Mighty

» see mightyapp.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Mighty was a web browser you did not run. It ran in a data center, on a sixteen-core machine with as much as 32GB of memory held open for your session, and what arrived on your laptop was a video stream of a Chromium window. You typed, the keystrokes went to the server, the server rendered, the picture came back. The claim was that this would feel faster than Chrome on your own hardware, because the hardware at the other end was so much bigger.

Suhail Doshi started it in 2019. He had co-founded Mixpanel a decade earlier after dropping out of Arizona State, and he came to the browser with a diagnosis most people did not share: the web had quietly outgrown consumer laptops, and the fix was to stop asking them to do the work. The company spent roughly two years building before it sold anything. Public launch was April 2021, at thirty-five dollars a month.

The customers it found were the ones the diagnosis fit. People with hundreds of tabs open. People running Figma and Google Drive all day on a four-year-old machine that answered by spinning its fan. For a stretch it delivered on the promise. Battery life improved because the laptop was decoding video instead of executing JavaScript, and tabs survived across sessions because they had never been on your computer to begin with.

On Sunday 13 November 2022, Doshi posted that he had decided to stop working on Mighty, three and a half years in, and offered the intellectual property to anyone who wanted it. The same post said the team would begin that week on creative tools built with AI. That became Playground AI, which is where mightyapp.com sends you today.

~ the record ~

~ the subscription was a map ~

The thing Mighty sold was not software. It was proximity to a data center. Every frame of your browsing had to leave your machine, cross a network, get drawn somewhere else and come back inside the time your eye would forgive, and the single variable governing whether that felt good was the distance to the server.

Mighty ran its machines in the United States and sold to people sitting near them. Measured from Ankara the same session becomes an ocean crossing per keystroke, and there is no degraded mode to fall back to here: a browser running slightly behind Chrome has lost its only argument, and the thirty-five dollars a month keeps coming out regardless. Most American software of that period reached Turkey late or expensively. This was something else, a product whose value was a function of latitude and longitude, and geography disqualified me before the price ever came up.

~ why it could not get faster ~

The engineering retrospective one of its own developers published two days after the announcement is unusually blunt about where it broke. Audio streaming, file downloads, scrolling and VPN support each turned out to need a disproportionate amount of work. There were networking stutters and stability problems, and the app never got webcam support, which quietly disqualified it from a video call. Push Mighty hard enough and it would end up slower than the Chrome it was replacing.

Underneath all of that sat a ceiling nobody could engineer around. Most of what makes the web feel slow is bound by single-core JavaScript performance, and sixteen cores do not help with that. Doshi said afterward that the team could reliably make things about twice as good and never got to the five or ten times that would have justified the subscription. Meanwhile the floor kept rising: Apple's M1 made ordinary laptops much better at exactly the work Mighty was charging to take away.

~ what the numbers said at the end ~

Mighty's own data undercut part of its pitch too. The 32GB tier was the headline, and more than nine in ten users never went past sixteen. The team had built something that genuinely worked, and the honest reading of November 2022 is that Doshi ran the numbers on how much better it could ever get and declined to keep selling the gap.

The domain still resolves. It carries you to Playground AI, the image-generation company the same team started the week Mighty stopped, and there is nothing on the other side to tell you that a browser used to live there.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »