Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/04/atlassian-the-browser-company-deal.html

by kevinyew • 11 months ago

523 505 11 months ago

cnbc.com

https://browsercompany.substack.com/p/your-tuesday-in-2030

https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/atlassian-acqui...

https://www.theverge.com/web/770947/browser-company-arc-dia-...

_kush• 11 months ago

Atlassian's announcement: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/atlassian-acqui...

dtagames2• 11 months ago

This is so strange. How would Atlassian convince their enterprise customers to switch browsers? That seems really unlikely, and unnecessary.

The main feature being touted is the ability to take context from multiple tabs and ... do something with it? So unconstrained access to what you're doing in multiple tabs feeding into exactly what and why? The announcement is concerning because it mentions "AI skills" which are, of course, nonexistent.

If anything, the "arc" of The Browser Company proves a fundamental tenet of the post-capitalist era: You can get rich without making or selling any products that anyone wants. It's all stock transactions between wealthly elites. The software, if any, is an afterthought.

DanielHB2• 11 months ago

They bought Trello as well, I haven't used Atlassian stuff in like 3 years but as far as I remember it didn't really work out well inside Jira.

dtagames2• 11 months ago

They recently decided to destroy Trello, too. They bought it because it was a legit alternative to Jira for small teams and basically left it alone after the acquisition. But recently they've decided that it's too much of an alternative so it had to be crippled to remove the team features, turning it into a personal information manager that no one asked for.

theuur• 11 months ago

https://investors.atlassian.com/news/news-details/2025/Atlas...

pavlov• 11 months ago

I never knew the Browser Company had such an awesome logo!

Anyway, the idea of making Dia into the knowledge worker's browser sounds good.

For me, this new browser would be successful the day I prefer to run Linear and Notion in Dia rather than using the companies' own Electron desktop apps (which are pretty terrible on Mac at least, so the bar is not necessarily very high).

smsx• 11 months ago

I don't think first class Linear or Notion support will be high on their list given who acquired them.

nerdjon• 11 months ago

What is with this need for a single application to do so many different tasks instead of just being focused on doing its job and doing it well (browsing the web in this case).

I just don't understand how they can with a straight face say "Today’s browsers weren’t built for work." when their entire business relies on browsers ability to do exactly that and have basically been fine (heavy javascript usage in Jira aside which this is not going to magically fix).

Looking at any of this I just don't see what this is actually supposed to solve.

threetonesun2• 11 months ago

Zawinski's Law in action.

I suppose the good thing with AI is we're coming close to being able to roll our own versions of whatever we want when the software we were using ascends to the enterprise plane.

ozgrakkurt• 11 months ago

I would like to see you and all people think that they can roll own software with AI come together with AI as well and write chromium one day

cosmic_cheese4• 11 months ago

I’d like to ask the same thing. The main things I want from my browser are for it to be a good browser. Fast and secure with excellent tab and bookmark management capabilities. Anything else except maybe ad blocking is extraneous.

I understand that a lot of people live in their browsers, but for web apps I’d rather split them out into “installed” PWAs and have them benefit from system app/window management facilities than have them clog up my browser’s tabs.

forbiddenvoid• 11 months ago

I want a browser in my apps, not apps in my browser. The whole thing has just gone completely backwards in the last 20 years.

Browsers make terrible operating systems. People live in their browsers because they have to, not because they want to.

neutronicus2• 11 months ago

Well, Atlassian may be acqu-hiring the team specifically to make a JIRA PWA

presentation• 11 months ago

Are you paying for your browser?

There’s your answer.

rvz3• 11 months ago

Well this is a surprise. Thought OpenAI or Perplexity would buy them. [0][1]

But there's an even worse company that wanted to buy them out of losing money and has no solid plan to use it.

This looks like a very bad deal, equivalent to the Humane and HP acquisition.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42213288

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/04/atlassian-the-browser-compan...

viraptor3• 11 months ago

It was nice knowing them.

less than 10% of organizations have adopted a secure browser

Yes Gartner, let's invent a "secure enterprise browser", because there's too much interoperability on the web - there's definitely some business on splitting that up. I'm sure atlassian people love that idea.

jgalt212• 11 months ago

less than 10% of organizations have adopted a secure browser

That's the value prop (along with better application interop+) of the Here browser.

+ I do think the File System API did somewhat mitigate this value prop.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System...

JumpCrisscross• 11 months ago

Also these guys [1].

[1] https://www.island.io

viraptor3• 11 months ago

I'm not sure we need a new browser for that. Between corporate proxies filtering content and the ability to disable JIT by policy, you get 99% there with security. Add some containers for zero trust / auto-sso and we'd be there... There's really no reason to make a new browser.

