Mighty's Plan To Reignite the Future of Desktop Computing (mightyapp.com) 219
New submitter oblom writes about Mighty, a new approach to web browsing: In short, server-side web navigation, with client-side rendering. Per Y Combinator founder Paul Graham: "Usually when people talk about grand things like changing "the future of computing," they're full of it. But not this time. Suhail [founder of Mighty] has been working on this for 2 years. There's a good chance it's the new default infrastructure. Suhail writes in a blog post: After 2 years of hard work, we've created something that's indistinguishable from a Google Chrome that runs at 4K, 60 frames a second, takes no more than 500 MB of RAM, and often less than 30% CPU with 50+ tabs open. This is the first step in making a new kind of computer. [...] When you switch to Mighty, it will feel like you went out and bought a new computer with a much faster processor and much more memory. But you don't have [to] buy a new computer. All you have to do is download a desktop app.
To make Mighty work, we had to solve a lot of complex engineering problems, including designing a custom server to keep costs low, building a custom low-latency networking protocol, forking Chromium to integrate directly with various low-level render/encoder pipelines, and making the software interoperate with a long list of macOS features. We are working hard at ramping up server capacity across the world as we roll it out to users. You might be thinking: "Yeah but what about the lag?" Lag would have been a real problem 5 years ago, but new advances since then have allowed us to eliminate nearly all of it: 5 Ghz WiFi bands, H.265 hardware-accelerated low-latency encoders, widespread 100 Mbps Internet, and cheaper, more powerful GPUs. We also designed a new low-latency network protocol, and we locate servers as close to users geographically as possible. As a result, a user with 100 Mbps internet will rarely notice lag while using Mighty. Watch this demo video and see for yourself.
To make Mighty work, we had to solve a lot of complex engineering problems, including designing a custom server to keep costs low, building a custom low-latency networking protocol, forking Chromium to integrate directly with various low-level render/encoder pipelines, and making the software interoperate with a long list of macOS features. We are working hard at ramping up server capacity across the world as we roll it out to users. You might be thinking: "Yeah but what about the lag?" Lag would have been a real problem 5 years ago, but new advances since then have allowed us to eliminate nearly all of it: 5 Ghz WiFi bands, H.265 hardware-accelerated low-latency encoders, widespread 100 Mbps Internet, and cheaper, more powerful GPUs. We also designed a new low-latency network protocol, and we locate servers as close to users geographically as possible. As a result, a user with 100 Mbps internet will rarely notice lag while using Mighty. Watch this demo video and see for yourself.
That sounds safe... (Score:5, Insightful)
...lets use a remote system to handle all the browsing, authentication, accessing of sensitive information, etc and just render the results locally...
Nope... fuck that.
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Re:That sounds safe... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup, sure, a cloud browser. That way I'll not even know if I've been censored, if my content has been censored, if I've been steered to what the cloud approves of, won't even suspect nothin.
Nope, thanks but no, I want more on my machine, not less. As in control. I do not wish to cede any more control than already lost.
And you can be sure my server would need more resources to accomplish this - if my site became the least bit popular, it might overwhelm my resources, force it onto some capable platform, and well, then it's not really mine any more.
Nope. And no thanks. Let this be an edge case.
Re:That sounds safe... (Score:5, Insightful)
Tick/tock. This is just our semi-decennial flip flop between the future being a local computer and back to thin client.
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Exactly. It's like the 'Personal Computer' revolution never happened. Ever since people were able to own their own computers, and they got powerful, there has been a counter-revolution to push server/terminal computing. My opinion about that was well expressed by the first comment.
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Re:That sounds safe... (Score:5, Insightful)
Thin clients etc. make sense in big companies with 10k's of computer workers, where you want to separate and isolate mail and office, from the actual work. It helps IT to focus on either "operations" and "office" needs.
Some companies exaggerate that idea, but from their standpoint it often makes sense.
However that a private person "needs" a super computer in the cloud and a "thin client" at home or en route to access it: that makes no sense.
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Not really-- this solution is even weirder. We've already been moving toward a "thin client" solution with everything running in web browsers, which actually runs a web application on the server. That's already a push toward the "thin client" model.
This then takes that and runs the browser on the sever, and streams the output locally. So it's like saying, "What if we emulate the thing client on the server too, and try to make a thinner client that just connects to the emulated thin client, which then co
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Came here to say exactly that. There is something simple yet magical about locally-executed software that the new-age hip devs seems to forget: control. By that I mean the ability to run several browsers in different containers. Being able to save, backup and restore these environments. Being able to manage online identities. Being able to experiment with alternative browser engines.
