9 ms·

Mighty Retrospective

138 points by drewbent 4y ago

nickdothutton 4y ago
I have some experience building infrastructure for on-demand cloud hosted desktops (HDx3DPro) for scientific users and their apps. Often wondered if there was a consumer play there too. Better someone tried and failed than never tried at all.
samwillis 4y ago
While I never really believed in Mighty as a concept, I think the technology has enormous potential in some industries. A robust, performant and versatile VNC like toolkit to enable traditionally desktop software to be made available in the cloud could be be very successful. There are many CAD, Visualisation, Rendering, Editing, and Simulation tools that are incredible CPU, GPU or Memory intensive that could be made available in a collaborative environment for the first time using some of the Mighty tech. I hope someone picks it up and explores other ways it could be used.
- ghostly_s 4y ago
  Industry has been using Citrix in that problem space for nearly a decade. What does Mighty bring to the table?
  - cokeandpepsi 4y ago
    parsec, nvidia's thing and a few other companies are already in that specific space as well, mighty just seemed dumb
  - samwillis 4y ago
    I think it's more of a hybrid approach, the web renderer was running in the cloud, the ui was native and local. I beleve Citrix is mostly a standard VNC type product where everything is rendered on a server and streamed. I was envisaging a toolkit to enable you to build an app where parts of it run in cloud, parts of it locally. Think of a 3D cad tool, the ui could be all local, but the rendering and compute is in the cloud. Or a 3d physics based ray tracing app, you could do the 3d wire frame locally, but have the real-time ray tracing happening on a very large server. On top of that, by have a cloud based state, it's only one step away from marking that state shared with other users to enable collaboration.
    - ghostly_s 4y ago
      You're misinformed. Citrix has plugins for managing aspects of GUI rendering, video/audio playback and GPU pipelines local on the client, which are a key part of the "secret sauce" behind their success in industry.[1] This is a product which is being used today for remote CAD/CAM workflows in the largest firms, whereas afaict applications of Mighty's product to this problem sphere is nothing but idle fantasy by HN posters? 1. ie. https://www.citrix.com/solutions/vdi-and-daas/hdx/what-is-hdx.html https://www.citrix.com/solutions/vdi-and-daas/hdx/what-is-hd... Whether they do these things well is another question entirely, but they've had more success than any of their competitors.
  - paulgb 4y ago
    Having used both Citrix and Mighty, it’s clear Mighty cared about latency in a way that Citrix doesn’t (or, more generously, is out of control of Citrix since they don’t own the end-to-end system)
- slashink 4y ago
  There are tons of these solutions in production for well over 10 years. Big media customers has run virtualized edit bays in AWS for at least 4 years at this point. Reasons people don't use these solutions are the same reason Mighty ended up not working. Even in CAD applications, latency matters when trying to move objects in 3D space with precise mouse input or using a 3dconnexion spacemouse. Sure, you can overcome latency by doing what Google essentially invested in with Stadia, run GPU's closer to the edge but at that point the cost of just buying workstations for your employees is not that different from acquiring a stable connection (for 8+ hours a day) with the fee of renting the hardware.
- jamiek88 4y ago
  Isn’t this just Citrix?
- paulgb 4y ago
  We’ve been working on a way for browser-based apps to run a rendering thread on the server and streaming back to the client, possibly composited into client-sode-rendered UI. So far the results are promising: you get the power of a server-side GPU with no additional latency for the normal UI interactions that can be drawn without a server round-trip. Here’s a demo of a full-blown Blender “running in the browser” (I don’t have a demo with local compositing yet, so this is all server-side) https://twitter.com/drifting_corp/status/1583460106963820545?s=46&t=TaGSbU4rp5DTYCiIN_jPkQ https://twitter.com/drifting_corp/status/1583460106963820545...
- yrgulation 4y ago
  For that to happen we first need proper internet connectivity, which lacks in most western countries.
- torginus 4y ago
  There is no technical challenge here. You can rent GPU instances from any cloud provider. Each of those has a built-in hardware video encoder. Then you can proceed to stream your CAD app/game/desktop/website over the browser with WebRTC. It's almost all OTC software. Stadia does it. Geforce Cloud does it. There is no technological innovation left in this space. You can package it with a nice GUI and convenient user experience, but I feel like that's hardly a billion dollar startup idea.
asadlionpk 4y ago
Streaming Chrome with some value adds must have been a short-term product right? It could only have existed until PCs caught up on processing speed (Apple's M1?). I wonder what vision did Suhail pitch to PG to deserve high praise. Because this can't be it.
- dhoe 4y ago
  My guess when it launched was (maybe too cynically) that it's the 100% complete visibility of user behavior.
  - samwillis 4y ago
    A team with a background in data analytics, starting a fully hosted browser platform? You don't have to squint too hard to to come to that conclusion. Although they did claim to keep your browsing data privet: https://www.mightyapp.com/security https://www.mightyapp.com/security Maybe four years ago it was seen as a strong counter to ad/tracker blocking. But now, with increased regulation and consumer resistance they couldn't make that play?
    - dhoe 4y ago
      Doesn't have to be personal data. You'd know the performance of every website's funnel, most used features of every app etc. Somebody would have paid a lot for it.
  - tweestuff 4y ago
- GMoromisato 4y ago
  The ultimate vision is/was to have everything run in the cloud. Imagine if you could run any app on the most powerful machine in the world. See: https://blog.mightyapp.com/mightys-secret-plan-to-invent-the-future-of-computing/ https://blog.mightyapp.com/mightys-secret-plan-to-invent-the... In my opinion, this is the right goal, but I don't think this can be done by running existing apps in the cloud (and remoting their UI). Instead, I think we need a new cloud-native platform so that any app can be written as a cloud app. (Obligatory self-promotion: that's what we're trying to do with https://gridwhale.com https://gridwhale.com)
gruez 4y ago
>CPU: We gave users a 16 core machine just for their browser, but it turns out that the web is largely limited by single core performance (think JS, layout, html parsing, etc). I'm pretty sure that javascript being largely single-threaded was well known knowledge since day 1. Did they not know this? Did they think that mulit-threaded javascript was just around the corner?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  JS is single threaded, but does a browser use that same thread for rendering, animations, web workers, network etc.? How much front end JS code is intensely computational vs. simply spending most of its time waiting on a callback? Genuine question - I might see if I can find out next time I have to do a performance profiling in Chrome!