It could be a few options away on Firefox for example if people cared about the "secure" part more than the "enterprise sales" part.

thewebguyd3• 11 months ago

I haven't heard of Here browser until now, but lookin at the website I guess I don't understand what the point is?

For Windows shops, Edge is already an "enterprise browser." I can control literally every aspect of it via MDM policies or Group Policy for the on-prem AD folks. If using EntraID, SSO is already included, and you can go as far as whitelisting sites as well. I can set custom tab groups, pinned tabs, etc all with policy.

Even on non-managed/BYOD devices, once signed in to the work account Edge can be managed the same way via MAM policies. I can even force documents and links from other "work" apps to open in the managed Edge profile.

The only thing Here seems to offer that I couldn't configure Edge to do is the split-pane view in their "Supertabs" but Edge does have the sidebar, that I can configure to be pinned with Teams, Outlook, Copilot, etc.

kube-system2• 11 months ago

let's invent a "secure enterprise browser", because there's too much interoperability on the web

Enterprise browsers are an existing category, and even Google offers an enterprise version of Chrome.

The idea of an enterprise browser is that all of the interoperability that has been built has been between the desktop and web servers. Most desktop browsers don't have many features that allow an organization to manage them, beyond managed policies which honestly aren't that great. For the most part, standard desktop browsers are a big hole in both inbound and outbound security.

jnwatson• 11 months ago

Enterprise Chrome is just regular Chrome with remote policy enforcement. It isn't a different browser.

ghm21993• 11 months ago

Whats a good source to read about designing enterprise browsers? I imagine this would becomes a tradeoff between breath functionality(API) vs the kind of threat vectors they face. But like what are the objectives and goals that help make these decisions?

its-summertime• 11 months ago

can it, when clicking a given link, hand off to a remote desktop session that is running windows XP and Internet Explorer because some random part of your intranet hasn't been updated in 20 years? If yes, then its an enterprise browser.

chrisweekly• 11 months ago

breath functionality?

zerkten• 11 months ago

Secure browsers want interoperability and for there to be zero objections on those grounds. Companies want to offer a standard web browser, but they need to harden deployments for specific threats. You can see articles like https://aka.ms/EdgeSecurityWhitepaper/Docs for Edge which describe the extra layers of security you can apply while still using the same browser.

Atlassian would want integration with their backend products to increase lock-in and provide a place where their products are centered. IT control how products are presented to end users in organizations that matter (in terms of sales volume.) Establishing visibility and driving engagement is hard if the Atlassian tools are a niche and they want to attack SharePoint or other products. Being able to more efficiently use the tools the company has bought is attractive (even if not a reality.)

Making their browser incompatible is a bad outcome for them because it's an IT choice to adopt their browser. This carries visibility and risk for IT who could be embarrassed. Any backlash carries over to other Atlassian products or affects renewals.

viraptor3• 11 months ago

Companies want to offer a standard web browser,

I don't believe that in a long term. If atlassian creates an enterprise-managed browser they can charge for, there will be a big incentive to making their suite work better in that browser only. Or JIRA/Confluence features will be released using APIs only available there. It will be their EEE.

If they really cared about actual security, they'd optimise their services enough to use them with JIT disabled. And maybe push the industry to do the same. And publish some SSO auth standard that integrates with the browser.

Any backlash carries over to other Atlassian products

Atlassian doesn't care about users and what they think. If they did, markdown textboxes would still be there and JIRA wouldn't be a slow abomination. But they sell to businesses, not users. So instead of fixed issues or QoL improvements, I get an AI button.

ActionHank4• 11 months ago

Remember when most organizations only supported IE for their websites, then in some orgs it later became a requirement for working with legacy webapps.

A secure browser was never a concern.

mrkramer2• 11 months ago

A secure browser was never a concern.

Because majority of malware if not all was written for PCs. Nowadays still most of the malware targets PCs but now attacks targeting web users are more prevalent. Attackers attack through compromised websites or phishing websites using social engineering techniques or exploit kits[0]. Websites are dominant attack surface not web browsers because it is hard to find 0-day exploits and usually they are found and used by state sponsored attackers. Chrome is still the most secure browser because it has enormous market share and everybody is attacking it, both whitehat and blackhat actors so Chrome team is constantly fixing and patching Chrome.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploit_kit

ebiester• 11 months ago

It's already invented - someone else mentioned Here and Island. It allowed us to onboard contractors without giving them computers because we could control a lot. It's an interesting idea on the business side and I'd say a good risk for Atlassian even though it won't be good for their current users.

Think about putting your business VPN and security controls in the browser. And if you can put your connection to AI and start building a productive workflow around it, that's an interesting proposition. It doesn't change interoperability on the web; it's a controlled client for the business use case.

