I think you kinda hit it on the nose. Who knows where or how or who has access to these machines. IDC if it's encrypted in transit or what, but there is no way a corporation with strict data privacy rules would be able to stream potentially sensitive information across the wire especially when it will be stored in the cloud in web form for a period of time. IDK good luck, but I'm definitely tin-foil hatting with this guy above me.

For me it's not so much a trust issue with this company, though for cloud and mobile stuff I have come to a "guilty until proven innocent" rule as regards privacy. It's (1) the trend this supports, and (2) what happens if worse players get access to it either through hacking or acquisition.

I guess I'm more thinking if the target is enterprise (because it's 30$ a month), what enterprise is going to green light workers using a browser where content doesn't reside on the user's machine? I've worked several tech jobs where it's mandated to use a specific browser because it's locked-down to not leak sensitive information. Not to mention it allows users to access internal resources. IDK I'm not necessarily hating the product, just don't know how it's going to work at scale for the listed CPU/Memory/Price point

I am in the same club :)

I don't usually care about companies success or failure, this none of my business, after all, but this kind of "innovation" could have extremely unpleasant side effects.

I hope they crash quick.

You have valid concerns but no need to hope for their failure.

Tech people are the minority. The market IS moving towards cloud. It's happened, it's happening, it will keep happening. Stadia may have failed now, but it IS conceptually the future of gaming. It's like you're arguing for blockbuster in a netflix world. We cannot stop this from happening, no matter how many choirs we preach to. All we can do is find ways to make this happen better.

I think it's more constructive (and technically difficult) to accept that the market is heading to full cloud and we as tech people need to find better ways of making this vibe with good privacy practices.

Personally, I would not use anything like this without knowing a lot more about their security. Even then, maybe we're still a few years out from a security perspective before I would feel comfortable storing my passwords and browsing data with a 3rd party server AND pay for it (wild). But, I could see myself doing this if my privacy was ensured.

I hope these guys really focus on innovating in that aspect, and then I hope they succeed big.

> It's like you're arguing for blockbuster in a netflix world.

No, it's not like that at all. Nobody is arguing for going back to distributing software in boxes with floppies or CD-ROMs in them.

Reason from first principles, not by analogy. Context and details matter.

Here are some major reasons for the push to cloud. None of these reasons are immutable or universal.

(1) Wimpy mobile devices with constrained power, storage, and bandwidth requirements.

(2) Cloud is the only kind of DRM that works. It's a way to lock things up and make piracy virtually impossible. As a bonus you can still build on "open source" and placate the open source zealots who don't understand the current state of things and are still living in the 90s.

(3) Application delivery and installation/uninstallation are terrible. OSes are broken.

Here are some solutions:

(1) Moore's law, huge improvements in battery capacity, 5G, WiFi 6, etc. are eating away at this problem. This issue will die of natural causes.

(2) The hopelessly naive idea that "information wants to be free" and everything has to be "free" (as in beer) needs to die, be cut into a thousand pieces, burned, encased in concrete, and sunk to the bottom of the ocean. Nothing is free. Software takes a vast amount of labor to produce, and that must be funded. If it's not funded directly and honestly it will be funded indirectly and dishonestly (surveillance capitalism, cloud lock-in, etc.). "Everything has to be free" and piracy actually help push us toward a surveillance capitalist panopticon future.

(3) This might be the toughest problem. Windows is by far the worst offender here with its nightmarish installation subsystem. Closed app stores are another huge problem but eventually I think anti-trust action is going to chip away at that.

That's not by any means a complete analysis. This is just a comment on a HN thread. It does hit the major points I think.

Privacy is not the main concern here, although it's huge.

Imagine you buy into this service and they go bust: Suddenly all your history, passwords and cache: poof, gone.

It's exactly what local-first advocates tell us is the current enemy, not closed-source. See Kleppmann's latest blog post about the GPL: https://martin.kleppmann.com/2021/04/14/goodbye-gpl.html

> Tech people are the minority.

That's irrelevant, though. The "tech people" aren't preferring local solutions because they're funny this way - they prefer them because cloud-streamed remote apps objectively sucks. It takes some knowledge about computers to comprehend how and why exactly, but it doesn't change the facts.

(To use an analogy - doctors are a minority too, but you listen to them when they say you should vaccinate.)

> The market IS moving towards cloud. It's happened, it's happening, it will keep happening.

The important question to ask is, why. Why it's happened, why it's happening? The answer has little to do with providing value to customers - it's mostly about creating ability to seek rent. Privacy issues only happen on top of that - they're not the entirety of the problem.

> I think it's more constructive (and technically difficult) to accept that the market is heading to full cloud

Or, we could fight it. Maybe it's a quixotic quest. Maybe not. The market is a dumb greedy optimizer, it flows down the profitability gradients the way water flows downhill. If you want it to flow elsewhere, you have to put obstacles in the way, or cut out a better path.

While I totally agree with you, if this succeeds my hope is that it will finally push browser vendors to come up with a good authentication/authorization story. Make it totally integrated in the browser, such that I remain in control and Mighty only sees the equivalent of OAuth token it can't use to login in my name. No more custom signup forms, no more botched login flows redirecting you through 13 sites, no more passwords stored on websites... That is an innovation I would gladly welcome both as a web user and a potential web developer.

Every service needs auth. I can't believe nothing is properly integrated. I still have to click and enter a password, which fortunately the browser can create for me. I still have to receive an email and click on a link to validate my account. Web developers still have to create forms, manage the whole process, hash, salt and sauce my password and not leak it.

That already exists as Apple Sign-In: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210318

Not really surprising considering how Apple is so focussed on doing proper UX and privacy. Too bad only Apple users can use it.

Your point about security is valid. But we are already past that point when we started moving all of our apps and our data to cloud. Before Saas was popular, almost all of our data stayed in our local machine. But now everything is in the cloud. we have already lost the privacy battle.

No, we haven't lost. When all our devices are thin clients and everything runs in the cloud, we will have lost.