Mighty: The Browser You Didn’t Know You Needed but Definitely Do
I’ve been following Mighty for a little over a year since I read a tweet from Paul Graham:
I recently saw a thread from Mighty’s founder which reminder me I needed to check in. I signed up for early access a while ago but hadn’t received an invite code yet.
After heading over to Mighty’s website I quickly realized that I had somehow missed the GA release. For some reason this seems like a pattern with me.
I’ve been using Mighty for about two weeks (they offer a 7-day free trial) and, at least for me, it definitely lives up to the hype.
What is Mighty?
Mighty is a new browser that loads pages faster, finds docs quickly, and remains snappy with hundreds of tabs to save you time and make you more productive at work.
At its core, Mighty lets you run a chromium browser in a virtual machine on a beefed up computer that streams the data to your personal computer. Mighty’s bet is browsers will start to act more like operating systems where more and more activities will happen via web apps as opposed to native apps. By providing 2 Gps of bandwidth, 40 GB of RAM, and 8 vCPUs to each browser instance this becomes a serious value proposition and starts to remove the downsides of web versus native applications.
I’ve switched nearly my entire workflow to web applications with Mighty: Slack, Teams, Outlook, Discord, WhatsApp, as well as resource intensive web applications like Miro, Figma, Jira, and Notion. Being able to have all of these apps open in my browser while still maintaining lightning fast responses is a game changer. I can have all of these apps open without my fan coming on saving me from being “the fan guy” in the meeting as well as saving me a significant amount of battery life throughout the day.
Having everything open in the browser has also reduced the cognitive load of having 10+ windows open on my desktop at one time; everything is in my browser and easily searchable with Mighty’s command palette.
Opening Noting with Chrome (left) vs Mighty (right)
Super Powers
Mighty has a lot of little features that make me feel like I have super powers — most of them center around the command palette. Pressing CMD + M on Mac opens up the command palette giving you access to:
- Search all open tabs
- Universal search within Notion
- Universal search within Google docs/sheets
- Hotkey functions like pinning and muting tabs
- Quick actions in apps like creating new documents or email
Smaller features I love are pressing : anywhere to add emojis, built in ad-blocker, being able to press CMD + O to open the first results in Google as well as using J and K to navigate up and down the result list. Mighty also knows to recommend the first real search result by skipping ads. For example, searching “stuff to do in Orlando” gives four ads as the top results, but with Mighty I skipped the ads and opened the Trip Advisor link right away.
The Price of Speed
Mighty comes in at $30 with a 9% discount with a 12 month prepayment. I don’t think Mighty is for everyone. Some people probably won’t get a huge benefit if they don’t use resource intensive web apps, or might just prefer native applications. I used to prefer natives apps myself. There’s something about using an app specifically designed for the OS you’re using that takes advantage of features you just can’t get in web apps. However, for people who use resource intensive applications regularly and either prefer or don’t mind using web apps it seems like a no-brainer. I think there is also a legitimate argument for corporations to provide Mighty for their employees purely based on the productivity boost, especially for tech employees.
I’m looking forward to Mighty continuing to ship new features and make improvements on video streaming as well as supporting webcams for apps like Microsoft Teams. I’ll also be interested to see if they can still provide the same level of resources as their user base scales. It might be hard to get purists to buy into the “browser = OS” value proposition, but in the meantime I’ll be enjoying my 40 GB of RAM.