WTF?! Whenever we find our computers struggling to run apps, games, or the odd RAM-hungry web browser, the usual solution is to upgrade to a beefier machine. A new startup called Mighty proposes a bizarre alternative -- a spider web browser that lives on a powerful server in the cloud, for "but" $30 per month.

If you're reading this commodity, chances are that you're doing then from a Chromium-based browser, either Google Chrome or the new Microsoft Edge. These two browsers have a combined market share of over 75 percentage, with Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and others taking smaller slices of the remaining share.

Heavy browser users amongst united states may have noticed that a lot of endeavour has gone into making significant operation enhancements to browsers — it'south been a never-ending bike for the by two decades, actually — from using fewer CPU cycles to reducing their ambition for RAM and suspending tabs yous're not actively using. On mobile, browser developers have offered information saving features for a while at present, to conserve precious cellular information on limited plans and to make the feel of loading websites faster.

We've heard about running instances of entire operating systems or CPU-intensive applications in the cloud, and well-nigh recently, cloud gaming on its diverse presentations has the ambitious goal of letting you playing triple-A games without the need of much local graphics power. Now Mighty wants to practice the same for the regular spider web browser.

For the past two years, Mighty has been working on a solution for streaming a Chromium-based browser from a powerful server in the cloud to an app that has a much lower footprint on your computer than Chrome has, especially after you open a few dozen tabs. To that end, the visitor has forked Chromium to "integrate direct with diverse depression-level render/encoder pipelines," and built a networking protocol to make interactions with the new browser experience the same equally using a powerful workstation with a gigabit connexion to the Internet.

Initially, Mighty wanted to stream Windows, but pivoted to streaming just the spider web browser once they realized that users spend well-nigh of their time there. Furthermore, that approach would take emulated services similar Shadow, and Mighty founder Suhail Doshi believes that to exercise both was unsustainable from a business standpoint.

Suhail notes that "most people want an experience where the underlying OS and the application (the browser) interoperate seamlessly versus having to tame ii desktop experiences," and that's also why Mighty is designed to integrate well with the operating organisation. As of writing, Mighty is simply available for macOS, with no word on when it'll be Windows or Linux'south turn.

Currently, a Mighty browser case runs on sixteen vCPUs on a server with dual Intel Xeon CPUs and Nvidia GPUs. Mighty's pitch is that can ever modify in the future if your needs abound over fourth dimension, without you having to upgrade your automobile to tap into that additional power (for a browser?). The flip side, nevertheless, is that Mighty costs $30 per month, so if yous typically upgrade your motorcar every four years, that'south $1440 yous've spent elsewhere.

There are other caveats that will immediately hit the skeptical eye. For one, Mighty requires a 100 Mbps Internet connection to experience as snappy as promised -- faster than any browser on a typical laptop or desktop. And while Mighty promises to encrypt your keystrokes and never sell your browsing data to third parties, information technology will be difficult to earn trust on that front end in a world where big tech companies with deep pockets have difficulties preventing data leaks and sometimes won't even take responsibleness for them.

Lastly, Mighty works by streaming 4K, 60 fps video to your device, which is an incredible waste product of bandwidth. Knowing all this, it's hard to recommend a deject solution when there are alternatives in the works like Cloudflare'southward Browser Isolation, which is actually designed with security in listen and works past sandboxing your browser session and sending only the final output of a browser's spider web page rendering.