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - itake 4y ago
    AFAIK, rendering and animations are on the same thread as JS. web workers have their own thread, but I think adoption is low. Network requests are async (JS doesn't have to wait for the network request for it to do other things), but JS can still only start one network request at a time.
  - kevingadd 4y ago
    The design of web APIs means that a lot of stuff has to happen as if it were on the main UI thread, so while you can do fork/join stuff to optimize it - for example, doing layout in parallel, etc - you're still bottlenecked by how fast the main thread is able to do all the stuff it needs to do. This is why many APIs disallow synchronous use or have serious constraints on synchronous use now.
- ignoramous 4y ago
mwcampbell 4y ago
I wonder if they ever got around to implementing accessibility, e.g. for screen readers, in their remote browser. That's an interesting problem. Do you send serialized accessibility trees (and hopefully incremental updates) down to the local machine so it can implement the platform accessibility API and work with a user's existing assistive technology (e.g. screen reader)? Or do you run the AT remotely as well? I believe the former is feasible with Chromium (though I haven't yet proven it), but Cloudflare went with the latter in their Browser Isolation product, probably because converting the Chromium accessibility tree back to HTML in the local browser would compromise the security benefit of Cloudflare's product. But Mighty didn't have that concern AFAIK.
andrewstuart 4y ago
I had expected Mighty to pivot to solving the giant problem of corporate computing security.
- FanaHOVA 4y ago
  https://www.island.io/ https://www.island.io/ (not affiliated in any way)
- paulgb 4y ago
  You might find Whist interesting https://www.whist.com/ https://www.whist.com/
- kilroy123 4y ago
  Yeah, I think the whole thing is weird. Why just give up so fast and easily? They made the thing work, hell I was a paying customer. Seems like the founder just moved on to the next shiny new toy instead of fighting it out until the end. I have a sneaking suspicion PG won't be talking about him anymore.
yamtaddle 4y ago
> RAM: Mighty allowed users to open hundreds of tabs without being worried that their RAM would be consumed. But my sense is this was not a killer feature. The benefit simply isn’t massive: the alternative is to close tabs and “clean things up”. Many people probably do this anyway because it’s visually hard to have hundreds of tabs open, so users end up closing tabs even with infinite RAM. This is evident in the data: when we gave users 32gb of RAM, 90+% of them didn’t go beyond 16. We did have the opportunity to provide users with a whole new interface of tab management – one in which tabs never have to be closed and hundreds of tabs are visually manageable. Maybe this would have been a smash hit, it’s hard to be sure. What I want is for the address bar to give me a really quick way to jump to existing tabs, if I start to type in the address of one I already have open. The entire reason my tabs get out of control is that at some point I get enough open that I start to lose track of what's there, and repeat myself. End up with like 5 AWS tabs, only one of which I'm actually using, stuff like that. So finally I just bookmark the whole set ("just in case"—I've not once looked back at these, in almost a decade of working this way, though I bet there's some great shit in there) and start over. Apple's "tab groups" approach being a solution, but the trouble is I forget to switch to the correct group for a given site and end up using a single jumbled-up session anyway. It needs better (more automatic, probably) UI.
- jamiek88 4y ago
  Yes tab groups has helped a lot and is nearly there but not quite. I try and be disciplined but like you end up having to manually stop myself and drag tabs back to the ‘proper’ group.
  - jemmyw 4y ago
    The tab groups extension for Chrome works well for automating moving tabs to the correct group. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-groups-extension/nplimhmoanghlebhdiboeellhgmgommi https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-groups-extensi...
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Just manual settings I could use to say "always open this site in tab group X" or "prompt to move this site to tab groups Y or Z if I open it somewhere else (but with the option not to)" would probably make it usable-enough for me.
iLoveOncall 4y ago
> Mighty’s short term goal was to make people more productive with their browser. I believe the biggest reason for their failure and lack of traction is because they misidentified their value proposition from day 1. No, loading web pages marginally faster is not going to make you more productive. It will save you a few minutes per day in the best case scenario, nothing else. Productivity does not come from loading speed, it comes from how quickly you can identify the information that matters on a page and absorb it. This HackerNews page took 320ms to load, but I've been on the page for 5 minutes already. They really think saving even 90% of the load time is going to make any difference to my _productivity_?
fleddr 4y ago
I always found the idea to be bizarre. The group of people for which a browser is truly horrendously slow would be on something like a low-end Windows laptop. From mid-end and upwards it's fine (or good enough) and for Mac users pretty much never an issue. The people with such crappy hardware are exactly the group to not be able to afford 35$ a month. That's like the price of 3 or 4 streaming services combined. Just to browse!?
- gonehome 4y ago
  I had a similar impression of it, the best I can come up with is I think it was a bet based on a prediction of the future that is kinda true, but just doesn't matter as much as they thought. 1. Personal computers are dead and just a means to access a browser via dumb terminals 2. Applications will be Figma style - web based entirely. 3. Intel/AMD chips are bad and not getting that much better (this one is true, but missed the mark entirely because of Apple silicon throwing a curve ball) 4. Given that your personal computer is basically a dumb terminal to a web browser you could imagine a world where it doesn't matter and it's worth paying $35/mo for a super computer to run your web apps streamed to whatever local hardware you're using, since your local machine is basically useless as a machine and only serves to load a web browser (which is where your actual applications are). This super computer will also remember state so any devices you access mighty on is exactly as you left it. Long term, this could end with a Chromebook like devices of some sort that just connects to mighty and are really nice low power hardware. -- Personal bias aside (I hate this future and I'm actively working on software trying to bring personal computing back in a from first principles networked way) - it was a bet on trends and fits squarely into the PG concept of a good startup being a bad sounding idea that might have recently became good because of changes in the environment that have not yet been really recognized. I think Apple made it less relevant. I also agree there's a weird issue of who is the actual target market at that price point (the exact people that would maybe need it can also afford good hardware). That and there is obviously fertile ground in AI right now and the founder sees a bigger opportunity there with a lot of low hanging fruit.
  - hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
    > Intel/AMD chips are bad and not getting that much better (this one is true, but missed the mark entirely because of Apple silicon throwing a curve ball) Define "bad". I'm on a 2019 MB Pro with an i9 with 32G of ram. I pretty much never have browser performance issues that bother me. I have Chrome open with 2 windows and a total of 39 tabs, plus some other apps that people always like to bitch about resource-wise (Slack, VSCode). Granted I'm not a designer so I don't have what would be some of the most resource-hungry apps like Figma, but if there is one group of people who I've always seen spend a shitload on their desktops/laptops it's designers. I think Mighty was always a weird project that pretty much only solved a problem for people that would never be willing to pay for it.
lxe 4y ago
> In addition, Suhail had been trying out building a new product that was showing to be a reasonable alternative bet. I see they've been distracted with AI art just like everyone else and had to jump on that bandwagon :). Don't get me wrong -- Stable Diffusion is probably the fastest progressing thing on the internet in decades.
- swyx 4y ago
  yeah but do they have some core insight that makes them better at building the 34th Stable Diffusion UI compared to the others?
fragmede 4y ago
The place where they really could have won is iOS, where browsers aren't allowed to use their own rendering engine, and system specs still lagged behind the M1.
- kevingadd 4y ago
  I'm sure Apple would have rejected the app from the store, unfortunately. Lots of vendors have failed to get streaming apps of this sort onto the store and had to (heh) distribute them via Safari as web pages instead.
- wmf 4y ago
  But mobile networks are worse and display streaming probably sends more data, making it a net slowdown.
swyx 4y ago
previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33583830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33583830 4 days ago interesting that https://www.mightyapp.com/ https://www.mightyapp.com/ still has not been updated with any mention of shutdown
el_nahual 4y ago
I wish Mighty had succeeded for a different audience. The core value prop "make figma faster" was not very compelling--people who need to use Figma can buy a mac. You know who does struggle with slow computers and memory issues? Call center employees who have to run Front, Slack, Chrome, and probably one or two other electron-based apps. At our startup (not in USA), these issues are so bad we've ended up getting people who earn $700usd/mo M1 macbook airs anyway because otherwise an electron-based workflow is unamnageable. I would have loved to buy them cheaper computers instead that ran entirely in the cloud...plus extra permission management, no local storage, and other "really, really, really nice to haves" for remote workers dealing with PII. If Mighty's value prop had been "never worry about remote wiping an employee's computer ever again, oh, and it's faster too, and it's all OPEX, and we charge you by minute instead of by the computer" I would have signed up immediately.
- fnbr 4y ago
  hmmm. that does seem like a compelling business case. I wonder why they didn't handle that market.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  Could the web versions of those services work instead? Or will they suffer from the same resource constraints?
- Kwpolska 4y ago
  Reasonably priced PC laptops that can run Chrome and Electron do exist. Just don’t buy bottom of the barrel Celerons, instead target an i5 or a Ryzen 5 (or maybe a higher-end i3).
  - TylerE 4y ago
    From my experience slow laptops are slow not because of the cpu (I mean, we’re not running a chess engine here…) but slow disks and slow/not enough RAM, which compounds the disk issue as soon as you start actively swapping… which in some of these is about as soon as the OS boots. Like, I just loaded up the Best Buy app and 3 of their top 10 selling laptops only have 4GB of RAM. I haven’t used a computer with that little RAM in over a decade.
chimney 4y ago
The use case had significant value until M1 came and offered a good enough native experience. Unfortunate.
renewiltord 4y ago
I use Arc and it deals with the memory issue differently. Only your pinned tabs are kept, the rest disappear over time. I like that functionality. Overall, I'm enjoying using it.
mattbillenstein 4y ago
I appreciate the swing and I pointed this out early-on, but I wouldn't bet against Moore's Law - the hardware gets faster and cheaper. Back when they started 16GB was pretty high end, now it's more mainstream with 32GB being the high end... And I think it's a very niche use case to have hundreds of tabs open - like, that's hoarding, like, just close some, you'll never get to all of that.
wmab 4y ago
I appreciated this commentary. When the news from Suhail came out as quite sudden, realistically there's a team under a struggling company working tirelessly to fulfill their vision. It sounds like M1 was the nail in the coffin - though you'd think this is a normal question for an investor to ask re defensibility when deciding to invest in the company (a version of the classic "What if Google entered your market?"), and thus something they would have had rebuttals for? I'd argue that this isn't a retrospective in it's truest form. I would like to have a piece that's more about the metrics, like what sort of churn they got, how was their launch perceived, what sort of market research they did/ didn't do etc. These sorts of pieces would help make the lonely startup world more transparent and accessible (it's easier to do this after the fact, rather than when keeping up appearances when trying everything to keep a company alive). Perhaps Suhail will bless us with this at some point.
- mritchie712 4y ago
  he addressed this in a thread about the shut down https://twitter.com/ishish/status/1591841784967352320?s=20&t=D4GqW-EKPp3ILIErFbJDkw https://twitter.com/ishish/status/1591841784967352320?s=20&t... Q: It was a great product I was a paying customer. I used it like crazy on my old MacBook but as soon as I upgraded to an M1 Pro it didn’t feel as a must have for me and wondering if you found that with others A (Suhail): We did but the mac market isn't as big as the PC market so it wasn't a critical factor in the decision but certainly had an impact as mac users.
