Ask HN: What Happened to Mighty App?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31768643

by night-rider • 4 years ago

15 15 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

We were promised this[0] about a year ago but it still hasn’t been released. It’s a cloud browser that does all the heavy lifting remotely so we don’t have to have resource hogging apps installed on our on-prem devices. What happened to it?

[0] https://www.mightyapp.com/

muttantt• 4 years ago

https://twitter.com/Suhail still working on it

cabirum• 4 years ago

It's insane to even consider using a browser running on somebody else's server. Would you trust them passwords and credit card details? How inefficient is running multiple browsers in one point of failure and streaming a video(?) of it over the net.

night-rider• 4 years ago

I thought of the privacy implications too, but I wouldn’t do anything sensitive on this like enter CC details. An on-prem browser would still be useful for more sensitive/NSFW stuff. I think Mighty caters to the tab-hoarding crowd who notice their computer fans whirring during casual surfing. I never hoard tabs and can’t understand why people do that. If something is interesting I have a bookmarklet that posts a URL to Pinboard and call it a day, and close the tab.

shreyshnaccount• 4 years ago

I tab hoard, but I use a side panel (sidebarly) on Firefox with a tab suspender, and use a second, extremely light browser (gnome web) for quick searches. Its a system that works brilliantly. For me.

Komodai• 4 years ago

I'd love a 'remote browser' if I could host it on one of my own servers, would help offload 15-30gb of ram usage from my main workstation. Unfortunately I know of no good software for that.

clintonwoo• 4 years ago

To be fair I'd say this product caters to the corporate crowd (in my opinion) so it's not much of a concern why any regular person would want to use it. I don't think it's very reasonable to say that your average person will want to pay a subscription fee in perpetuity just to browse the web.

solumos• 4 years ago

I was an early user for about 6 months before the M1 was launched. Pretty great product IF you don't want to buy the latest Apple hardware and you work in the browser a lot.

They're still working on it, and growing the user base.

darrelld• 4 years ago

I don't get the use case for this. Are browsers really that slow?

I have an old 2013 macbook air with 16GB ram and it still surfs the net silky smooth.

I have a desktop I built back in 2015 with an i7 and 32 GB ram that I'm using right now and it's been fine for everything including Adobe products, and especially for browsing the web.

More than anything loading ads slow down my browsing experience, not the machine itself.

kojeovo• 4 years ago

I wonder how close our definitions of silky smooth are. My 2015 pro w. 16gb did not surf the net silky smooth. My 2020 air with 8gb does.

suhail• 4 years ago

Big announcements soon.

We're delayed by the chip shortage and are expecting 34 huge servers to land around ~mid-July but they've been delayed since April. Right now we've only got 1/3 of our capacity available which isn't a whole lot.

maxique• 4 years ago

Interesting security page (https://www.mightyapp.com/security) that promises everything whilst proving nothing... you'd have thought they could've at least had a pentest by now?

How do I have guarantees that Mighty isn’t going to do anything it shouldn’t?
We believe that the people who use our service expect us to protect their information and their right to privacy as our top priority. We commit to keeping your browser history private, your logged in identity secure, and your information under your control. Let us be clear: your data will never be sold. We recognize that we earn our trust with you every day and that won’t be easy.

vrtcn• 4 years ago

IMO, this is a product for five years ago, when sites like figma were beyond the capabilities of most machines. Looking five years ahead, most of their potential users (higher income or working at companies able to afford the subscription fee) will have moved on to M-series machines from Apple. Intel and AMD will probably also have catched up far enough to be able to efficiently handle most use cases, for companies that cant or dont want to switch to macOS.

Honestly, as much as I admire the energy of their founder, I think this product should have never gone far past the idea phase with Apple experts like Rene Ritchie having predicted the integration and performance benefits of Apple Silicon since the first rumors came up many years ago.

aaaaaaaaata• 4 years ago

What if I'm not only running Figma, but also a video editor webapp, + MS Teams/Slack, etc etc

I believe the everything as a SaaS trend continues (especially for corporate work environments, which shouldn't be tied to hardware!), and their idea is very sound.

vimy• 4 years ago

I think the current product is too niche but the tech is nice so I expect some kind of pivot in the future.

DantesKite• 4 years ago

I imagine all the semi-conductor chip shortages likely played an integral role in the delay. It's been an odd year.

Ask HN: What Happened to Mighty App?

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