But all of these are "power user features" today. It would be interesting to know how many people are logged into Google perm
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Agreed.
I could see it having some potential for accessing in-house corporate resources, e.g. in a hospital or R&D facility where locking down access to the resources is a primary concern.
As a general-purpose technology for home users? Not a chance. *Especially* not when talking about giving the front-end direct access to low-level services that typically present huge, poorly-secured attack surfaces. There's a very good reason web browsers have been moving towards more and more secure sandboxing of we
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Corporations - for security. (Score:2)
This is already happening in corporations. Securing corporate computers, especially for remote work, is an uphill battle. Corporations see server-side rendering of the browser as a security feature. In that aspect makes sense, as there is already no privacy on a company-owned computer.
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Even more: what has a web browser actually to do with "desktop computing".
While the web is important "information at your finger tips" - a huge deal of my work is in fact "desktop computing", and not browsing the web.
A solution looking for a problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A solution looking for a problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
If I understand this correctly, there are two markets. One would be users which low end computers. The modern browser is wicked stressful on computers. People want to do more with less.
The other is parents. It will be much harder for kids to hide activity if nothing is local. This could be a very profitable subscription service.
Re:A solution looking for a problem? (Score:4, Interesting)
The main adopters will be organizations that want to extend EOL of existing hardware or convert CapEx into OpEx. Think call-centers with cheap hardware.
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When my place of work experiences a downturn, cutting capex is laughable - it's already such a small portion of the budget that we could liquidate the buildings and
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Annual budget constraints could be the selling point.
Re:A solution looking for a problem? (Score:4, Insightful)
We ALREADY have this though, they're call VDIs, or Virtual Desktops. Citrix, VMware, Microsoft, and others have already been doing that for over a decade, where the local machine is just a dumb terminal, and all compute happens on a server either locally, in a DC, or in the cloud. This new "Browser as a Service" is the same thing, but dumbed down to just a single application, while possibly costing companies more money. It makes zero sense.
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I was so tickled in the late 1990s when the salesmen came by and told management how much easier it would be if we bought a central server with ERP software and just have all the expensive PCs that we bought run it remotely. At that time I had a RAD app hitting a central database thing. But dumb terminals have made a comeback.
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You think 'they' would show anything kids were doing to parents? As in 'just what they want to'...
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Rendering is done locally. It would have to be secure otherwise you would need to trust them with your banking or other personal information. What would stop kids from accessing content through an encrypted third party? The same security that hides your personal information would also apply to the kids. Otherwise it's exactly what we have today with the added cost of a subscription..
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Rendering is done remotely. They specifically advertise "our nVidia GPUs".
Re:A solution looking for a problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
The modern browser is wicked stressful on computers.
TL;DR: We are doing it wrong.
This is because:
Web pages are now the size of entire operating systems.
We are asking web browsers to everything an operating system does on top of an operating system.
We are using web browsers to do things that should be done with other applications.
We are using a stateless protocol to do tasks that require states.
We are doing things that require high security in an inherently insecure environment with an inherently insecure protocol requiring bolt-on extensions.
We are doing it wrong.
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And who all has internet speeds THAT fast?
I know some do, but it isn't that common, is it?
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So, where are you?
I guess I'm a bit outta touch, I've had the same grandfathered business account for well before Katrina, and they have actually upped the speeds on it, but I generally get about 26Mbps down and 5-6 up for $69/mo.
That does give me a static IP and no blocked ports and a low level SLA....
So far, I've not found my speed wanting for any computer or media I want to watch.
But I guess I don't have much of an idea what's out there and how much on the consumer side.
Is t
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Internet only. No Static IP.
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1.5-8ish on a good day here for $66.
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In "third world countries" that installed fibre in the late 1990s, because before "they had no internet at all". It is very common. My internet in Thailand is on the Gbit range ... no idea how fast it is: as it is faster than the wifi hotspots wifi.
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So...where is "here"?
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nobody needs 50 tabs open.
You clearly haven't met my wife.
Anyway, while I largely agree with your sentiment about a missing target demography, it is not your call to specify other people's use cases.
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Right now Brave has 30 processes running. For 10 tabs. Is Chrome more efficient?