CyberRabbi 4y ago
The offered value was simply not worth what they were charging. I would venture to say that it would be difficult to sustainably charge anything at all for this. For most people, the alleged slowness of Chrome is good enough. Why would the normal person go through the hassle of paying for an experience that was only marginally better than something that was available for free? Their best bet was an ad-based model but that comes with its own set of drawbacks. In general all alternative browser products that charge money face the same issue. Netscape already tested this business model in the 90s. For this reason and for many people this app was DOA from the inception. The founder should have carefully considered this criticism instead of disregarding it and using it as "fuel" https://twitter.com/Suhail/status/1196458286347776001 https://twitter.com/Suhail/status/1196458286347776001 Sadly it seems his new startup is jumping on the trend of generative AI. This is another product category that is doomed to failure yet has tons of tech industry fanfare (similar to web3, which is on its deathbed). For most professional artists, it's not hard to do the actual drawing, the difficulty is coming up with the subject matter / concept for the drawing. Generative AI may have a market for low quality yet high volume content creators that auto-generate content on YouTube or other social media for a modest living.
llaolleh 4y ago
Mighty was great. If they had a Windows/Linux port it would be killer as it would have allowed you to run all kind of apps without carrying a $1.5k computer around. That was the dream. I'd also expect their pricing to go down given economies of scale. I lowkey wanted them to be super ambitious and one day roll out their own chips and become a full stack computer company.
gfodor 4y ago
Mighty would have been huge imo if they just waited a bit longer and pivoted to powering browsers inside of mobile VR/AR all day wear devices, like the upcoming Apple visor, where there are basically no resources available to be used for things like figma yet having a fast, scalable browser anywhere would be amazing.
- JayStavis 4y ago
  I agree. I guess there's nothing wrong with going in a different direction for a few years until there's actually display glasses that this would feel good with.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
theicfire 4y ago
Author here, I just noticed this was on HN! There’s lots of great points raised here that I didn’t cover. I published this with very little feedback, so I’m not surprised I missed things. I’ll go through some of the additional points, though: * Pivoting towards enterprise. Not with speed in mind, but instead security/control/compliance. We didn’t spend too much time here, so I can’t definitively say this wouldn’t have worked. Cloudflare had (has?) just this vision when they bought S2: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-and-remote-browser-isolation/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-and-remote-browser-is.... There is at least one critical roadblock that I see: wifi and networks can be spotty. If only 80% of a company’s employees have good enough internet, what do you do as an administrator? Force them to figure out notoriously difficult wifi problems? If you don’t, those that don’t like the browser will simply not use it because they’re not required to. Given this, I always thought of this as a secondary market. First, make something great, independent of being required to use the product. Then start building out other tools that make businesses more enticed. We did sell to companies in multi-seat deals, and were eager to keep pushing in this direction. Note the tag line: “A new browser to work faster”. * CAD/Rendering/Simulation/etc instead of a Browser The trend is that all of these are moving to the browser. However, maybe not fast enough and Mighty was too early. It’s also a more crowded market (Citrix, Teradici, now Parsec, etc) and yet smaller than the browser market (well, by users at least). * Powering browsers inside of mobile VR/AR We never tried this. My sense is we’d be too early (at least 2+ years?). * Accessibility, e.g. for screen readers This was never a big enough priority but yeah, it seems solvable. It’s more or less another API to implement. * Loading web pages faster is not going to make you more productive As I see it, there are two buckets of speed. The first is to make fast things faster. The second is to make slow things faster. The two can work together. The real value prop is the second, but the first is where you can bring lots of delight. But I think there is some truth to this. Of the loyal paying users that we had, they felt substantially more productive. But could this benefit offset the price + downsides? Knowing what I know now, I don’t think so. But there’s a lot of context about what’s actually possible, what a wide spectrum of people value, etc that gets me to that conclusion. * Who really, really, has a slow browser that’s willing to pay $35/month due to it? This was my first thought when we starting working on a Browser. One thing I learned was to hold back my gut instinct and prove the answer, instead of guessing it. The empirical answer: thousands of people that we could find through minimal marketing (just Twitter, basically). Does that mean there are a million+ people out there that also have it? Maybe.. it’s hard to tell. But my personal hope was that this quantity generalized somewhat to the 2B users of Chrome so that we could at least make a profitable business. If we got there, we could move into areas where we were solving more problems. So to directly answer the question: I’m pretty confident this market exists. But not if Mighty also has the downsides it did (doesn’t work well in cafes, a variety of bugs, etc.)
slotrans 4y ago
What annoyed me about Mighty was that it represented giving up on having fast, efficient software on our own machines. We COULD live in a world where 400+ tabs (typical for me) didn't require 32gb of RAM, but browser authors have chosen otherwise, and that sucks. The idea of pushing the entire browser to some other computer, and over-speccing that one, instead of actually making better software, just seemed like a cop-out. This person's claim that Mighty customers didn't open huge numbers of tabs and use a ton of RAM makes no sense. What OTHER purpose could a $35/m cloud browser possibly serve??
beardedman 4y ago
I was one of the people not only perplexed by the positioning, but that they managed to raise money. Props to Suhail for selling it - it does make me wonder how many great ideas are slipping through purely from VC's requiring flashy sales skills. But I guess that could be said about almost anything.