This is being marketed to an entirely different group.

superkuh• 11 months ago

It wouldn't be the worst event of that type or even unprecedented. HTTP/3 is not even TCP and barely HTTP anymore. HTTP/3, QUIC, was openwashed through the IETF by google/ms/apple and can't even connect to a website unless that website gets continuing approval from a third party corporation for existing (a CA TLS cert, no self signed, no plain text). It is "secure enterprise HTTP" with every one of it's architectural and implementation choices being driven by the needs and use cases of for-profit enterprises. It is a fairly crap protocol for human persons and the web and sites as we know it.

johnhamlin• 11 months ago

404

drbscl2• 11 months ago

AI in a web browser isn't going to make Atlassian products any more usable

pjmlp• 11 months ago

If only competition was half as good.

I will keep suggesting Atlassian, because everything else I used since the 1990's was worse.

drbscl2• 11 months ago

AI jammed into a browser really isn't going to make any Atlassian product any more pleasant to use

arnvald2• 11 months ago

I really appreciate that there's a company trying to reimagine browsers. Arc was an interesting idea, I used it for a few months, but in the end I switched back to Firefox. I haven't tried Dia yet, and now I'm not sure if I should.

I do think that selling a browser is going to be an extremely difficult task, so having an enterprise software machine with huge customer base might help it, but Atlassian strikes me as a company that will eventually just kill the project and turn this into a de facto acquihire.

Cu3PO42• 11 months ago

If you liked Arc, you should try Zen. I understand it brings many of the same ideas to a Firefox base.

4ggr02• 11 months ago

+1, i used firefox since my childhood, never interested by Arc because it's idiotic to me that a browser requires an account. a while back someone suggested Zen, i now use it as my main browser since a bit over a month. really happy :)

arnvald2• 11 months ago

Thanks for recommendation, I'll give it a try

sniffers7• 11 months ago

Skip Dia, it's a security nightmare.

blackqueeriroh13• 11 months ago

Atlassian doesn’t kill the products of companies they acquire

conradfr• 11 months ago

I never tried it because I was on Windows at the time but I remember my brother raving about it constantly, that I had to try it etc (and reading other people saying the same thing).

I think he's still using it. He probably would have paid something for it.

But then overnight they just weren't interested on building it. So strange.

ljbred083• 11 months ago

Right! So many people would have actually paid for Arc to keep active development going, but without even giving that option they switched to Dia...

dcchambers3• 11 months ago

The thing the Browser Company does best is marketing. I have always felt like they really wanted to market their products more than build them. The founders should let Dia/Arc go and just go into product marketing. Many would hire them.

joeguilmette2• 11 months ago

I always wondered who did their marketing. Their Arc Act II video was so good I watched it a few times (https://youtu.be/WIeJF3kL5ng?si=R1fHA87355dXDuZH).

I immediately thought Sandwich made it. Some of their stuff like https://youtu.be/5GeR8XTWR3M?si=RX-NBCMicnUPw1jA is so good I just periodically watch it.

If The Browser Company folks made that video, their superpower is really marketing and you are actually correct. But I feel like it must have been an agency.

frankdenbow• 11 months ago

Nashilu Makoua did a lot of their storytelling and strategy, very talented.

timw4mail• 11 months ago

Maybe they can finally make Jira responsive /s

kedihacker• 11 months ago

It would be perfect upsell for Atlassian because of their products abysmal performance of their product.

dcchambers3• 11 months ago

Arc had some novel ideas but ultimately it was DOA for me because I needed something that I could access on both desktop and mobile for shared tabs/history/etc.

They did help push the established players in the field forward a bit though, so I will be thankful for that.

Also: It's always funny to see how people really feel about an acquisition. eg the comments in this thread feel like a eulogy.

joeguilmette2• 11 months ago

It does that.

dcchambers3• 11 months ago

There was no Arc Mobile when it first released.

secfirstmd• 11 months ago

ARC always feels like a feature not a product. Don't see how Atlassian connection is really gonna make either better.

techjamie• 11 months ago

It has the kind of buzzwords to get executives to buy in, who will then force it on their employees. I mean, if you offered a CEO an "Enterprise AI Browser," it feels like the sort of thing they'd salivate over. Then they can go tell the investors that they're AI now and line can go up.

Shank• 11 months ago

I would've actually expected a buyer like OpenAI or Anthropic, if I'm being perfectly honest. Atlassian is such a strange buyer. $610m in cash is really low in the grand scheme of AI pricing too. If they're only worth $610m, I feel like this says a lot that "AI browsers" aren't actually worth that much. Remember, Instagram was $1b. The Windsurf acquihire was $2.4b and there are surely a lot more people in business that use browsers than write code.

