macbook Air, and it's slow af when I browse the web. Constantly lags, freezes, runs out of RAM. And that's a $1000 that I have to spend every few years, for just a mediocre experience (Since by the time it's 4-6 years old, it's virtually unusable for anything but the simplest of websites). Maybe if people just wrote more HTML+JS rather than these big hefty "500kb of JS" React-based websites, this wouldn't be necessary. But as it is, $120/year is actually very cheap if it actually solves the problem it claims to solve. (Even $300/yr wouldn't be unreasonable tbh, esp if it's on my employer's card since work tabs are the hefty tabs for me)
    - cassianoleal 4y ago
      I also have an M1 MacBook Air. It's very snappy on both Firefox and Safari. Sometimes when I woke the computer up from sleep, Firefox would be crazy laggy. I suspect some resource leakage but at least RAM and CPU were fine. Closing and reopening the browser would work around it.
paberusan 4y ago
ashhabthakur 4y ago
meowtastic 4y ago
Just wanted to let you know that the site takes a relatively long while to load on my Android Firefox browser.
russellpekala 4y ago
this is awesome, if I didn’t have the M1 I bet I would need this given how many tabs I always have open…
thevarunraja 4y ago
How much do you plan to charge for your browser? I can't find pricing page on your site.
- pnoel 4y ago
  The basic version of Whist (with limited cloud tabs usage), will be free, forever. For full cloud tabs support, we'll be charging a subscription fee as an add-on on top of the browser. We're still figuring out exactly what the pricing tiers will be, but we expect it to be in the 10-15$ range.
  - westcort 4y ago
    I would feel way more comfortable with a paid application. Otherwise, how are you paying for the cloud compute time? Also, where is the company based and who are the funders?
    - pnoel 4y ago
      Charging a subscription fee is the primary way for which we would pay for cloud compute time -- but we're thinking there will be a version of Whist which will have very limited amount of compute time and be free (a sort of free trial if you will)
mwcampbell 4y ago
Has Whist implemented accessibility support for cloud tabs, e.g. by pushing the remote Chromium renderer's accessibility tree across the network?
- pnoel 4y ago
  We haven't implemented what you describe yet, but we've verified that basic accessibility support works for the Whist browser. We'll be making sure that Chrome's accessibility support is fully covered on Whist cloud tabs before general availability
nicolasweninger 4y ago
I can imagine this making a lot of sense for engineers working on embedded linux while not needing to SCP things back and forth to a build machine if a good web IDE was supported
cwmdo 4y ago
This looks perfect for my team's use case. How long should we expect to wait for invites?
- pnoel 4y ago
  Exciting! We'll be onboarding users on macOS in the second half of July, and Windows will follow in August or September
amyz11 4y ago
Congrats on the launch!
skyfaller 4y ago
"Whist is a fork of Brave", and advertises their "Crypto Wallet". I'll pass.
- kotaKat 4y ago
  I'm in the same camp. If it was a fork of regular Chromium I'd be all over this.
  - loh 4y ago
    I'm curious. What do you (and the GP) have against Brave and its "crypto wallet"? I use Brave myself, but have never bothered with the wallet. Last I checked, you could earn BAT from watching ads provided by Brave, which is why I never personally bothered with it. (I really don't like ads.) Is that your reasoning as well? Or is there another reason?
nmlt 4y ago
I think it’s really funny that websites have now become so processing heavy that something like this makes sense.
bzmrgonz 4y ago
Look into the remote browser isolation sector. That space is perfect for you guys!! I think you could make a splash in that sector.
q9tE6uHb7yKq 4y ago
Looks pretty sweet! Any thoughts on being able to game in one of the cloud tabs?
- pnoel 4y ago
  You absolutely can!
thushanp 4y ago
Congrats on the launch!! Really exciting.
ulisyx 4y ago
awesome!
bigP2024 4y ago
I am team close-your-damn-tabs-when-finished, but I know tons of people who need this urgently
- codeloveroil 4y ago
caromontminy 4y ago
Wow ! Great idea ! Great product ! I’m in
pnmartin7 4y ago
I've been using the beta for a bit, it's a great tool, amazingly seamless streaming experience.
egg_yeet-er2020 4y ago
Can't wait to try this out -- it's something that's much needed in this day and age!
janniezhong 4y ago
congrats on the launch, excited to see where y'all go!
joyceh 4y ago
suggested by a friend
surprises 4y ago
I'm very interested in this idea as my non-work laptop is pretty old at this point and is struggling with chrome lately. How does Whist's resource utilization scale as you increase the number of tabs?
- pnoel 4y ago
  Whether you have 1 cloud tab or 100 cloud tabs, the resource utilization on your machine will be the same. If you open more local tabs, though, those will take up RAM/CPU on your machine.
westcort 4y ago
For a while now, I have been thinking of switching to Windows 365. This is halfway there because the heavy tabs are streamed from the cloud, but I am starting to think that the only way I can trust software to work is with a monthly fee. This has the added advantage of being able to switch to a thin client, and the data restoration and storage is paid for and is someone else’s problem. But then I think there is another side to this. Windows has always continued with this cycle of planned obsolescence. The latest iteration was the worst. My copy of Microsoft Office 2019 slowed to a crawl after the Windows 11 update. Then, I had to buy a 365 subscription. That Office license was supposed to be good for life. I won’t forget that! So I set up an older computer with 4 gigs of ram with Mint. It is snappy. I bought Crossover. It runs Word, but not PowerPoint. Unfortunately, it is difficult to get a copy of Office 2016 that is stable with Wine/Crossover. So again I am stuck paying the Microsoft Mafia. Honestly, I am fine with paying. What I am not fine with is them adding no new features, and bogging down my hardware so I need to buy another machine. I also feel acutely the need to get control of my email back from Google, as many others do. The reason I, and I think a lot of others want privacy is because they are sick of the obsolescence kill switch. Give me light hardware and web applications that can get as much cloud processing power to run as needed, and I would be happy. But I really need to trust that cloud provider and I don’t trust Microsoft. After all, they are using emails to get URLs to scrape for Bing. Not good. Maybe this is a nice balance of a cloud operating system and local control.
elXavi 4y ago
This sounds like an interesting idea, it would be nice to have a better and faster browsing experience. Is it going to be a 1-time payment or a subscription kind of thing?
bcopa 4y ago
This looks super epic. Can't wait to get access to it... contemporary browsers have remained pretty much the same – and slow – despite many user software needs advancing. Congrats to the team.
Rossbeef 4y ago
Wow! The world of technology is very grateful and this is the future of internet. So many questions about, but this is really underrated, fascinating
Julher 4y ago
Very closer to link without waiting, I think if you are in hurry, this could be the best option to manipulate your preferences in the web site. Can’t wait to try it
nodomain 4y ago
It is funny where we are right now. After blowing up classical web pages to over-complex web applications that eat up memory, bandwidth and battery, we now think it is a good idea to optimize this by streaming these complex applications to clients? To be honest: my fist take was "this has to be satire" - but this is really a product. Wow.
ijoshmathews 4y ago
excited to try this out! congrats on the launch!