138 points by drewbent 4y ago

I have some experience building infrastructure for on-demand cloud hosted desktops (HDx3DPro) for scientific users and their apps. Often wondered if there was a consumer play there too. Better someone tried and failed than never tried at all.

samwillis 4y ago

While I never really believed in Mighty as a concept, I think the technology has enormous potential in some industries. A robust, performant and versatile VNC like toolkit to enable traditionally desktop software to be made available in the cloud could be be very successful. There are many CAD, Visualisation, Rendering, Editing, and Simulation tools that are incredible CPU, GPU or Memory intensive that could be made available in a collaborative environment for the first time using some of the Mighty tech. I hope someone picks it up and explores other ways it could be used.

ghostly_s 4y ago
Industry has been using Citrix in that problem space for nearly a decade. What does Mighty bring to the table?
- cokeandpepsi 4y ago
  parsec, nvidia's thing and a few other companies are already in that specific space as well, mighty just seemed dumb
- samwillis 4y ago
  I think it's more of a hybrid approach, the web renderer was running in the cloud, the ui was native and local. I beleve Citrix is mostly a standard VNC type product where everything is rendered on a server and streamed. I was envisaging a toolkit to enable you to build an app where parts of it run in cloud, parts of it locally. Think of a 3D cad tool, the ui could be all local, but the rendering and compute is in the cloud. Or a 3d physics based ray tracing app, you could do the 3d wire frame locally, but have the real-time ray tracing happening on a very large server. On top of that, by have a cloud based state, it's only one step away from marking that state shared with other users to enable collaboration.
  - ghostly_s 4y ago
    You're misinformed. Citrix has plugins for managing aspects of GUI rendering, video/audio playback and GPU pipelines local on the client, which are a key part of the "secret sauce" behind their success in industry.[1] This is a product which is being used today for remote CAD/CAM workflows in the largest firms, whereas afaict applications of Mighty's product to this problem sphere is nothing but idle fantasy by HN posters? 1. ie. https://www.citrix.com/solutions/vdi-and-daas/hdx/what-is-hdx.html https://www.citrix.com/solutions/vdi-and-daas/hdx/what-is-hd... Whether they do these things well is another question entirely, but they've had more success than any of their competitors.
- paulgb 4y ago
  Having used both Citrix and Mighty, it’s clear Mighty cared about latency in a way that Citrix doesn’t (or, more generously, is out of control of Citrix since they don’t own the end-to-end system)
slashink 4y ago
There are tons of these solutions in production for well over 10 years. Big media customers has run virtualized edit bays in AWS for at least 4 years at this point. Reasons people don't use these solutions are the same reason Mighty ended up not working. Even in CAD applications, latency matters when trying to move objects in 3D space with precise mouse input or using a 3dconnexion spacemouse. Sure, you can overcome latency by doing what Google essentially invested in with Stadia, run GPU's closer to the edge but at that point the cost of just buying workstations for your employees is not that different from acquiring a stable connection (for 8+ hours a day) with the fee of renting the hardware.
jamiek88 4y ago
Isn’t this just Citrix?
paulgb 4y ago
We’ve been working on a way for browser-based apps to run a rendering thread on the server and streaming back to the client, possibly composited into client-sode-rendered UI. So far the results are promising: you get the power of a server-side GPU with no additional latency for the normal UI interactions that can be drawn without a server round-trip. Here’s a demo of a full-blown Blender “running in the browser” (I don’t have a demo with local compositing yet, so this is all server-side) https://twitter.com/drifting_corp/status/1583460106963820545?s=46&t=TaGSbU4rp5DTYCiIN_jPkQ https://twitter.com/drifting_corp/status/1583460106963820545...
yrgulation 4y ago
For that to happen we first need proper internet connectivity, which lacks in most western countries.
torginus 4y ago
There is no technical challenge here. You can rent GPU instances from any cloud provider. Each of those has a built-in hardware video encoder. Then you can proceed to stream your CAD app/game/desktop/website over the browser with WebRTC. It's almost all OTC software. Stadia does it. Geforce Cloud does it. There is no technological innovation left in this space. You can package it with a nice GUI and convenient user experience, but I feel like that's hardly a billion dollar startup idea.

asadlionpk 4y ago

Streaming Chrome with some value adds must have been a short-term product right? It could only have existed until PCs caught up on processing speed (Apple's M1?). I wonder what vision did Suhail pitch to PG to deserve high praise. Because this can't be it.

dhoe 4y ago
My guess when it launched was (maybe too cynically) that it's the 100% complete visibility of user behavior.
- samwillis 4y ago
  A team with a background in data analytics, starting a fully hosted browser platform? You don't have to squint too hard to to come to that conclusion. Although they did claim to keep your browsing data privet: https://www.mightyapp.com/security https://www.mightyapp.com/security Maybe four years ago it was seen as a strong counter to ad/tracker blocking. But now, with increased regulation and consumer resistance they couldn't make that play?
  - dhoe 4y ago
    Doesn't have to be personal data. You'd know the performance of every website's funnel, most used features of every app etc. Somebody would have paid a lot for it.
- tweestuff 4y ago
GMoromisato 4y ago
The ultimate vision is/was to have everything run in the cloud. Imagine if you could run any app on the most powerful machine in the world. See: https://blog.mightyapp.com/mightys-secret-plan-to-invent-the-future-of-computing/ https://blog.mightyapp.com/mightys-secret-plan-to-invent-the... In my opinion, this is the right goal, but I don't think this can be done by running existing apps in the cloud (and remoting their UI). Instead, I think we need a new cloud-native platform so that any app can be written as a cloud app. (Obligatory self-promotion: that's what we're trying to do with https://gridwhale.com https://gridwhale.com)

gruez 4y ago

>CPU: We gave users a 16 core machine just for their browser, but it turns out that the web is largely limited by single core performance (think JS, layout, html parsing, etc). I'm pretty sure that javascript being largely single-threaded was well known knowledge since day 1. Did they not know this? Did they think that mulit-threaded javascript was just around the corner?