Was Atlassian the highest bidder, or was Atlassian the only bidder?

warthog• 11 months ago

Considering they never made revenue, there must be more than one bidder - otherwise the price could have been much lower. I remember them raising at $500 MM at the last round

k9294• 11 months ago

It looks really overpriced to me. Dia is a rough MVP. Arc is really a very niche browser with little adoption. I dont think technology worth this money, and Arc the user base is low compared to major browsers, probably around 1-5 million users with no growth (most likely they hit the plateau even before they decide to kill the Arc in favor of Dia).

tripletpeaks• 11 months ago

This is the first I’m hearing of either of these products, or this company. If you’d asked me what a program named Dia was ten minutes ago, I’d have confidently replied that it’s an open source gui diagramming tool.

new_here• 11 months ago

Agreed, OpenAI and Anthropic want to get as close to the user as possible. Browser is used more often than a specific website or standalone desktop app and much less work than an entire OS. Raycast also seems well positioned but perhaps more niche.

Perhaps Atlassian was sitting on cash and needed to make some bets. If you can build a big enough user base for a browser it can earn handsomely from AdWords type referral fees. Look at what Google pays Apple to be default on Safari and how much referral spend Chrome recouped for Google etc. Maybe Atlassian will try and promote Dia to its customer base and look to launch more AI type commercial product discovery experiences like Perplexity Shopping.

utyop224• 11 months ago

"Perhaps Atlassian was sitting on cash and needed to make some bets

Perhaps investors should put on a stupidity discount and discount the value of cash when valuing the value of equity!

RachelF• 11 months ago

Given Atlassian's terrible product quality, I give it two years until anything they buy becomes borderline unusable frustration.

blackqueeriroh13• 11 months ago

Would love hear what, specifically, you find terrible about the quality of their products!

amrrs• 11 months ago

Surprising I don't think Atlassian hasn't even recovered from Loom acquisition. It was good for Loom but hardly any positive impact for Atlassian. Now Arc and Dia - it seems to be an obsession to acquire an AI BROWSER

utyop224• 11 months ago

Its just funny to watch isnt it.

The reality is, most people at the top of these firms had great initial success because they had some advantage but over time, you realise that advantage acquired can be explained more by luck than skill.

Very few can have sustained success.

blackqueeriroh13• 11 months ago

How so? The Loom acquisition has been a huge success for Atlassian.

neodymiumphish4• 11 months ago

Arc was actually full of some really great ideas. There was plenty of nonsense, but their Air Traffic Control feature is still unmatched on other browsers. Multi-container/profile browsing is managed so poorly across other browsers.

Dia is a joke, but I guess it has a chance in the age of ever-more-popular AI functionality.

My only curiosity is whether this means that Atlassian will lock these browsers down to just paying customers or keep some limited functionality versions available for personal use. Of all the companies who might’ve bought TBC, I did not expect Atlassian, based on the services they offer already.

Then again, all the potential anti-trust stuff happening with Google and the push to separate Google from Chrome could be a bit catalyst for this move.

vinnymac• 11 months ago

I find Atlassian to be a strange buyer of The Browser Company and there products. I don’t see the philosophical match here.

Does Atlassian want them to become an Enterprise AI arm?

flkiwi3• 11 months ago

Trying to bootstrap a new-generation Lotus Notes from parts, with Dia as the container.

ghm21993• 11 months ago

I've switched to Zen browser recently (I like it's spaces and folder structure to organize work on a daily basis, same as Arc). fFox nightly is not there yet but it's getting close with tabs on the left..

jimmydoe2• 11 months ago

Zen is nice.

Arc is still irreplaceable for its true separation of tab and window, it’s like tmux for browser, I haven’t seen any other browser do that.

nicoka11• 11 months ago

Actually you can do it in chrome (having multiple profiles basically), but yeah nowhere as good as arc is, i'm using zen rn but still very sad for arc, I have some hopes they bring back arc to life (either directly or inside of Dia)

felarof2• 11 months ago

We are in early stages, but as a big Arc fan myself, we want to bring build this feature.

If you can raise a github issue, we can get to work asap https://github.com/browseros-ai/BrowserOS

shuckles• 11 months ago

Pinned tabs in Safari propagate between windows.

globular-toast• 11 months ago

Emacs does that.

cosmic_cheese4• 11 months ago

I’m hopeful for Zen, not just as a successor for Arc but as a Gecko-based browser that sweats the small details. I appreciate that Firefox exists but it’s got a number of rough edges that’ve seemingly been forgotten.

CarbonNanotubes5• 11 months ago

One thing I noticed shortly after when I initially switch Arc a couple years ago from Firefox, ads were more targeted at me and I definitely felt more tracked online. I started using Zen Browser at work because they blocked Arc for Windows (Zen blocked as well but I can run the Twilight build without being blocked :D) and the more I used it I just like it better than Arc in general and it was nice to be back to using Firefox again. When Arc went into maintenance mode it was just that last thing to finally get me to move off of it and over to Zen everywhere.

dutchCourage• 11 months ago

I've also made the move to Zen. I think Arc users will feel right at home there. It hasn't quite reached he same level of polish just yet but being in active development is a big plus.

