Author here, I just noticed this was on HN! There’s lots of great points raised here that I didn’t cover. I published this with very little feedback, so I’m not surprised I missed things. I’ll go through some of the additional points, though:

* Pivoting towards enterprise. Not with speed in mind, but instead security/control/compliance.

We didn’t spend too much time here, so I can’t definitively say this wouldn’t have worked. Cloudflare had (has?) just this vision when they bought S2: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-and-remote-browser-is.... There is at least one critical roadblock that I see: wifi and networks can be spotty. If only 80% of a company’s employees have good enough internet, what do you do as an administrator? Force them to figure out notoriously difficult wifi problems? If you don’t, those that don’t like the browser will simply not use it because they’re not required to. Given this, I always thought of this as a secondary market. First, make something great, independent of being required to use the product. Then start building out other tools that make businesses more enticed. We did sell to companies in multi-seat deals, and were eager to keep pushing in this direction. Note the tag line: “A new browser to work faster”.

* CAD/Rendering/Simulation/etc instead of a Browser

The trend is that all of these are moving to the browser. However, maybe not fast enough and Mighty was too early. It’s also a more crowded market (Citrix, Teradici, now Parsec, etc) and yet smaller than the browser market (well, by users at least).

* Powering browsers inside of mobile VR/AR

We never tried this. My sense is we’d be too early (at least 2+ years?).

* Accessibility, e.g. for screen readers

This was never a big enough priority but yeah, it seems solvable. It’s more or less another API to implement.

* Loading web pages faster is not going to make you more productive

As I see it, there are two buckets of speed. The first is to make fast things faster. The second is to make slow things faster. The two can work together. The real value prop is the second, but the first is where you can bring lots of delight. But I think there is some truth to this. Of the loyal paying users that we had, they felt substantially more productive. But could this benefit offset the price + downsides? Knowing what I know now, I don’t think so. But there’s a lot of context about what’s actually possible, what a wide spectrum of people value, etc that gets me to that conclusion.

* Who really, really, has a slow browser that’s willing to pay $35/month due to it?

This was my first thought when we starting working on a Browser. One thing I learned was to hold back my gut instinct and prove the answer, instead of guessing it. The empirical answer: thousands of people that we could find through minimal marketing (just Twitter, basically). Does that mean there are a million+ people out there that also have it? Maybe.. it’s hard to tell. But my personal hope was that this quantity generalized somewhat to the 2B users of Chrome so that we could at least make a profitable business. If we got there, we could move into areas where we were solving more problems.

So to directly answer the question: I’m pretty confident this market exists. But not if Mighty also has the downsides it did (doesn’t work well in cafes, a variety of bugs, etc.)