deleted 4y ago
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quickthrower2 4y ago
JS is single threaded, but does a browser use that same thread for rendering, animations, web workers, network etc.? How much front end JS code is intensely computational vs. simply spending most of its time waiting on a callback? Genuine question - I might see if I can find out next time I have to do a performance profiling in Chrome!
- deleted 4y ago
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- itake 4y ago
  AFAIK, rendering and animations are on the same thread as JS. web workers have their own thread, but I think adoption is low. Network requests are async (JS doesn't have to wait for the network request for it to do other things), but JS can still only start one network request at a time.
- kevingadd 4y ago
  The design of web APIs means that a lot of stuff has to happen as if it were on the main UI thread, so while you can do fork/join stuff to optimize it - for example, doing layout in parallel, etc - you're still bottlenecked by how fast the main thread is able to do all the stuff it needs to do. This is why many APIs disallow synchronous use or have serious constraints on synchronous use now.
ignoramous 4y ago

mwcampbell 4y ago

I wonder if they ever got around to implementing accessibility, e.g. for screen readers, in their remote browser. That's an interesting problem. Do you send serialized accessibility trees (and hopefully incremental updates) down to the local machine so it can implement the platform accessibility API and work with a user's existing assistive technology (e.g. screen reader)? Or do you run the AT remotely as well? I believe the former is feasible with Chromium (though I haven't yet proven it), but Cloudflare went with the latter in their Browser Isolation product, probably because converting the Chromium accessibility tree back to HTML in the local browser would compromise the security benefit of Cloudflare's product. But Mighty didn't have that concern AFAIK.

andrewstuart 4y ago

I had expected Mighty to pivot to solving the giant problem of corporate computing security.

FanaHOVA 4y ago
https://www.island.io/ https://www.island.io/ (not affiliated in any way)
paulgb 4y ago
You might find Whist interesting https://www.whist.com/ https://www.whist.com/
kilroy123 4y ago
Yeah, I think the whole thing is weird. Why just give up so fast and easily? They made the thing work, hell I was a paying customer. Seems like the founder just moved on to the next shiny new toy instead of fighting it out until the end. I have a sneaking suspicion PG won't be talking about him anymore.

yamtaddle 4y ago

> RAM: Mighty allowed users to open hundreds of tabs without being worried that their RAM would be consumed. But my sense is this was not a killer feature. The benefit simply isn’t massive: the alternative is to close tabs and “clean things up”. Many people probably do this anyway because it’s visually hard to have hundreds of tabs open, so users end up closing tabs even with infinite RAM. This is evident in the data: when we gave users 32gb of RAM, 90+% of them didn’t go beyond 16. We did have the opportunity to provide users with a whole new interface of tab management – one in which tabs never have to be closed and hundreds of tabs are visually manageable. Maybe this would have been a smash hit, it’s hard to be sure. What I want is for the address bar to give me a really quick way to jump to existing tabs, if I start to type in the address of one I already have open. The entire reason my tabs get out of control is that at some point I get enough open that I start to lose track of what's there, and repeat myself. End up with like 5 AWS tabs, only one of which I'm actually using, stuff like that. So finally I just bookmark the whole set ("just in case"—I've not once looked back at these, in almost a decade of working this way, though I bet there's some great shit in there) and start over. Apple's "tab groups" approach being a solution, but the trouble is I forget to switch to the correct group for a given site and end up using a single jumbled-up session anyway. It needs better (more automatic, probably) UI.

jamiek88 4y ago
Yes tab groups has helped a lot and is nearly there but not quite. I try and be disciplined but like you end up having to manually stop myself and drag tabs back to the ‘proper’ group.
- jemmyw 4y ago
  The tab groups extension for Chrome works well for automating moving tabs to the correct group. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-groups-extension/nplimhmoanghlebhdiboeellhgmgommi https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-groups-extensi...
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Just manual settings I could use to say "always open this site in tab group X" or "prompt to move this site to tab groups Y or Z if I open it somewhere else (but with the option not to)" would probably make it usable-enough for me.

iLoveOncall 4y ago

> Mighty’s short term goal was to make people more productive with their browser. I believe the biggest reason for their failure and lack of traction is because they misidentified their value proposition from day 1. No, loading web pages marginally faster is not going to make you more productive. It will save you a few minutes per day in the best case scenario, nothing else. Productivity does not come from loading speed, it comes from how quickly you can identify the information that matters on a page and absorb it. This HackerNews page took 320ms to load, but I've been on the page for 5 minutes already. They really think saving even 90% of the load time is going to make any difference to my _productivity_?

fleddr 4y ago

I always found the idea to be bizarre. The group of people for which a browser is truly horrendously slow would be on something like a low-end Windows laptop. From mid-end and upwards it's fine (or good enough) and for Mac users pretty much never an issue. The people with such crappy hardware are exactly the group to not be able to afford 35$ a month. That's like the price of 3 or 4 streaming services combined. Just to browse!?