On top of that, Zen can be personalized with CSS. As someone who spends a lot of time in the browser, it's been awesome to be able to tailor it to my needs. https://docs.zen-browser.app/guides/live-editing

bathwaterpizza• 11 months ago

One big limitation for me is how they can't display DRM protected content like Netflix

keijay• 11 months ago

zen's performance issues really need to be addressed tho... it hogs an insane amount of memory (and somehow even more than arc)

jdlyga2• 11 months ago

Zen is nice, but it's nowhere near as powerful as Arc is. It's still missing a lot of Arc's features like Air Traffic Control.

hbn5• 11 months ago

I've been trying to find a Chrome replacement since they finally cut the cord on manifest v2.

I know Firefox is the "right" option, and I'm fully in favour of chipping away at Chromium marketshare (even if the EU is determined to solidify it further with demands of Apple to allow non-Safari rendering in iOS) but I've used it in the past, and even if it's fine 99% of the time, there is that occasional website that has issues because web devs only test in Chromium. And it leaves me with an ever-looming sense of "is this broken because the site is actually broken or was it just not tested with anything but Chrome?" and then I'm obsessively opening Chrome every time I have an issue to test it there.

So I figured I'll just use one of the many Chromium-based alternatives that's going to continue supporting manifest V2, and I've generally heard good things about them anyway. Edge is off the table since Microsoft said they'd only support it as long as Google did, and I already swore it off after using it for like the first year after they switched to Chromium and it was okay, but it quickly got destroyed by the typical suspects at Microsoft, turning it into a Microsoft adware shitshow. Not to mention their quality control was clearly not up to snuff cause they frequently pushed terribly broken builds to stable, which I rarely experienced with Chrome in 15-ish years of using it.

I tried Arc a little bit but something about the onboarding process and browser experience feels more like their top priority is being cute and unique rather than just making a good browser.

I've settled on Brave for now. After disabling all their crapware, it's been... okay. But like Edge, it seems to have some quality control issues. I have very weird performance issues, like for a long time typing in the youtube comment box would be incredibly laggy. I think that's mostly fixed now? But I still get regular issues where the entire browser will lock up if I'm playing a video and I pull the tab into a separate window, and I have to kill the window to unfreeze everything. The bugs are annoying on their own but it also gives me concern about the skillset of the people making it. I'm trusting my browser with fairly sensitive data, and who knows how difficult it will be in a few years to continue supporting manifest V2. They got all that work done for them by Google/open source contributors. Wouldn't surprise me if Google maliciously made manifest V2 more and more difficult to support by moving Chromium in a direction that's increasingly incompatible with it.

4ggr02• 11 months ago

Edge is off the table since Microsoft said they'd only support it as long as Google did

could've shortened this to 'Edge is off the table since its Microsoft' :)

hbn5• 11 months ago

I figure if anyone should be able to financially support putting out a decent, well-tested browser it should be the second most valuable company on the planet. But indeed, like nearly everything else Microsoft makes, it's trash.

phyzome• 11 months ago

If you think Firefox is the right choice, and it works 99% of the time, and you're worried about lack of competition... you should probably be using Firefox. That will support its marketshare (by definition).

If you see bugs, you can probably assume they're just regular ol' bugs most of the time. A lot of the web is just plain broken or badly designed.

hbn5• 11 months ago

I'm giving it a shot on my work machine. Device management doesn't give me any options other than Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari anyway. I do like and use Safari for non-work tasks (mainly HN scrolling) but it has some issues that prevent it from being a main browser for me.

So I'll see if I can make FF work but it's mostly cause it's the best option at this point.

prmoustache2• 11 months ago

What about ignoring that 0.1% of the websites that are so badly made they don't work on firefox? Do they really deserve your attention?

hbn5• 11 months ago

Sometimes yes. That 0.1% of sites could be me trying to buy a movie ticket or something. I'm not gonna cancel plans with a friend to see a movie because I need to protest Google that badly.

flkiwi3• 11 months ago

Or keep Chrome (or Chromium or even Edge if you have it installed anyway) for the rare use case when Firefox won't work?

dismalaf• 11 months ago

Vivaldi has a built in adblocker, no crapware, and is by the original founder of Opera. Also based on Chromium. My personal fav right now.

dblohm7• 11 months ago

This calls for a plug for https://webcompat.com/

Report compatibility issues and they'll either try to work with the websites or browser vendors to mitigate the issue.

