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I decided to stop working on Mighty

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Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#271

Post by ignoramous »

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…

> I think it really was the M1 Chip that killed Mighty.

Mighty is only dead because Suhail wanted to pursue what they clearly think is a bigger opportunity [0]. Mighty is already building its own GPU servers, might as well put them to use for AI as the perf and the size of AI models is roughly on an exponential trajectory [1]. It may not be long before AGI is within vicinity [2].

Though I agree a better strategy wouldn't be to accelerate the browser (akin to boiling an ocean?), but instead take one app at a time and make it browser-native (like, Photoshop -> Figma). A similar concept to (I don't remember who said it), take tools hackers use and build it for the Internet (grep -> Google, sendmail -> Hotmail, emacs -> Replit, sftp -> Dropbox etc).

[0] AIs today can automate away humans on quite a few tasks, assist them on quite a few complex ones already. And still: models are getting only way more capable, not less.

[1] https://twitter.com/stephsmithio/status/1501729837366452224

[2] https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1590816470845771777

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#272

Post by Stention314 »

lkbm wrote: post #136
aniforprez wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really REALLY not sure how it makes sense to pay that much for a remote browser unless there's something I'm missing which I have to think is the case. What was the actual hook here? Surely a remote browser cannot have been worth it for 240-360 dollars a year? Wouldn't it have been more worth it to simply buy an M1 Mac or a Surface? How are people suffering from slow browsers that much?

> Wouldn't it have been more worth it to simply buy an M1 Mac or a Surface? Yes, probably, but I would note that a cheap M1 Mac is 4x the annual cost you cited for the browser, and if the browser is 95% of what you use a laptop for, getting the same perf boost for 25% the cost sounds like a good value prop. Granted, a laptop should last more than a year, but presumably it starts to show it's age in under four, wherea…

Then start to add all aspects: security, network delay, service downtime.

I think baas is bullshit for security reasons alone.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#273

Post by mhss »

fuckstick wrote: post #117
mhss wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Analogies always fall apart somewhere under scrutiny. This one is still useful though to compare. Vitamins are successful because there’s a lot of awareness and marketing (sometimes deceitful) about the benefits of vitamins. If you’re going to build a vitamin product be prepared to spend a lot in marketing and/or have a killer user experience with tangible results to be able to rely on word of mouth.

> Analogies always fall apart somewhere under scrutiny. Yeah but this one falls apart the moment you simply try to figure out what facet is trying to be conveyed. Just say what you fucking mean. The general painkiller > vitamin argument is generally bunk/false dichotomy - therefore you’re not saving any time with the analogy.

I never had heard this analogy before and understood it immediately. If it didn’t click with you that’s fine, that doesn’t mean is not useful.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#274

Post by IceWreck »

Cyberdog wrote: post #252
IceWreck wrote: post #119

Called it here back when it launched. Streaming video of a slightly more powerful browser in a browser (electron) never made sense to me. And the few people who really had that usecase could just use a lightweight container running chromium + guacamole on a nearby server. Okay I'm sure Mighty used cool tech to make it faster than just that (idk how it worked but maybe they were transmitting changed HTML) but at its c…

> Called it here back when it launched. Streaming video of a slightly more powerful browser in a browser (electron) never made sense to me. Wait, the client was an Electron app? Are you serious? If so, this just goes from a poorly-executed idea to an outright fraud.

From their description: We write code primarily in C++/JavaScript/TypeScript. Our application is a desktop Electron app where the front-end is in JS while the bits that need to be fast are written in C++.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#275

Post by ykl »

I think this piece from a few years ago about how difficult it is to build a startup around GPT-3 [1] is relevant to the AI art product they’re pivoting to. Best of luck to them, but the “build a product on top of open source AI models” space overwhelming favors the incumbents that actually are doing the cutting edge work in driving those models.

[1] https://www.allencheng.com/starting-a-business-around-gpt-3-...

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#276

Post by bagels »

shp0ngle wrote: post #151
bagels wrote: post #148

For those, like me who don't know what Mighty is: apparently a web browser that is faster. If that is the selling point, I can see why he quit working on it.

It’s a browser that runs remotely and renders the page remotely, and the user connects to it via Electron app. That was the selling point.

I don't think most people using browsers care how they work, so if that was the pitch, even worse.

This is from the home page, it just focuses on faster and more capable:

A new browser to work faster. Mighty is a new browser that loads pages faster, finds docs quickly, and remains snappy with hundreds of tabs to save you time and make you more productive at work.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#277

Post by ip26 »

svnt wrote: post #255
ip26 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea is predicated on economies of scale and low utilization rates typical of local hardware. The success of AWS and Azure show it can be done. (You do have to avoid replacing cheap commodity desktops with exotic bleeding edge servers, it’s hard to make up for that)

Which means that if Mighty survived the M1 it would have been dead anyway (probably in not more than a few months) by Azure and AWS offering it once Mighty proved the market.

Not exactly, if the market was small it wouldn’t be worth AWS’s time to provide a turnkey. Plenty of small operations provide services backed by AWS without getting eaten for that reason.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#278

Post by stephc_int13 »

leobg wrote: post #265
stephc_int13 wrote: post #166

Suhail blocked me on Twitter some time ago as I was a bit vocal in my opposition to the core idea behind this app. I think it was already dead at the time and the criticism got under his skin. I wish there was a way to make money by shorting bad ideas. I think I could easily fund a few companies by doing that on weekends.

It’s easy to do. Just tell the founder you’re willing to bet $10k that they will (define “fail” metric and time). Some will take you up on it. (Though I bet your won’t do it as often as you would have thought, now that your money is on the line. Pun intended.)

Not that easy. Most founders would not even take the offer seriously.

Then you have to choose/agree and pay some kind of arbitration.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#279

Post by modeless »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #67
modeless wrote: post #41

Looking at tweets like [1] it seems like their original bet was that server single core performance would dramatically outpace client single core performance. Honestly even if that had happened I still don't think their product would have made sense. The hosting cost and bandwidth/latency requirements would still have killed it. The death of this product is a good sign for computing overall. The more of computing tha…

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 think this is true in one sense and false in another.

It's true because users often don't complain about or even consciously notice poor performance. So if you are trying to sell a product, advertising performance benefits doesn't work well. People don't think they care (except in extreme cases).

But it's false because even moderate performance differences actually have enormous and easily measurable effects on user behavior. So if you care about providing value, then performance is one of the most important things, and it's consistently overlooked because it doesn't sell.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#280

Post by Nullabillity »

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…

> It would be a lot easier to just control the browser viewport and prevent data harvesting (essentially what Mighty was doing, focused on performance).

Not really, the client can still OCR whatever the browser viewport contains, even if the server just streams video.

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