gonehome 4y ago
I had a similar impression of it, the best I can come up with is I think it was a bet based on a prediction of the future that is kinda true, but just doesn't matter as much as they thought. 1. Personal computers are dead and just a means to access a browser via dumb terminals 2. Applications will be Figma style - web based entirely. 3. Intel/AMD chips are bad and not getting that much better (this one is true, but missed the mark entirely because of Apple silicon throwing a curve ball) 4. Given that your personal computer is basically a dumb terminal to a web browser you could imagine a world where it doesn't matter and it's worth paying $35/mo for a super computer to run your web apps streamed to whatever local hardware you're using, since your local machine is basically useless as a machine and only serves to load a web browser (which is where your actual applications are). This super computer will also remember state so any devices you access mighty on is exactly as you left it. Long term, this could end with a Chromebook like devices of some sort that just connects to mighty and are really nice low power hardware. -- Personal bias aside (I hate this future and I'm actively working on software trying to bring personal computing back in a from first principles networked way) - it was a bet on trends and fits squarely into the PG concept of a good startup being a bad sounding idea that might have recently became good because of changes in the environment that have not yet been really recognized. I think Apple made it less relevant. I also agree there's a weird issue of who is the actual target market at that price point (the exact people that would maybe need it can also afford good hardware). That and there is obviously fertile ground in AI right now and the founder sees a bigger opportunity there with a lot of low hanging fruit.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  > Intel/AMD chips are bad and not getting that much better (this one is true, but missed the mark entirely because of Apple silicon throwing a curve ball) Define "bad". I'm on a 2019 MB Pro with an i9 with 32G of ram. I pretty much never have browser performance issues that bother me. I have Chrome open with 2 windows and a total of 39 tabs, plus some other apps that people always like to bitch about resource-wise (Slack, VSCode). Granted I'm not a designer so I don't have what would be some of the most resource-hungry apps like Figma, but if there is one group of people who I've always seen spend a shitload on their desktops/laptops it's designers. I think Mighty was always a weird project that pretty much only solved a problem for people that would never be willing to pay for it.

lxe 4y ago

> In addition, Suhail had been trying out building a new product that was showing to be a reasonable alternative bet. I see they've been distracted with AI art just like everyone else and had to jump on that bandwagon :). Don't get me wrong -- Stable Diffusion is probably the fastest progressing thing on the internet in decades.

swyx 4y ago
yeah but do they have some core insight that makes them better at building the 34th Stable Diffusion UI compared to the others?

fragmede 4y ago

The place where they really could have won is iOS, where browsers aren't allowed to use their own rendering engine, and system specs still lagged behind the M1.

kevingadd 4y ago
I'm sure Apple would have rejected the app from the store, unfortunately. Lots of vendors have failed to get streaming apps of this sort onto the store and had to (heh) distribute them via Safari as web pages instead.
wmf 4y ago
But mobile networks are worse and display streaming probably sends more data, making it a net slowdown.

swyx 4y ago

previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33583830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33583830 4 days ago interesting that https://www.mightyapp.com/ https://www.mightyapp.com/ still has not been updated with any mention of shutdown

el_nahual 4y ago

I wish Mighty had succeeded for a different audience. The core value prop "make figma faster" was not very compelling--people who need to use Figma can buy a mac. You know who does struggle with slow computers and memory issues? Call center employees who have to run Front, Slack, Chrome, and probably one or two other electron-based apps. At our startup (not in USA), these issues are so bad we've ended up getting people who earn $700usd/mo M1 macbook airs anyway because otherwise an electron-based workflow is unamnageable. I would have loved to buy them cheaper computers instead that ran entirely in the cloud...plus extra permission management, no local storage, and other "really, really, really nice to haves" for remote workers dealing with PII. If Mighty's value prop had been "never worry about remote wiping an employee's computer ever again, oh, and it's faster too, and it's all OPEX, and we charge you by minute instead of by the computer" I would have signed up immediately.

fnbr 4y ago
hmmm. that does seem like a compelling business case. I wonder why they didn't handle that market.
paulryanrogers 4y ago
Could the web versions of those services work instead? Or will they suffer from the same resource constraints?
Kwpolska 4y ago
Reasonably priced PC laptops that can run Chrome and Electron do exist. Just don’t buy bottom of the barrel Celerons, instead target an i5 or a Ryzen 5 (or maybe a higher-end i3).
- TylerE 4y ago
  From my experience slow laptops are slow not because of the cpu (I mean, we’re not running a chess engine here…) but slow disks and slow/not enough RAM, which compounds the disk issue as soon as you start actively swapping… which in some of these is about as soon as the OS boots. Like, I just loaded up the Best Buy app and 3 of their top 10 selling laptops only have 4GB of RAM. I haven’t used a computer with that little RAM in over a decade.

chimney 4y ago

The use case had significant value until M1 came and offered a good enough native experience. Unfortunate.

renewiltord 4y ago

I use Arc and it deals with the memory issue differently. Only your pinned tabs are kept, the rest disappear over time. I like that functionality. Overall, I'm enjoying using it.

mattbillenstein 4y ago

I appreciate the swing and I pointed this out early-on, but I wouldn't bet against Moore's Law - the hardware gets faster and cheaper. Back when they started 16GB was pretty high end, now it's more mainstream with 32GB being the high end... And I think it's a very niche use case to have hundreds of tabs open - like, that's hoarding, like, just close some, you'll never get to all of that.

wmab 4y ago

I appreciated this commentary. When the news from Suhail came out as quite sudden, realistically there's a team under a struggling company working tirelessly to fulfill their vision. It sounds like M1 was the nail in the coffin - though you'd think this is a normal question for an investor to ask re defensibility when deciding to invest in the company (a version of the classic "What if Google entered your market?"), and thus something they would have had rebuttals for? I'd argue that this isn't a retrospective in it's truest form. I would like to have a piece that's more about the metrics, like what sort of churn they got, how was their launch perceived, what sort of market research they did/ didn't do etc. These sorts of pieces would help make the lonely startup world more transparent and accessible (it's easier to do this after the fact, rather than when keeping up appearances when trying everything to keep a company alive). Perhaps Suhail will bless us with this at some point.

mritchie712 4y ago
he addressed this in a thread about the shut down https://twitter.com/ishish/status/1591841784967352320?s=20&t=D4GqW-EKPp3ILIErFbJDkw https://twitter.com/ishish/status/1591841784967352320?s=20&t... Q: It was a great product I was a paying customer. I used it like crazy on my old MacBook but as soon as I upgraded to an M1 Pro it didn’t feel as a must have for me and wondering if you found that with others A (Suhail): We did but the mac market isn't as big as the PC market so it wasn't a critical factor in the decision but certainly had an impact as mac users.