Apocryphon3• 11 months ago

Maybe you should try Zen. Like Firefox, it's one of the few browsers that use Gecko, but it also aims to have modern design sensibilities similar to Arc. Or if you want to use non-Chromium WebKit, try Orion.

ecshafer• 11 months ago

This is not Dia the open source diagram editor. Apparently Dia is an AI chatbot that interacts with tabs.

eqvinox• 11 months ago

I was concerned about the diagram editor for about a minute. Now (especially after scrolling through comments here) I'm annoyed at wasting my attention on this junk.

coronapl• 11 months ago

I’m really curious to see how Dia will evolve toward being enterprise-ready. The Arc vision was sadly killed, and I assume the same might happen with Dia. Rather than competing with Claude for Chrome or Gemini in Chrome, it seems more likely it will become a conservative, secure AI browser tightly integrated into the Atlassian ecosystem.

delfinom• 11 months ago

RIP

al_borland3• 11 months ago

I lost all faith in The Browser Company when they went into a maintenance-only mode with Arc to shift to Dia, without any real announcement. Just a reply to a Twitter post calling them out. They figured no one would notice. I think they eventually addressed it after some public pressure, but I don’t think they sold the decision well.

AI seems like a feature to add to existing browsers, not something that needs its own dedicated browser. People’s workflows get tied to a browser, especially one like Arc, so to proclaim it done, with no need for any new features after just a couple years, while most expect a browser to carry on for decades, left a really bad taste in my mouth.

I was excited when they launched, but won’t miss them. They felt more like a dev backed hype machine. I’m not sure what Atlassian has planned, but won’t be surprised if they kill the browsers and integrate some tools into their existing product line.

julianozen4• 11 months ago

Yep, you nailed it.

Why would I try/migrate to a new workflow after they axed my old one. You can't rebuild customer trust after that

CarbonNanotubes5• 11 months ago

I just switched to Zen instead.

hbn5• 11 months ago

Hey, give them a break. Arc is like... 2 years old. You can't expect anyone to maintain legacy code THAT OLD!

That's like 17 hot new frameworks out of date!

julianozen4• 11 months ago

I've been using it for 4 years!

CarbonNanotubes5• 11 months ago

yea, I guess Google, Microsoft, Apple and Mozilla also ditch their work after only two years as well...

Also 2 years or even 4 years is not that long at all

muragekibicho• 11 months ago

The java, it is scripting, all day, every day, hakol hayom

amykhar3• 11 months ago

I also hated that they were trying to make it a free tool, which would mean selling user data to make money, and would require growth at all costs.

These days, I'm trying to migrate to paid tools. I would much rather work with a slower growing company that has a real business model other than grow and sell out.

thewebguyd3• 11 months ago

a real business model other than grow and sell out.

This is why I have problems trusting any new SaaS these days. The industry has changed from wanting to build a good product to wanting to grow fast and then exit, and typically the users get screwed.

You just can't trust that anything will stick around, so why bother adopting the tool in the first place, especially for anything that's not open source.

al_borland3• 11 months ago

Same. Old business models make more sense to me and seem healthier for customers, employees, and the economy. Growth at all costs, with the goal of a quick and profitable exit only benefits the founders, and is generally a net loss for society as a whole.

I can’t say I’d be above taking the briefcase full of money when dangled in front of my face, but when that’s the goal from the outset, the incentive structure feels backward.

lotsofpulp• 11 months ago

Assuming the business has access to the data, the backup plan for the business is always to sell the data. There is very little chance the leaders of a business simply wind down the business and close the doors.

knr23453• 11 months ago

I share your sentiment but still can’t imagine adding a browser-specific AI subscription alongside my current GPT or Claude sub.

blackqueeriroh13• 11 months ago

Dia was paid. Dia Pro cost $20/mo

felarof2• 11 months ago

I was a big fan of Arc too, they should at least open sourced it after abandoning.

Anyways, now we are building BrowserOS, an open-source alternative to Dia -- https://github.com/browseros-ai/BrowserOS

Leo_666• 11 months ago

I'm also a big fan of Arc, and I'm currently a heavy user. I have zero interest in the upcoming Dia release - I feel like Dia is a step backward compared to Arc.

neodymiumphish4• 11 months ago

Actually, I think the switch to Dia was them providing certain potential buyers proof that they (as a dev team) could build a new browser with a completely different UI and mindset/intent quickly. Essentially just something to prove their "Arc Dev Kit" efficiency.

uni_baconcat2• 11 months ago

The transition from Arc to Dia feels like Windows 10 to 11. They try to add new things to the old software, like Copilot on Windows and AI in Arc Max. But then they decide to make something entirely new instead, like Windows 11 and Dia.

sniffers7• 11 months ago

Building Dia was such a colossal mistake, and the folks running TBCNY seem to not understand. They believe they are reinventing the wheel, and every time I hear them talk I cringe.

whalesalad3• 11 months ago

Selling for over half a billion dollars sounds like zero mistakes were made.

afavour5• 11 months ago

Doesn't mean it isn't a mistake, just means you've conned someone into thinking your mistake was a good choice.

sniffers7• 11 months ago

They talk about their product like it's the reinvention of fire. Seems awful low for that. And if they made no mistakes, surely they wouldn't need to be acquired? Surely they'd be making their own money?

