Mighty Retrospective

#1

Post by drewbent » Thu, Nov 17, 2022, 8:43 PM UTC

Mighty Retrospective
blog.chaselambda.com

Re: Mighty Retrospective

#2

Post by samwillis » Thu, Nov 17, 2022, 9:40 PM UTC

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.

Re: Mighty Retrospective

#3

Post by asadlionpk » Thu, Nov 17, 2022, 9:41 PM UTC

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.

Re: Mighty Retrospective

#4

Post by nickdothutton » Thu, Nov 17, 2022, 9:43 PM UTC

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.

Re: Mighty Retrospective

#5

Post by dhoe » Thu, Nov 17, 2022, 9:46 PM UTC

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.

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

Re: Mighty Retrospective

#6

Post by samwillis » Thu, Nov 17, 2022, 9:51 PM UTC

dhoe wrote: post #5

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.

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?

Re: Mighty Retrospective

#7

Post by gruez » Thu, Nov 17, 2022, 9:53 PM UTC

>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?

Re: Mighty Retrospective

#8

Post by mwcampbell » Thu, Nov 17, 2022, 9:54 PM UTC

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.

Re: Mighty Retrospective

#9

Post by ghostly_s » Thu, Nov 17, 2022, 10:01 PM UTC

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?

Re: Mighty Retrospective

#10

Post by GMoromisato » Thu, Nov 17, 2022, 10:02 PM UTC

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.

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 be written as a cloud app. (Obligatory self-promotion: that's what we're trying to do with https://gridwhale.com)