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Mighty Retrospective

blog.chaselambda.com

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Re: Mighty Retrospective

#21

Post by jemmyw »

jamiek88 wrote: post #14
yamtaddle wrote: post #12

> 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…

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.

The tab groups extension for Chrome works well for automating moving tabs to the correct group. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-groups-extensi...

Re: Mighty Retrospective

#22

Post by dhoe »

samwillis wrote: post #6
dhoe wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess when it launched was (maybe too cynically) that it's the 100% complete visibility of user behavior.

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 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?

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.

Re: Mighty Retrospective

#23

Post by GMoromisato »

jamiek88 wrote: post #17
GMoromisato wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... 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 b…

Hmmm. Interesting. Would the UI be local and compute remote in this paradigm? And how is that different from the old thin client model? just read your site, and I’m thinking of this as more like a super massive global mainframe?

Yes, that's exactly it. Local UI (initially in the browser, but could be on a rich-client or mobile app) but all compute is in the cloud.

The difference from existing thin-client models is that it's a single stack: When you write a program, you write the UI code as if on a local computer. E.g., you just call MessageBox("Hi, there") and the platform is responsible for remoting that as appropriate.

"A super massive global mainframe" is the correct analogy, but instead of a text-mode VT100 terminal, you get a full remote GUI (more like X Windows).

Re: Mighty Retrospective

#24

Post by [deleted] »

asadlionpk wrote: post #3

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.

[deleted]

Re: Mighty Retrospective

#25

Post by mmcclure »

yamtaddle wrote: post #12

> 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…

Others mentioned Chrome doing this, but it never really seemed to work reliably for me.

This actually came up in a thread the other day, so feels weird to be talking about it again, but I've been playing with Arc[1] lately. Took me a while to get used to how they treat tabs (almost more like bookmarks) but I've enjoyed it. Squirrel the ones I want to truly keep around into folders ("To Review", "Some Project"), but all the randomly opened tabs automatically get closed after a specified time period (default 24 hours, I have mine set to a week). When I hit cmd+t I can _reasonably_ often get to the right tab I've already got open.

I have a feeling the honeymoon will end when they start trying to figure out a monetization strategy, but so far I'm rooting for them.

[1] https://arc.net/

Re: Mighty Retrospective

#26

Post by yamtaddle »

jamiek88 wrote: post #14
yamtaddle wrote: post #12

> 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…

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.

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.

Re: Mighty Retrospective

#27

Post by fleddr »

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!?

Re: Mighty Retrospective

#28

Post by samwillis »

ghostly_s wrote: post #9
samwillis wrote: post #2

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…

Industry has been using Citrix in that problem space for nearly a decade. What does Mighty bring to the table?

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.

Re: Mighty Retrospective

#29

Post by [deleted] »

gruez wrote: post #7

>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]

Re: Mighty Retrospective

#30

Post by lxe »

> 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.

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