Since I'm all Windows, I'm sure Safari and all the *nix browsers are head and shoulders better.
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I could see this working fine in a local context, with one local machine doing the heavy lifting with satellite machines doing the browsing. It would make synchronizing things easier.
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Who is asking for this?
I too wonder who the target audience is. Yes, I know people with 20-40 tabs open but they're browsing stuff like Stack Overflow or Pinterest. I guess I should check just how busy Chrome is but most of those tabs are idle (or at least they ought to be since they're not visible).
If I'm doing something heavyweight, like working in Jira or Confluence, the lags aren't from the browser or network, they're lags on the app server. I don't see how Mighty addresses that. For that matter, I don't see how Mighty works
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I actually have 4 browsers open ... no idea about the amount of tabs, probably 800 or something.
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My computer use to drag when I had more than 7 or 8 tabs opened with the 8GB of RAM. Doubled it, and I can get into the 20 range before it is noticeable.
Win 10 Pro, Waterfox, i5-8350U.
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My main computer is a decade old, possibly more (has a Vista sticker on it), and is maxxed out with 4GB of RAM. I can have plenty of tabs open in Firefox. My secret? Noscript... Does wonders.
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Re: A solution looking for a problem? (Score:2)
This is (supposedly) how the mid 2010s Amazon tablets worked. I bought one back then and honestly couldn't tell the difference between normal browsing and accelerated browsing.
Now's a good time to remind folks about the "internet appliance" thin client gizmos some silly valley outfit was pushing like 25 years ago.
Same idea: why do processing locally when everything is just web based?
It ran into a bandwidth problem back in the dial up days, but also was a nonstarter for anyone who needed any serious computin
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Who is asking for this?
The company who developed the model (Mighty) along with the venture capitalists who gave them money (Y Combinator). They want access to both your money and to your personal information, so they can make additional money.
Oh, you mean who actually wants to be a paying customer of this new business? Beats me... my first thought is "nobody in their right mind".
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"nobody in their right mind" So, a good part of the American people who won't know the difference.
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Who is asking for this?
Corporate environments already use internet proxies. Creating a thin-client/proxy combination - which is exactly what this sounds like - isn't a terrible idea. Assuming that the corporation can own the server and only serve clients inside their network.
Anyone expecting to use this from home is mad.
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Who is asking for this? I guess it might make sense for bargain tablets with super slow CPUs, but they're talking about this for desktop PCs which just seems like a totally wrong market -- every PC sold has enough CPU and RAM to browse the web. Nobody should care what happens when you have 50 tabs open because nobody needs 50 tabs open.
You would be surprised on how many people I see with so many tabs open that the tab name is barely visible. I would say these are the same people with 50 shortcuts on their desktop. However I am more concerned with limiting resources that a tab can use. For example there are some websites that eat a lot of RAM as soon as they are open. Often these are the same ones that launch video ads upon opening.
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I need more than 50 tabs open ...
So do many.
The problem is: why does a simple html page need so much memory?
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50 tabs open in Chrome works just fine on my 10 year old PC I bought used for $150 a few years back.
If it gets slow, then now I have the option of paying an extra $40/mo for faster internet instead of $20 once for more RAM... yay?
Just an other form of a mainframe of old (Score:3, Insightful)
Lets just lock everybody into a service they have to pay forever. Adobe would be proud.
"50+ tabs open" then shows 3 tabs in video (Score:4, Interesting)
"Usually others ... are full of it". Next sentence: "Suhail has been working on this for 2 years. There's a good chance it's the new default infrastructure.".
Ha-bloody-ha, that's not how that works. At all.
It's the Return of the Undead Son of (Score:5, Insightful)
Client/Server Computing: Part IX: Which itself was a sequel to Mainframes With TTYs are the Future!
Re: It's the Return of the Undead Son of (Score:2)
Write^WMorse that to Frank!
Morse that to Frank!
This has to be paid advertising (Score:5, Interesting)
Somebody's getting a kickback for putting this on Slashdot.
The kickback is being paid by someone who obviously had no idea how stupid their idea is, nor how quickly it would get shredded here.
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1. Scouts honor I'm not affiliated with Mighty and not receiving any rewards for posting the story.
2. The reason this product is interesting is that it can help organizations control their hardware costs while converting CapEx into OpEx. Think call-centers.
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>The reason this product is interesting is that it can help organizations control their hardware costs while converting CapEx into OpEx.
