CloudMosa’s Cloud Avatar — the World’s Most Advanced Remote Browsing Platform

As one of the earliest Chromium developers, we’ve optimized our Cloud Avatar remote browsing platform over the years to maximize its performance. Learn more about remote browsing, and how Cloud Avatar enables faster and more secure experiences on the web.

What is a remote browser?

While a traditional browser renders web pages locally, a remote browser executes these tasks in the cloud. Here’s how a traditional browser works:

For years, the two-tier browsing model was sufficient. Unfortunately, it has not kept pace, especially in terms of security.

A remote browser features an additional tier:

Using a three-tier software architecture — with cloud servers handling webpage rendering — offers significant advantages.

Let’s take a look remote browsing has evolved over the years:

• In the early days, pixel pushing and video streaming were used. Those methods can still be found today, but require large amounts of bandwidth. This makes web browsing slow and laggy.
• Later, DOM reconstruction entered the scene. While not as laggy, it is complicated to set up. It’s also a lot of work for minimal security; zero-day attacks can still slip through during DOM reconstruction.
• The newest remote browsing technique utilizes vector graphic drawing commands. Generally, this means the page is rendered in the cloud, and then vector drawing commands rebuild the webpage on the user’s device. This technique varies between vendors, so it’s important to test for security, browsing speed, and device performance.

Since 2009, CloudMosa’s proprietary Puffin Vector Graphics Language has powered the Cloud Avatar platform — serving over 150 million browsers globally.

Why is Cloud Avatar better?

The way Cloud Avatar renders web content brings unparalleled functionality to the web browser.

It’s more secure

By transcoding the webpage into the Puffin Vector Graphics language, any potential threats are stripped away before they reach the user’s device.

Transcoding a webpage into vector drawing commands removes harmful threats. This happens in mere milliseconds, producing a safe replica of the webpage in the client’s browser.

A good analogy would be akin to boiling an egg:

1. Cloud Avatar grabs the potentially harmful content (the raw egg) and then transcodes it (boils it).
2. Any threats (salmonella) are removed because the webpage completely changes its structure during transcoding.
3. The new content (the cooked egg) is now 100% safe for consumption.

Here’s a more technical explanation:

1. Webpages are built using HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
2. Hackers exploit vulnerabilities in these scripting languages to attack users via phishing scams, ransomware, bots, and more.
3. By transcoding the webpage into a different language, we effectively “boil” any malicious code away.

Just as boiling water kills harmful organisms, transcoding neutralizes threats to make Cloud Avatar the safest way to browse the internet.

It’s faster

Cloud Avatar surfs the internet much faster, because of two reasons:

1. Our Cloud Avatar servers sit in enterprise-level data centers with a high-speed link to other servers
2. Our http payloads are much lighter thanks to the transcoding of the webpage into the Puffin Vector Graphics Language.

A home or office internet connection features a latency of about 100 ms, whereas Cloud Avatar clocks in around 10 ms.

Unlike a home or office browser which requires multiple hops to reach the internet, a direct backbone connection gives Cloud Avatar faster access to any server on the web.

It works on low-powered devices

Cloud Avatar also boosts the browsing performance of low-powered devices. There are still billions of users using feature phones around the world, and it has always been our mission to enable equitable access to the internet. Cloud Avatar helps us do that.

Transmitting data using the Puffin Vector Graphics Language allows even low-powered devices (with only 32 MB of RAM) to access the internet as quickly as flagship phones from iPhone or Samsung.

Thanks to its performance, Cloud Avatar was selected by the Lava telecom group in India as the engine for its Lava Cloud Store. It provides a wide user base access to websites that would otherwise be inaccessible or laggy on a low-powered device.

Where can I get it?

Our recommended browser is Puffin Secure Browser — a desktop browser for both Windows and macOS. Protect your team from zero-day attacks with the most advanced remote browsing platform available on the market today.

It is available for $5/month or $50/year with a yearly Puffin 365 subscription.

Enterprise users: please contact us for an in-person demo or to inquire about enterprise integration.

About CloudMosa

Since 2009, CloudMosa has been a pioneer in remote browsing technology. We were founded by former Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo employees with a passion for creating better experiences on the web.