And there are plenty of stories of how they treat their employees that suggest there are absolutely mistakes being made.... company is a joke.

CarbonNanotubes5• 11 months ago

why does everything need to be about making macho bucks? Make a good product and support it long term, don't sell out just to fill your pockets

meshugaas2• 11 months ago

their valuation from last funding in March 2024 was $550m, sold for $610m minus cash on hand. so basically at value...agreed that it's a nice windfall for these folks but relatively bad outcome. When you're building a new browser with AI a year before the trillion dollar AI industry goes bananas for AI browsers and you end up with 600 mil, that feels like an L.

Reagan_Ridley2• 11 months ago

Dia was built for VC, no user will really like it.

lofaszvanitt• 11 months ago

Why on earth would they shelve out money for these horrible, totally mislead, borderline useless, alien like things (browsers)?

bichiliad• 11 months ago

The link seems to be serving a 404 (at least from the Arc Search app on iOS, ironically)

cwrichardkim• 11 months ago

Atlassian owns: jira, confluence, trello, bitbucket, loom, and a couple of other small products

It doesn’t feel like a strong strategic or product fit. These are all complex power user products meant to serve enterprises at scale. Integration doesn’t seem useful either. Bummer but congrats to the team!

Moto7451• 11 months ago

There’s a bunch of “AI” features being added to Jira if you’re a Jira Cloud customer. I don’t find them useful and maybe that’s a common issue. The features in Dia seem to kind of map to Jira and Confluence if you squint at it. Maybe this is just for that team to fix those features.

mananaysiempre3• 11 months ago

Thus far I’ve found Jira’s AI features to be basically nonsensical (and they’re constantly annoying me with downright childish amounts of bling, like if you asked a five-year-old to design a product box). So that seems perfectly in character.

All right, there’s a related-tickets feature that could have been great (witness the related-questions feature on Stack Overflow’s ask page, widely acknowledged to search better than the site’s actual search). It’s just no good at what it’s sup posed to do.

Esophagus4• 11 months ago

Agreed. Though I will say using the AI to JQL tool is nice.

And I use Confluence’s AI pretty often.

sevensor• 11 months ago

Jira’s AI features to be basically nonsensical

Unlike its other features?

blackqueeriroh13• 11 months ago

Completely disagree. Rovo has been an incredible game changer for us. It speeds up work by like 30% and brings context to information rapidly.

rollcat• 11 months ago

Atlassian broke both Trello and Bitbucket for me, so at least, thanks for acquiring these browsers before I got a chance to get attached?

blackqueeriroh13• 11 months ago

How did they break Bitbucket for you?

gbalduzzi2• 11 months ago

Arc will probably become a product for Atlassian paying users

pluc• 11 months ago

There's piles of money to be made training a model on content they have access to

findthewords• 11 months ago

Zen has replaced Arc for me nicely.

gniting3• 11 months ago

Zen does not handle tab sharing (when using Google Meet) gracefully. That's the only major blocker left.

gbalduzzi2• 11 months ago

Yeah I hope they are able to solve this and achieve feature parity with Arc

nottorp• 11 months ago

Hmm so those aren't alternative web browsers but "AI" crammed on top of ... chromium or something?

testfrequency• 11 months ago

The most impressive thing I find about this is that Atlassian felt compelled to buy a Chromium skinned browser running third party AI agents.

Did we learn nothing from Windsurf?

julianozen4• 11 months ago

Lots of respect to Josh Miller, the CEO. TBC got to a difficult place. They built a product that was very very good, but evidently not good enough to support the capital they raised or the workforce they hired.

I wish they had managed to keep Arc around. It's a product I'd glad pay for, and it seems like maybe there are enough fans that subscriptions could've supported a smaller team. Hopefully Atlassian doesn't kill it after 5 months

flkiwi3• 11 months ago

I know it's not fashionable to blame founders, but I genuinely don't understand this. What has he done to deserve "lots of respect" in the context of this conversation? TBC got to a difficult place because of their choices. Rugpulling users by creating a product nobody asked for, squandering investor money, cashing out by selling to a company antithetical to all the marketing copy TBC had produced to that point.

If you live by the rule that you only judge leaders by their actions and not by their words, TBC was a failure as soon as they abandoned Arc, and arguably when they couldn't provide a business case for Arc in the first place.

afavour5• 11 months ago

Lots of respect to Josh Miller, the CEO. TBC got to a difficult place. They built a product that was very very good, but evidently not good enough to support the capital they raised or the workforce they hired.