111 points by dcposch 4y ago

dhruv4 4y ago

Wow! Congratulations y'all! I love this, especially for building Webflow apps

tejalp 4y ago

very cool!

rocketry101 4y ago

nice!

andreseg 4y ago

Congrats on the launch! Tried early on - looking forward to trying again and intrigued by the hybrid approach.

bjbrooks 4y ago

this looks great!

ammersoliman 4y ago

This is awesome! Does this support history syncing?

pnoel 4y ago
Yes! Whist will support all native Chrome features like history sync-ing :)

darinf 4y ago

I’m excited to try this out. The idea of cloud hosted browsers is not new, but this approach seems really promising. In this era of connectivity and cloud compute, it makes so much sense.

TommyWise5 4y ago

Congratulations y'all!! I cannot wait to try it in my Toshiba.

lhnz 4y ago

How does this compare to Mighty (https://mightyapp.com https://mightyapp.com)?

pnoel 4y ago
Whist and Mighty are similar in that they are browsers that offer cloud-offloading. Whist differs by being built in a native browser on your computer, rather than being fully offloaded to the cloud, and supports both local and cloud tabs (so that you can adapt your workflow based on which web apps you are using, how strong your Internet is, etc.) For more details on the exact differences with Mighty and with other browsers, we have a comparison chart on our website
- gildas 4y ago
  > For more details on the exact differences with Mighty and with other browsers, we have a comparison chart on our website It would be helpful if you somehow included the browser name as I had to use Google Images for this. It's not very convenient.
thevarunraja 4y ago
The comparison is present on the website homepage. Check it out. It's a hybrid browser(supports local and remote tabs) as opposed to a cloud only browser

thebitrot 4y ago

nice just sent a request access. I am curious how long will the wait time be for getting access to try this?

pnoel 4y ago
If you are on macOS, you'll get access to Whist in the second half of July. If you're on Windows, it will likely be in August or September :)

k4tz 4y ago

Congrats on the launch!

sshine 4y ago

I like the alternative of treating tabs more like bookmarks better. So instead of explicitly bookmarking a page, not closing a tab is the indicator that you may be more interested in this page in the future than any page you visited in the past. In the meantime, you don't think that having many bookmarks requires more RAM. As for the faster load times, I can see the lure, but I think it's a sellout. I'd like to know the resource footprint and incentivize website makers to make websites possible to run on computers without cloud GPUs. Other than the fact that this browser doesn't solve problems that I'd like to have, I think that more browsers is both necessary and good. While they may rely on Google's browser engine technology (Blink), having more front-end diversity surely contributes to a better browser market.

night-rider 4y ago
I only recently learned that people like to tab-hoard, hence addons like one-tab that collapses your tabs into a neat page for revisiting later. That’s just how people use their browser. They assume their machines can hold all those tabs in the background but are then shocked when their CPU fan whirs violently. Remember a browser is the most complex piece of software on your system apart from the OS and has to do many things simultaneously.
- cassianoleal 4y ago
  I use Auto Tab Discard [0], which offloads tabs after a period of time. They still show as normal tabs (with a "ZZZ" icon to indicate it's been discarded), and the website reloads when I switch to them. When I open the browser after closing it, the session is restored with all but the current tab offloaded so it opens quickly and using very little resources. My current session has tens of tabs, only a handful of them active. It uses about .5% CPU when idle, and less than 1Gb RAM. [0] https://add0n.com/tab-discard.html https://add0n.com/tab-discard.html

ohCh6zos 4y ago

What kind of privacy grantees does Whist make? Having more of the browser in the could could open up new opportunities for snooping either to sell data, or by state actors. Do you have a warrant canary?

pnoel 4y ago
The Whist privacy guarantee is that we've engineered our system so that no one, not even us, can see what's going on in your cloud tabs. We'll be releasing a blog post about how our system is engineered, stay tuned! Privacy is also one of the reasons we've decided on the hybrid approach. Websites with sensitive information (your bank, etc.) can be used on local, incognito, or Tor tabs, all of which are not offloaded to Whist's servers and run 100% locally.
- ohCh6zos 4y ago
  That's awesome, it seems like you've thought through privacy! It'd be above and beyond, but is it possible to self-host my own cloud backend?
  - pnoel 4y ago
    Potentially! We could make this happen, it probably wouldn't even be that much work. It's more of a question of whether enough people/companies would be interested in self-hosting, which is something we'll keep an eye out for
    - moltar 4y ago
      I would definitely self host. Already self host a VPN.
      - pnoel 4y ago
        Noted, we'll keep this in mind as we go forward then
- 4y ago

dean_hathout 4y ago

Really cool! Love the flexibility of the Accelerated mode especially.

