I’m excited to try this out. The idea of cloud hosted browsers is not new, but this approach seems really promising. In this era of connectivity and cloud compute, it makes so much sense.
Whist and Mighty are similar in that they are browsers that offer cloud-offloading.
Whist differs by being built in a native browser on your computer, rather than being fully offloaded to the cloud, and supports both local and cloud tabs (so that you can adapt your workflow based on which web apps you are using, how strong your Internet is, etc.)
For more details on the exact differences with Mighty and with other browsers, we have a comparison chart on our website
The comparison is present on the website homepage. Check it out. It's a hybrid browser(supports local and remote tabs) as opposed to a cloud only browser
I like the alternative of treating tabs more like bookmarks better.
So instead of explicitly bookmarking a page, not closing a tab is the indicator that you may be more interested in this page in the future than any page you visited in the past. In the meantime, you don't think that having many bookmarks requires more RAM.
As for the faster load times, I can see the lure, but I think it's a sellout. I'd like to know the resource footprint and incentivize website makers to make websites possible to run on computers without cloud GPUs.
Other than the fact that this browser doesn't solve problems that I'd like to have, I think that more browsers is both necessary and good. While they may rely on Google's browser engine technology (Blink), having more front-end diversity surely contributes to a better browser market.
I only recently learned that people like to tab-hoard, hence addons like one-tab that collapses your tabs into a neat page for revisiting later. That’s just how people use their browser. They assume their machines can hold all those tabs in the background but are then shocked when their CPU fan whirs violently. Remember a browser is the most complex piece of software on your system apart from the OS and has to do many things simultaneously.
I use Auto Tab Discard [0], which offloads tabs after a period of time. They still show as normal tabs (with a "ZZZ" icon to indicate it's been discarded), and the website reloads when I switch to them.
When I open the browser after closing it, the session is restored with all but the current tab offloaded so it opens quickly and using very little resources.
My current session has tens of tabs, only a handful of them active. It uses about .5% CPU when idle, and less than 1Gb RAM.
What kind of privacy grantees does Whist make? Having more of the browser in the could could open up new opportunities for snooping either to sell data, or by state actors. Do you have a warrant canary?
The Whist privacy guarantee is that we've engineered our system so that no one, not even us, can see what's going on in your cloud tabs. We'll be releasing a blog post about how our system is engineered, stay tuned!
Privacy is also one of the reasons we've decided on the hybrid approach. Websites with sensitive information (your bank, etc.) can be used on local, incognito, or Tor tabs, all of which are not offloaded to Whist's servers and run 100% locally.
Potentially! We could make this happen, it probably wouldn't even be that much work. It's more of a question of whether enough people/companies would be interested in self-hosting, which is something we'll keep an eye out for
We'll look into it, our team cares heavily about privacy and if we judge that this is a valuable way to protect our users we will definitely implement it
Yeah, the kind of people that need high-performance productivity apps for their jobs but can't afford to upgrade to a $1000 M1 Macbook Air but will be able to spend what I assume will be more than $10 / month indefinitely /s
Bro I _have_ a $1000 M1 Macbook Air, and it's slow af when I browse the web. Constantly lags, freezes, runs out of RAM.
And that's a $1000 that I have to spend every few years, for just a mediocre experience (Since by the time it's 4-6 years old, it's virtually unusable for anything but the simplest of websites).
Maybe if people just wrote more HTML+JS rather than these big hefty "500kb of JS" React-based websites, this wouldn't be necessary. But as it is, $120/year is actually very cheap if it actually solves the problem it claims to solve. (Even $300/yr wouldn't be unreasonable tbh, esp if it's on my employer's card since work tabs are the hefty tabs for me)
I also have an M1 MacBook Air. It's very snappy on both Firefox and Safari.
Sometimes when I woke the computer up from sleep, Firefox would be crazy laggy. I suspect some resource leakage but at least RAM and CPU were fine. Closing and reopening the browser would work around it.
The basic version of Whist (with limited cloud tabs usage), will be free, forever.
For full cloud tabs support, we'll be charging a subscription fee as an add-on on top of the browser. We're still figuring out exactly what the pricing tiers will be, but we expect it to be in the 10-15$ range.
I would feel way more comfortable with a paid application. Otherwise, how are you paying for the cloud compute time? Also, where is the company based and who are the funders?
Charging a subscription fee is the primary way for which we would pay for cloud compute time -- but we're thinking there will be a version of Whist which will have very limited amount of compute time and be free (a sort of free trial if you will)
We haven't implemented what you describe yet, but we've verified that basic accessibility support works for the Whist browser. We'll be making sure that Chrome's accessibility support is fully covered on Whist cloud tabs before general availability
I can imagine this making a lot of sense for engineers working on embedded linux while not needing to SCP things back and forth to a build machine if a good web IDE was supported
72 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadWhist differs by being built in a native browser on your computer, rather than being fully offloaded to the cloud, and supports both local and cloud tabs (so that you can adapt your workflow based on which web apps you are using, how strong your Internet is, etc.)
For more details on the exact differences with Mighty and with other browsers, we have a comparison chart on our website
It would be helpful if you somehow included the browser name as I had to use Google Images for this. It's not very convenient.
So instead of explicitly bookmarking a page, not closing a tab is the indicator that you may be more interested in this page in the future than any page you visited in the past. In the meantime, you don't think that having many bookmarks requires more RAM.
As for the faster load times, I can see the lure, but I think it's a sellout. I'd like to know the resource footprint and incentivize website makers to make websites possible to run on computers without cloud GPUs.
Other than the fact that this browser doesn't solve problems that I'd like to have, I think that more browsers is both necessary and good. While they may rely on Google's browser engine technology (Blink), having more front-end diversity surely contributes to a better browser market.
When I open the browser after closing it, the session is restored with all but the current tab offloaded so it opens quickly and using very little resources.
My current session has tens of tabs, only a handful of them active. It uses about .5% CPU when idle, and less than 1Gb RAM.
[0] https://add0n.com/tab-discard.html
Privacy is also one of the reasons we've decided on the hybrid approach. Websites with sensitive information (your bank, etc.) can be used on local, incognito, or Tor tabs, all of which are not offloaded to Whist's servers and run 100% locally.
And that's a $1000 that I have to spend every few years, for just a mediocre experience (Since by the time it's 4-6 years old, it's virtually unusable for anything but the simplest of websites).
Maybe if people just wrote more HTML+JS rather than these big hefty "500kb of JS" React-based websites, this wouldn't be necessary. But as it is, $120/year is actually very cheap if it actually solves the problem it claims to solve. (Even $300/yr wouldn't be unreasonable tbh, esp if it's on my employer's card since work tabs are the hefty tabs for me)
Sometimes when I woke the computer up from sleep, Firefox would be crazy laggy. I suspect some resource leakage but at least RAM and CPU were fine. Closing and reopening the browser would work around it.
For full cloud tabs support, we'll be charging a subscription fee as an add-on on top of the browser. We're still figuring out exactly what the pricing tiers will be, but we expect it to be in the 10-15$ range.