No one will argue that the internet of 2022 isn't significantly more demanding than the internet even just ten years ago. Websites are built like apps, offering all kinds of experiences that weren't possible years ago, but that's come at a significant processing cost.
That high-end phone you bought years ago, or your desktop that had a top-of-the-line processor back in 2016 don't feel quite so fast browsing the web anymore. And besides upgrading your hardware, there's not much you can do to stop that march. But Whist thinks it has something revolutionary to make the internet a better place for your devices again.
Whist browser delivers cloud-rendered websites
The browser isn't anything too special. It's Chromium-based, and forked from Brave, so you're getting broad internet compatibility with a focus on privacy and security. That's important for this next part, because the browser's claim to fame is rendering websites totally in the cloud instead of on your device's local hardware.
This is a pretty wild difference from how websites work these days. Your laptop would basically just be a screen that mirrors what Whilst processes and renders for you, including demanding websites that need hardware acceleration and intensive requirements. NVIDIA GPUs in the cloud do the heavy lifting, taking most of the strain off of your device. That means longer battery life, more tabs open, and a smoother experience than you'd get trying to run some of this stuff in a regular Chrome browser.
Whilst says you'll get up to two extra hours of battery life by using these cloud tabs, and you can save your RAM for programs that do need to run locally. And since it's so heavily focused on the cloud, you can sync things up across devices. Imagining setting up some photo editing through Adobe's cloud software, then immediately picking up your progress on another computer is an attractive thought.
But obviously something like this is going to have privacy concerns. Would you want to render your bank's login screens in the cloud, for example? Even chat applications can contain sensitive info that you might not want anyone else's eyes on, so you certainly don't want to risk that being processed on a cloud server. Whist offers four different modes, including ultralight that renders everything in the cloud, accelerated that lets you choose which tabs will be local and which will be cloud-based, smart that only renders tabs in the cloud if your device is low on memory, and native that renders everything locally, no cloud whatsoever.
While that may alleviate all privacy concerns, the granular control is nice, and still guarantees that your tabs will work if you go into an area with spotty internet or just don't want things running off-device for the time being. The company behind Whilst also says they'll be open sourcing the project down the line, which is another plus in this area.
If you want to test this out, Whist is currently available on Macs with either Apple or Intel chips at the moment. You'll still need to wait for an invite to start using the cloud functionality, and if you're on Windows they're working on a build that you can also be waitlisted for. Other OSes are in the pipeline, but it's early going.
Either way, it's a pretty clever innovation with hundreds of immediate use cases, and we're excited to see how it progresses.
What are your thoughts on a fully cloud-based web browser?
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Opera browser did this years ago, they called it “Turbo Mode”. Unfortunately they got bought out by the Chinese government a few years back so i no longer use them. But they did have this feature.