djparker724 4y ago

Excited to try this out - just requested access!

pam-b 4y ago

This is super cool. Good for people with slow/older computers and also presumably reduces the surface for web based attacks

heipei 4y ago
Yeah, the kind of people that need high-performance productivity apps for their jobs but can't afford to upgrade to a $1000 M1 Macbook Air but will be able to spend what I assume will be more than $10 / month indefinitely /s
- jjdirac 4y ago
  Bro I _have_ a $1000 M1 Macbook Air, and it's slow af when I browse the web. Constantly lags, freezes, runs out of RAM. And that's a $1000 that I have to spend every few years, for just a mediocre experience (Since by the time it's 4-6 years old, it's virtually unusable for anything but the simplest of websites). Maybe if people just wrote more HTML+JS rather than these big hefty "500kb of JS" React-based websites, this wouldn't be necessary. But as it is, $120/year is actually very cheap if it actually solves the problem it claims to solve. (Even $300/yr wouldn't be unreasonable tbh, esp if it's on my employer's card since work tabs are the hefty tabs for me)
  - cassianoleal 4y ago
    I also have an M1 MacBook Air. It's very snappy on both Firefox and Safari. Sometimes when I woke the computer up from sleep, Firefox would be crazy laggy. I suspect some resource leakage but at least RAM and CPU were fine. Closing and reopening the browser would work around it.

paberusan 4y ago

ashhabthakur 4y ago

meowtastic 4y ago

Just wanted to let you know that the site takes a relatively long while to load on my Android Firefox browser.

russellpekala 4y ago

this is awesome, if I didn’t have the M1 I bet I would need this given how many tabs I always have open…

thevarunraja 4y ago

How much do you plan to charge for your browser? I can't find pricing page on your site.

pnoel 4y ago
The basic version of Whist (with limited cloud tabs usage), will be free, forever. For full cloud tabs support, we'll be charging a subscription fee as an add-on on top of the browser. We're still figuring out exactly what the pricing tiers will be, but we expect it to be in the 10-15$ range.
- westcort 4y ago
  I would feel way more comfortable with a paid application. Otherwise, how are you paying for the cloud compute time? Also, where is the company based and who are the funders?
  - pnoel 4y ago
    Charging a subscription fee is the primary way for which we would pay for cloud compute time -- but we're thinking there will be a version of Whist which will have very limited amount of compute time and be free (a sort of free trial if you will)

mwcampbell 4y ago

Has Whist implemented accessibility support for cloud tabs, e.g. by pushing the remote Chromium renderer's accessibility tree across the network?

pnoel 4y ago
We haven't implemented what you describe yet, but we've verified that basic accessibility support works for the Whist browser. We'll be making sure that Chrome's accessibility support is fully covered on Whist cloud tabs before general availability

nicolasweninger 4y ago

I can imagine this making a lot of sense for engineers working on embedded linux while not needing to SCP things back and forth to a build machine if a good web IDE was supported

cwmdo 4y ago

This looks perfect for my team's use case. How long should we expect to wait for invites?

pnoel 4y ago
Exciting! We'll be onboarding users on macOS in the second half of July, and Windows will follow in August or September

amyz11 4y ago

Congrats on the launch!

skyfaller 4y ago

"Whist is a fork of Brave", and advertises their "Crypto Wallet". I'll pass.

kotaKat 4y ago
I'm in the same camp. If it was a fork of regular Chromium I'd be all over this.
- loh 4y ago
  I'm curious. What do you (and the GP) have against Brave and its "crypto wallet"? I use Brave myself, but have never bothered with the wallet. Last I checked, you could earn BAT from watching ads provided by Brave, which is why I never personally bothered with it. (I really don't like ads.) Is that your reasoning as well? Or is there another reason?

