Tuesday, June 21, 2022

Review of the Mighty Browser

Jacob Russell (via Hacker News):

At its core, Mighty lets you run a chromium browser in a virtual machine on a beefed up computer that streams the data to your personal computer. Mighty’s bet is browsers will start to act more like operating systems where more and more activities will happen via web apps as opposed to native apps. By providing 2 Gps of bandwidth, 40 GB of RAM, and 8 vCPUs to each browser instance this becomes a serious value proposition and starts to remove the downsides of web versus native applications.

I’ve switched nearly my entire workflow to web applications with Mighty: Slack, Teams, Outlook, Discord, WhatsApp, as well as resource intensive web applications like Miro, Figma, Jira, and Notion. Being able to have all of these apps open in my browser while still maintaining lightning fast responses is a game changer. I can have all of these apps open without my fan coming on saving me from being “the fan guy” in the meeting as well as saving me a significant amount of battery life throughout the day.

He doesn’t say what hardware he’s using. Is there any benefit—e.g. because of their faster Internet conection—if you already have a fast computer? Otherwise, I guess is this like renting a new computer—that’s only faster for Web stuff—for $30/month. Plus, maybe there are some features that make the browser itself better.

Previously:

Update (2022-06-22): Or, I wonder if it helps in cases where you have a fast computer but a slow or high-latency connection.

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The idea that you need a gigabit+ connection, 40GB RAM and 8 cores to get good performance out of modern web apps during a typical workday isn't really a surprise, but its pretty depressing to see it laid bare like that.

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