Wasn't Opera doing something similar too for a while?
Rendering on the server was how Opera Mini worked (works?) for years. The low-end J2ME phones it ran on wouldn't be able to handle a full webpage even without today's JavaScript bloat.
Opera Mini was great on cheap Windows Mobile devices because your device didn't have the power to actually lay out a page, and the bandwidth savings on your slow cellular connection made the use of images make sense. Opera Mobile was preferable on Windows Mobile devices with better chips that could handle laying out a web page and had the bandwidth to work with embedded pictures that weren't tiny.
Silk solves a different set of problems. Silk offloads expensive things like page layout or rasterization to the server, and for a static page you could theoretically cache those too.
Mighty is streaming a browser instance, wholesale, as a video stream. It's very very different both in philosophy and actual implementation.
Re:Mighty Makes Google Chrome Faster
by somethoughts on Wednesday April 28, 2021 @01:18PM
(#26971807)
Perhaps I should have added some qualifiers - it shares "at a high, superficial level" a philosophy with the Amazon Silk Browser in trying to cloud accelerate the browsing experience.
Once one scratches into the technical details, the similarities end. Interesting, as you describe it, at a very high level, it does sound like Google Stadia or Nvidia GeForce Now but applied to web browsing.
"When Silk is run in cloud mode, it can off-load some of the the parts of the browsing and rendering process to EC2. In cloud mode, EC2 acts as a sort of cache plus proxy for browsing, and it also can dynamically take over parts of the page rendering pipeline from the client."
[1] https://www.wired.com/insights/2011/09/amazon-silk/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Silk