nmlt 4y ago

I think it’s really funny that websites have now become so processing heavy that something like this makes sense.

bzmrgonz 4y ago

Look into the remote browser isolation sector. That space is perfect for you guys!! I think you could make a splash in that sector.

q9tE6uHb7yKq 4y ago

Looks pretty sweet! Any thoughts on being able to game in one of the cloud tabs?

pnoel 4y ago
You absolutely can!

thushanp 4y ago

Congrats on the launch!! Really exciting.

ulisyx 4y ago

awesome!

bigP2024 4y ago

I am team close-your-damn-tabs-when-finished, but I know tons of people who need this urgently

codeloveroil 4y ago

caromontminy 4y ago

Wow ! Great idea ! Great product ! I’m in

pnmartin7 4y ago

I've been using the beta for a bit, it's a great tool, amazingly seamless streaming experience.

egg_yeet-er2020 4y ago

Can't wait to try this out -- it's something that's much needed in this day and age!

janniezhong 4y ago

congrats on the launch, excited to see where y'all go!

joyceh 4y ago

suggested by a friend

surprises 4y ago

I'm very interested in this idea as my non-work laptop is pretty old at this point and is struggling with chrome lately. How does Whist's resource utilization scale as you increase the number of tabs?

pnoel 4y ago
Whether you have 1 cloud tab or 100 cloud tabs, the resource utilization on your machine will be the same. If you open more local tabs, though, those will take up RAM/CPU on your machine.

westcort 4y ago

For a while now, I have been thinking of switching to Windows 365. This is halfway there because the heavy tabs are streamed from the cloud, but I am starting to think that the only way I can trust software to work is with a monthly fee. This has the added advantage of being able to switch to a thin client, and the data restoration and storage is paid for and is someone else’s problem. But then I think there is another side to this. Windows has always continued with this cycle of planned obsolescence. The latest iteration was the worst. My copy of Microsoft Office 2019 slowed to a crawl after the Windows 11 update. Then, I had to buy a 365 subscription. That Office license was supposed to be good for life. I won’t forget that! So I set up an older computer with 4 gigs of ram with Mint. It is snappy. I bought Crossover. It runs Word, but not PowerPoint. Unfortunately, it is difficult to get a copy of Office 2016 that is stable with Wine/Crossover. So again I am stuck paying the Microsoft Mafia. Honestly, I am fine with paying. What I am not fine with is them adding no new features, and bogging down my hardware so I need to buy another machine. I also feel acutely the need to get control of my email back from Google, as many others do. The reason I, and I think a lot of others want privacy is because they are sick of the obsolescence kill switch. Give me light hardware and web applications that can get as much cloud processing power to run as needed, and I would be happy. But I really need to trust that cloud provider and I don’t trust Microsoft. After all, they are using emails to get URLs to scrape for Bing. Not good. Maybe this is a nice balance of a cloud operating system and local control.

elXavi 4y ago

This sounds like an interesting idea, it would be nice to have a better and faster browsing experience. Is it going to be a 1-time payment or a subscription kind of thing?

bcopa 4y ago

This looks super epic. Can't wait to get access to it... contemporary browsers have remained pretty much the same – and slow – despite many user software needs advancing. Congrats to the team.

Rossbeef 4y ago

Wow! The world of technology is very grateful and this is the future of internet. So many questions about, but this is really underrated, fascinating

Julher 4y ago

Very closer to link without waiting, I think if you are in hurry, this could be the best option to manipulate your preferences in the web site. Can’t wait to try it

nodomain 4y ago

It is funny where we are right now. After blowing up classical web pages to over-complex web applications that eat up memory, bandwidth and battery, we now think it is a good idea to optimize this by streaming these complex applications to clients? To be honest: my fist take was "this has to be satire" - but this is really a product. Wow.

ijoshmathews 4y ago

excited to try this out! congrats on the launch!