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I decided to stop working on Mighty

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Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#101

Post by robenkleene »

dinvlad wrote: post #94
robenkleene wrote: post #30

The trick of Figma claims another. I see Mighty as part of the broader trend of folks thinking Figma it the leading edge of a wider transition to web apps across all creative work. But all forms of coding and media editing (the main tasks that are truly CPU/GPU-bound, the area where something like Mighty would help) have remained as local desktop app affairs. I think what really happened is folks misinterpreted the s…

In the code space, would have to disagree I think, given how both JetBrains [1][2] and VS Code have embraced the client-server model, and how products like GitPod have used these to a full extent with excellent native integrations. [1] https://www.jetbrains.com/remote-development/gateway/ [2] https://www.jetbrains.com/fleet/

Yeah I addressed this here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33584880

I think the distinction is that the UI needs to run locally so that shortcut-rich powerful apps don't have to fight for the keybinding space with the browser.

I'd say that the migration to the client-server approach for professional software is already underway, with VS Code of course being the canonical example, but my (limited) understanding is that Blackmagic's Da Vince Resolve (which is currently eating Premiere and Media Composer's lunch) also uses a similar model where data can be stored remotely but the UI runs locally.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#102

Post by ec109685 »

Mighty was conceived at a really dark time in Mac laptop performance.

The combination of Intel Mac Laptops that had horrible thermal characteristics, browsers that didn’t do anything to throttle background tabs, bloated websites and limited memory created a perfect storm of awful performance that Mighty could address.

Almost all of that isn’t true anymore (besides the bloated websites which browsers manage better), which decimated the potential Mighty market (people willing to spend hundreds a year on a fast browser).

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#103

Post by Entinel »

no_time wrote: post #87
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My primary feeling is that I think technical people drastically overestimate the pain that most "normal" people experience when it comes to browser performance. I see it all the time on HN, e.g. people bitching about the amount of RAM Electron apps take and the like. Who cares? The average user certainly doesn't. If anything, 98% of the time when I experience browser performance issues it's network-latency related, o…

>I see it all the time on HN, e.g. people bitching about the amount of RAM Electron apps take and the like. Who cares? The average user certainly doesn't. It is our job to care so non IT people don't have to.

To a degree yes but acting like anything that uses <500MB of RAM is a disaster goes beyond what is a reasonable concern in my opinion.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#104

Post by iopq »

baxtr wrote: post #61
talhof8 wrote: post #39

I don't think it's M1 that killed it. Probably high server costs and being a vitamin and not a painkiller killed it. Also, people are not too happy about giving away their browser history data to server-side powered browsers. That being said, it's still sad to see startups fail. Hopefully they'll have better luck with their new direction. Fingers crossed!

I love the vitamin vs painkiller discussion. The basic premise is: don’t build a vitamin, build a painkiller because it’s solves a real problem and people will be willing to pay for it. First of all the analogy fails in the real world. The vitamin market is huge. People pay lots of money to buy vitamins. Second, the transition is not clear. It’s hard to draw a line line and say now this vitamin turned into a painkill…

My pain point was that my friends were fragmented among MSN, AIM, Skype, Google etc. and I had to pay for texts so I always used online messaging instead

When I was able to add everyone on Facebook I was able to keep track of everyone, and also connect to all the XMPP networks.

Currently it doesn't serve this purpose because it's no longer a universal messenger, so I don't go on it

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#105

Post by technics256 »

obblekk wrote: post #57

Props to Suhail for building in the open (takes a lot of rejection tolerance) and being so honest about the path. That said, I work with lawyers as customers and I suspect there was an adjacent market in data privacy that a hosted browser would have had PM fit for. A lot of industries have strict legal requirements on controlling employee access to data (think healthcare, legal, compliance). In these cases, SaaS beco…

Isn't this somewhat achievable already with cloud hosted vms, like AWS workspaces? IAM rules, SSO, etc, gets you a long way there I would imagine?

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#106

Post by beebeepka »

iopq wrote: post #91
kaesar14 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% - people cared about browser performance and usability until Firefox and Chrome solved 99% of the problems users would ever face (tabbing, consistent rendering, security, beauty(!)) and now it’s a market that’s immune to change.

Wait until adblockers stop working, and see many people start seeing YouTube ads again. Will they agree to stay on Chrome?

My only use for chromium is youtube. I only watch a handful of channels but things are getting ridiculous. Sometimes I get ads every minute. Every minute! Just the other day I got served 5 ads in a row after a simple fast forward. I gave up TV more than 20 years ago and this crap is way worse.

What can I do without letting them in my actual browser? These people are crazy.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#107

Post by hollerith »

baxtr wrote: post #61
talhof8 wrote: post #39

I don't think it's M1 that killed it. Probably high server costs and being a vitamin and not a painkiller killed it. Also, people are not too happy about giving away their browser history data to server-side powered browsers. That being said, it's still sad to see startups fail. Hopefully they'll have better luck with their new direction. Fingers crossed!

I love the vitamin vs painkiller discussion. The basic premise is: don’t build a vitamin, build a painkiller because it’s solves a real problem and people will be willing to pay for it. First of all the analogy fails in the real world. The vitamin market is huge. People pay lots of money to buy vitamins. Second, the transition is not clear. It’s hard to draw a line line and say now this vitamin turned into a painkill…

>I believe almost no product is a real painkiller.

Heroin is.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#108

Post by ohgodplsno »

yrgulation wrote: post #55
nisten wrote: post #29

I think it really was the M1 Chip that killed Mighty. The product itself looked like it was working great. Before the value proposition was good. You can still use your old laptop and still have a very fast browser experience via remotely running it on a AMD server chip, this way you save on battery life and RAM too. Then M1 speedometer scores started beating AMD Epyc on single core web browsing performance. Not only…

> Then yeah there was no point paying $20-$30 a month for a remote browser instance. Sorry what? There are people that even considered this?

Not only that, but there are clowns that seriously called it the future of computing (suhail included).

Reselling Hetzner instances and locking access to Chromium, brought to you by the finest VC backed startups.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#109

Post by ec109685 »

robenkleene wrote: post #30

The trick of Figma claims another. I see Mighty as part of the broader trend of folks thinking Figma it the leading edge of a wider transition to web apps across all creative work. But all forms of coding and media editing (the main tasks that are truly CPU/GPU-bound, the area where something like Mighty would help) have remained as local desktop app affairs. I think what really happened is folks misinterpreted the s…

All the heavy lifting of figma happens on your local computer. The delta between doing that in a browser in a native app is only shrinking over time.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#110

Post by fragmede »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #81
obblekk wrote: post #57

Props to Suhail for building in the open (takes a lot of rejection tolerance) and being so honest about the path. That said, I work with lawyers as customers and I suspect there was an adjacent market in data privacy that a hosted browser would have had PM fit for. A lot of industries have strict legal requirements on controlling employee access to data (think healthcare, legal, compliance). In these cases, SaaS beco…

> The standard solution is to limit the webapp to be accessible on VPN, and limit VPN to be accessible on MDM controlled devices, and limit MDM to be accessible on company owned devices. Didn't the "BeyondCorp" zero trust model pretty much kill that, or at least show there was a better way to restricting access to secure apps than a VPN?

Yeah you're right that there is that, but most of the world still runs on the VPN model.
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