That's a nice diagram! Yeah that's roughly it. We'll be adding support for more sources of truth in the future to expand coverage, like the ones you mention but also NoSQL like MongoDB
Good question -- the primary difference is the method of integration with Postgres. ZomboDB is a Postgres extension, which limits their compatibility with Postgres serivces like AWS RDS, while Retake is compatible with any service where you can enable logical replication
In December 2022, we shut down Whist after ~3 years. For those who didn't know us, we were a Mighty competitor, building a cloud-streamed browser.
I spent a long time reflecting on what happened, our successes and mistakes, and compiled them in a post-mortem. A few people close to me read it and some found it insightful, so I figured I'd share it with the wider community.
A story on hard-learned lessons that feel obvious in hindsight. Here's to hoping my mistakes can save you some!
Whether you have 1 cloud tab or 100 cloud tabs, the resource utilization on your machine will be the same. If you open more local tabs, though, those will take up RAM/CPU on your machine.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
https://www.whist.com/ Whist is building the world's fastest browser by streaming it from the cloud. Load pages instantly. Use 10x less memory. Enjoy complete privacy. Whist is a supercharged version of Chrome that runs in the cloud.