I think Citrix and similar solutions already do this better.
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If only slashdot were that business savvy. They frequently slashvertise for free. It's easy to be excited by technology, but I draw the line at parroting elevator sales pitches of tech entrepreneurs. At lot of what goes on in this industry needs far more skeptical reporting than it gets.
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I marked this binspam the first time after reading their website and discovering that this is a security nightmare of a useless product.
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Slashdot moderators probably know posting obviously bad ideas get more comments and views then good ideas. They don't need a kickback for this.
What I can't explain is why any VCs funded this.
Streaming the web. (Score:2)
This is the browser version of Stadia.
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Or the browser version of Amazon's web browser Silk, which does the same thing.
Only they did it because passively cooled tablets lacked the horsepower in 2011 to have a decent experience. Don't know why you'd think you'd need it in a desktop. Even a modern phone is perfectly capable of keeping up with browsing without adding yet another middle man..
Re: Streaming the web. (Score:2)
Now watch people install Stadia *on* it.
Ory even "betterer": Amazon "cloud" Mighty running a VM running Chrome/-ium running webStadia running Minecraft running a single 6502 CPU simulation.
No, wait! Hear me out: ... web...Mighty! ...
Sounds familiar (Score:5, Informative)
Did someone "discover" the thin client fat server model again? Like we haven't seen dumb terminals, X terminals, and thin clients before.
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No, they spent two years building trash.
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Well except all three plus the network have grown up in thirty years time.
Appropriate name (Score:5, Funny)
Y Combinator
Indeed. Y?
Why would I basically make an X-terminal connection to a server I do not explicitly trust and let that spy on everything I browse for?
Oh, snap! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Well just how much control do we all have over servers that aren't ours? e.g. Slashdot, etc.
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I can choose not to render or download parts of Slashdot I don't like. I block most scripts, for example.
It's much harder to do that when my computer is reduced to bitblitting terminal.
Client server? (Score:2)
Did they just invent the client server model?
Who will pay (Score:2)
Who will pay for the server infrastructure? How? I have a guess and I don't like it.
Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Usually when people say ""Usually when people talk about grand things like changing "the future of computing," they're full of it. But not this time." they're full of it.
Finally! (Score:2)
A dumb client for people who have gigahertz wireless and 100mbps up/down but who don't have $200 for a basic refurbished desktop and also want MacOS compatibility (...!?)
RDP/ICA? (Score:2)
if you want to pay (Score:2)
> But you don't have [to] buy a new computer. All you have to do is download a desktop app
Not exactly, you need to install and app and pay $30-$50/month. So you rent a computer in the cloud and it can only do web browsing. Plus you lose control and privacy. If you want this why wouldn't you want your entire desktop on that 'fast' cloud computer with your entire UI just a thin client?
No way I'm paying for that.
Price? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh I know (Score:2)
Not fix the underlining issues with modern browsers and doesn't correct terrible web design.
VT100 for the 21st century (Score:4, Insightful)
This sounds like a re-invention of the DEC VT100. The VT100 has a nice screen and a CPU powerful enough to display and update text without flickering. It accepts commands to update the screen from the connected PDP-11 or VAX, which can run many applications, one for each VT100. The VT100, with its predecessor the VT52 and its successors such as the VT220, are the "glass teletypes" of the late 20th century.
Old School (Score:4, Informative)
something that's indistinguishable from a Google Chrome that runs at 4K, 60 frames a second, takes no more than 500 MB of RAM, and often less than 30% CPU with 50+ tabs open.
Netscape 1.0?
This is no future for Desktop Computing. (Score:3)
Having turned your Desktop PC into a modern version of a dumb terminal, isn't a good sign for the future of desktop computing.
The future of Desktop Computing, is and always has been, having tasks that you needed to run remotely run on your Desktop PC.
In the 1980's when Desktop PC's became common for businesses, they slowly got applications built on them, that replaced jobs that were done on a mainframe via a dumb terminal. This took us off the Expensive mainframe, which needed to be overpowered to handle hundreds of users at once, with the PC's with fast enough processors are running the application for each user. Where the user didn't need to connect to the mainframe, and a various forms of offline syncing were done too, that you can do over a temporary connection with a modem.
This expanded until the 2000's where HTML4 and Javascript started to become good enough to handle most Application requirements so the Apps were moved to the cloud. Having an other cloud app, isn't pushing the future of desktop computing, but just putting an other nail in it.