CyberRabbi 4y ago

The offered value was simply not worth what they were charging. I would venture to say that it would be difficult to sustainably charge anything at all for this. For most people, the alleged slowness of Chrome is good enough. Why would the normal person go through the hassle of paying for an experience that was only marginally better than something that was available for free? Their best bet was an ad-based model but that comes with its own set of drawbacks. In general all alternative browser products that charge money face the same issue. Netscape already tested this business model in the 90s. For this reason and for many people this app was DOA from the inception. The founder should have carefully considered this criticism instead of disregarding it and using it as "fuel" https://twitter.com/Suhail/status/1196458286347776001 https://twitter.com/Suhail/status/1196458286347776001 Sadly it seems his new startup is jumping on the trend of generative AI. This is another product category that is doomed to failure yet has tons of tech industry fanfare (similar to web3, which is on its deathbed). For most professional artists, it's not hard to do the actual drawing, the difficulty is coming up with the subject matter / concept for the drawing. Generative AI may have a market for low quality yet high volume content creators that auto-generate content on YouTube or other social media for a modest living.

llaolleh 4y ago

Mighty was great. If they had a Windows/Linux port it would be killer as it would have allowed you to run all kind of apps without carrying a $1.5k computer around. That was the dream. I'd also expect their pricing to go down given economies of scale. I lowkey wanted them to be super ambitious and one day roll out their own chips and become a full stack computer company.

gfodor 4y ago

Mighty would have been huge imo if they just waited a bit longer and pivoted to powering browsers inside of mobile VR/AR all day wear devices, like the upcoming Apple visor, where there are basically no resources available to be used for things like figma yet having a fast, scalable browser anywhere would be amazing.

JayStavis 4y ago
I agree. I guess there's nothing wrong with going in a different direction for a few years until there's actually display glasses that this would feel good with.

deleted 4y ago

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theicfire 4y ago

Author here, I just noticed this was on HN! There’s lots of great points raised here that I didn’t cover. I published this with very little feedback, so I’m not surprised I missed things. I’ll go through some of the additional points, though: * Pivoting towards enterprise. Not with speed in mind, but instead security/control/compliance. We didn’t spend too much time here, so I can’t definitively say this wouldn’t have worked. Cloudflare had (has?) just this vision when they bought S2: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-and-remote-browser-isolation/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-and-remote-browser-is.... There is at least one critical roadblock that I see: wifi and networks can be spotty. If only 80% of a company’s employees have good enough internet, what do you do as an administrator? Force them to figure out notoriously difficult wifi problems? If you don’t, those that don’t like the browser will simply not use it because they’re not required to. Given this, I always thought of this as a secondary market. First, make something great, independent of being required to use the product. Then start building out other tools that make businesses more enticed. We did sell to companies in multi-seat deals, and were eager to keep pushing in this direction. Note the tag line: “A new browser to work faster”. * CAD/Rendering/Simulation/etc instead of a Browser The trend is that all of these are moving to the browser. However, maybe not fast enough and Mighty was too early. It’s also a more crowded market (Citrix, Teradici, now Parsec, etc) and yet smaller than the browser market (well, by users at least). * Powering browsers inside of mobile VR/AR We never tried this. My sense is we’d be too early (at least 2+ years?). * Accessibility, e.g. for screen readers This was never a big enough priority but yeah, it seems solvable. It’s more or less another API to implement. * Loading web pages faster is not going to make you more productive As I see it, there are two buckets of speed. The first is to make fast things faster. The second is to make slow things faster. The two can work together. The real value prop is the second, but the first is where you can bring lots of delight. But I think there is some truth to this. Of the loyal paying users that we had, they felt substantially more productive. But could this benefit offset the price + downsides? Knowing what I know now, I don’t think so. But there’s a lot of context about what’s actually possible, what a wide spectrum of people value, etc that gets me to that conclusion. * Who really, really, has a slow browser that’s willing to pay $35/month due to it? This was my first thought when we starting working on a Browser. One thing I learned was to hold back my gut instinct and prove the answer, instead of guessing it. The empirical answer: thousands of people that we could find through minimal marketing (just Twitter, basically). Does that mean there are a million+ people out there that also have it? Maybe.. it’s hard to tell. But my personal hope was that this quantity generalized somewhat to the 2B users of Chrome so that we could at least make a profitable business. If we got there, we could move into areas where we were solving more problems. So to directly answer the question: I’m pretty confident this market exists. But not if Mighty also has the downsides it did (doesn’t work well in cafes, a variety of bugs, etc.)

slotrans 4y ago

What annoyed me about Mighty was that it represented giving up on having fast, efficient software on our own machines. We COULD live in a world where 400+ tabs (typical for me) didn't require 32gb of RAM, but browser authors have chosen otherwise, and that sucks. The idea of pushing the entire browser to some other computer, and over-speccing that one, instead of actually making better software, just seemed like a cop-out. This person's claim that Mighty customers didn't open huge numbers of tabs and use a ton of RAM makes no sense. What OTHER purpose could a $35/m cloud browser possibly serve??

beardedman 4y ago

I was one of the people not only perplexed by the positioning, but that they managed to raise money. Props to Suhail for selling it - it does make me wonder how many great ideas are slipping through purely from VC's requiring flashy sales skills. But I guess that could be said about almost anything.