Yeah...I'm skeptical to be honest. If you're running Chrome on a server, you have to fetch the website to the server, then send back to the client. Now I suppose the server could be in some datacenter with really fast internet and include some aggressive caching, but that's still two trips instead of one.
I suppose if you're running major web apps in the browser, this could be a good idea. With the rise of WebAssembly, you could end up with something like a video editor or photoshop in the browser. And yeah, if big apps in the browser becomes a thing, people will want to run the big app on slower computers. But it'd have to be one beefy server to make the latency of streaming worth the performance speed up. Maybe if you keep common sites hot in the browser JIT and share it across users it'll be really fast but holy security issues Batman.
I'm not super pessimistic about the idea. If there's one thing I'd bet on it's internet speeds increasing while compute speeds plateauing. But I'm not sure I'd bet my own money or 5-10 years of my life on the idea.
It surely will pivot. Low-latency high-fidelity streaming doesn't come handy, and a lot of hard engineering work. But if worked, a lot of applications. Like you said, 100Gbps NIC between your data and video editor is much better than 1T fast local storage editing rig with 10Gbps NIC to the archive. Citrix worked really well in industries that need tighter control over your digital environment. Oculus Link just started to support WiFi, and would be cool if it can go over WAN.
There are some competitions, such as Parsec or Stadia, but if you can have an higher-frequency use case to iterate on, why not go with that?
Besides complicated apps, I think this could be useful for dumb web pages that are making a bunch of requests. Instead of having all those requests go from the browser to the provider to the pile of services, advertisers, and spies, and back again, they'll just go from the Mighty data center to the provider and back. I'm thinking FB and pretty much any news/old media site.
I suppose if you're running major web apps in the browser, this could be a good idea. With the rise of WebAssembly, you could end up with something like a video editor or photoshop in the browser. And yeah, if big apps in the browser becomes a thing, people will want to run the big app on slower computers. But it'd have to be one beefy server to make the latency of streaming worth the performance speed up. Maybe if you keep common sites hot in the browser JIT and share it across users it'll be really fast but holy security issues Batman.
I'm not super pessimistic about the idea. If there's one thing I'd bet on it's internet speeds increasing while compute speeds plateauing. But I'm not sure I'd bet my own money or 5-10 years of my life on the idea.