100 Mbps internet!! (Score:2)
As a result, a user with 100 Mbps internet will rarely notice lag while using Mighty
100 Mbps internet .. Hahahahahahahahahaha
You might as well state that you need pixie dust or unicorn horns as part of your requirements.
Useless (Score:2)
Faster / more efficient / higher quality always wins out, right? Look how Betamax beat VHS. Blu ray beat streaming. OS/2 beat Win95. Digital cameras beat cell phones. Oops.
Modern web is way past "good enough". 5ms latency instead of 500ms, who cares? Machine gets a little slow from browser load, put more RAM in the sucker. Much cheaper to throw hardware at the problem than develop a completely new "optimized" software stack full of bugs, security holes, unknown failure modes, lack of documentati
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The biggest deterrent for Blu-Rays is the fact that they are more expensive.
Digital Cameras still win out on the high end. My mothers digital camera takes better pictures than her new iPhone does.
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Where's my ad blocker? (Score:2)
The dumb dumb terminal (Score:2)
This is so dumb and so wasteful I almost feel sorry for Mighty's investors.
I can see this kind of thing... (Score:2)
...being very popular in authoritarian countries. I'm betting it'll be a huge hit in places like China, or North Korea, or Myanmar.
Thin clients (Score:3)
Could have saved a few paragraphs.
This has been tried since the 70s.
I don't see anything new here.
Marketing Shite (Score:2)
So its usless then? (Score:3)
a user with 100 Mbps internet will rarely notice lag while using Mighty.
I mean 100Mbps! shit what was the point again. It would be way cheaper to just beef up your PC such that it can run chrome decently for most people. Alright, alright a lot of cable modems etc do offer 400+ Mbps plans now and if you live in the right in the right place you can get gig fiber. Still you will quickly over subscribe trunks on corporate networks, and slam wifi in those dense neighborhoods (where the gig fiber is mosty) even 5Ghz.
A huge portion of the US can get anything near 100Mbps service to the home affordably. Even if you have one of those high speed connections its probably metered and you actually will hit that TB/month of transfer if this thing really needs a pipes this large. It would completely saturate a Starlink uplink..
All so you can run a frigging browser? The level of stupid and wasteful here is epic.
Re: So its usless then? (Score:2)
Why do we have such shit Internet when some poor bozo over in a Russian city does 50MB/s, that is mega*bytes*, like it's not even special?
What are we then? The third world?
We should be at 10Gb/s fiber right to the mainboard by now!
Centralising of computing = doomed humanity (Score:2)
From a place where there was no informational limits computing has turned into a cage of control and forcefed bullshit.
I do not like the way IT has evolved into a mass surveillance and control system.
The only answer to the threat it poses to humanity is to decentralise.
Re: Centralising of computing = doomed humanity (Score:2)
And to anyone who yells "You have a choice!"...Please do tell us how you can still choose a modular pocket PC for a realistic price... --.--
If the morons do it out of laziness and not thinking about the dependency they get themselves into, dead PC sales will kill any chance to still buy a decently-priced regular PC that can still do anything on its own.
Another question: (Score:2)
Why does a video player need 500 MB of memory?
mplayer, even with all its bazillion codecs and bells and whistles, takes less then a tenth of that.
I bet if you cut it down to just using the OS's existing video/audio player, and SDL input, you could do it in less than a page of bash code. (The hardest part would be a serializer for input events coming from SDL. But I guess piping /dev/input/* data back and forth through some compression, and a filter for $bazillion Hz mice, could do it too.)
How is this desktop computing? (Score:2)
Niche use case at best. (Score:3)
Won't fly. These guys have been solving exactly the wrong problems.
They should've spent those two years working on a compelling way to surf the web offline, like an improvement on a new IPFS based web with an independent, free and blockchain determined nameservice, a complete cleanup of HTML and CSS along with some solid turing complete resolution independent runtime for the client. Sort of like Flutter an Dart but with 10x time-to-market for GUI apps built with it. And perhaps some default encrypted and signed replacement for that ancient protocol called E-Mail. ...
Seriously, there are countless things about the contemporary web that could use some serious improving and they teach a memory hog of a browser to emphasize all the bad habits and run it on its very own remote service exclusively for clients? ... Y-Combinator are cool guys and Paul Graham is a really smart dude and I love his insights, but I'm fairly certain he's wrong on this one.