Mighty Streams A Chromium-Based Web Browser To Your macOS
From an age of apps, we seem to now be living in an age of streaming. Spotify and Netflix popularized and conquered the music and video streaming markets, respectively, and the likes of Google Stadia and Amazon Luna are competing for the game streaming space. Now a startup is trying to start a trend that aims to address one of the biggest annoyances among computer users. Mighty wants to make Chrome faster but it is doing so by not making Chrome run on your computer at all.
The idea of relocating the heavy processing to a remote and more powerful computer isn't exactly new. Thin clients and "dumb terminals" have been around for decades but most of those revolve around non-graphical text-based interfaces like command lines and terminals. They definitely don't fit most people's idea of "streaming", at least in the visual sense.
That said, that is exactly what Mighty wants to turn Macs into as far as web browsing is concerned. The idea is pretty simple and mostly uses existing technologies and strategies, particularly those used in VPS or Virtual Private Server setups. Each browser instance, the startup says, has access to 16 vCPUs running on dual Intel Xeon processors, 16GB of RAM, and NVIDIA GPUs.
The effect is that you no longer have to be limited by your own Mac's hardware and can have as many tabs opened as you'd like without worrying about memory or even battery life. You can also start using more graphics-intensive web apps even if your Mac doesn't even have a dedicated graphics card. That sounds almost too good to be true and naturally comes with a few caveats just like game streaming.
The bottleneck in this situation will be, of course, your Internet connection but Mighty is boasting of innovations that can reduce the bandwidth down to more bearable levels. There might, however, be some security concerns when it comes to logging into sensitive accounts on a computer somewhere in the world that you don't own, not to mention the possibility of those keystrokes being intercepted along the way. Lastly, Mighty is a modified Chromium browser, not Chrome itself, and might have some compatibility issues or missing features that Google has decided not to make available on the open source foundations of its own browser.