Was this not predictable from day one? There's no money in making a web browser. That ought to be obvious to anyone, let alone a superstar CEO. That they would end up selling the company seemed like a foregone conclusion.

I don't mean to disrespect the guy but I don't see much to credit here either. He had a problem, used VC cash to ignore it, then sold the company. Hardly uncommon in the tech world.

julianozen4• 11 months ago

I understand your point... but you can predict that every start-up will fail and probably be mostly right.

They built a product that many people liked. That's part of why so many people are angry about shutting down Arc. How does one tell during the rapid growth phase that things will level off and that actually even though a lot of people will like your product it won’t be enough to be a mass market success? They took a big swing, and they got a lot further than I thought they would.

And it seems like maybe he managed to swing an okay outcome for investors and hopefully employees too.

Edited:

Was this not predictable from day one? There's no money in making a web browser.

And to this point, before Google no one had cracked monetizing search. Before Facebook, no one had monetized social. No one had monetized online video before Youtube... this is what start ups do... they make people like and figure out how to monetize it

sniffers7• 11 months ago

Scuttlebutt is Josh Miller is pretty unpleasant to work with and believes Dia is like a holy revelation or something (rather than a chrome extension that calls ChatGPT for you).

What respect does delusions of grandeur and crashing out at Atlassian deserve?

don_neufeld• 11 months ago

Curious what you’ve heard.

I certainly enjoyed working with him and Hurst in the early days at Obvious 2.0 when we were incubating Branch.

A bunch of Medium & Obvious 2.0 alumni I respect work or worked at TBC (Dustin, DanB, Connor, Cemre, maybe others).

gniting3• 11 months ago

Details on the price Atlassian paid: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/04/atlassian-the-browser-compan...

outlore• 11 months ago

from a glitzy reimagining of "how we use the internet" to joining the ranks of shitty Jira...what an ending!

it's hard not to be bitter after they squandered so much goodwill by abandoning Arc

my personal thesis for consumer apps is that power users will always sustain over the latest hype cycle (even if that means your addressable market will be smaller - maybe don't take an obscene amount of VC money?)

The best thing to come out of Arc was the lovely design, the tab switcher, Nate's experiments on Twitter, the astounding welcome screen, Little Arc, the announcements which acknowledged the individual engineers etc. To me, those really pushed the boundaries. For that, thank you!

jeffwask• 11 months ago

Interesting idea. Replace a bunch of different clients with one for purpose client but the devil we be in the details.

afavour5• 11 months ago

I never understood how the Browser Company expected to be successful on its own terms. Now I guess we have the answer: they don't.

Wild that someone else's browser technology mixed with generic AI is worth $610m. Bubble, you say?

mirekrusin• 11 months ago

It's Xm, not Xb = peanuts.

uncircle• 11 months ago

How are they not successful? They are selling for $610M. Did you not think that was the goal all along?

Groxx3• 11 months ago

Imagine, a browser with the polished experience and performance of Jira

tom1337• 11 months ago

So Internet Explorer 11 you're saying?

jgpmm• 11 months ago

The one ticket Jira would never get? A speeding ticket.

cosmicgadget2• 11 months ago

I do love 500ms delays as yet another pop-up menu appears from one of the half-dozen redundant places in the UI.

afavour5• 11 months ago

$610m for a Chromium skin with generic AI bolted on feels like a lot. But what do I know?

gsoid• 11 months ago

It's for the team

dbbk4• 11 months ago

That team is not worth $610m

afavour5• 11 months ago

The team that made a Chromium skin with generic AI on top of it, yes

asystole• 11 months ago

They did well to get acquired before the AI bubble pops.

aravindputrevu• 11 months ago

Would Atlassian be building a agentic version for their AI Coding agent - Rovo.

ch4s3• 11 months ago

What a cursed thought.

ozim• 11 months ago

If that agent does jira stuff instead of me so I don’t have to ever see it again then I am all for it.

baq• 11 months ago

Literally no other reason for them to buy this

jdlyga2• 11 months ago

Arc Browser is an excellent "what could have been" story. The UI came together amazingly fast, there was excellent posts every week with updates from the project lead, and it felt fresh and exciting. It would be an amazing open source project, but there just not a good way to monetize it. There's no other browser, including newer projects like Zen, with a better ui. I would strongly encourage Atlassian to open source Arc.

kadomony• 11 months ago

I bet they were already in talks for being acquired and not open sourcing Arc was one of the conditions.

Who knows what Atlassian will do with it, but I did find it a bit frustrating that in the Atlassian blog announcing the acquisition, they showcase images of Arc when they're specifically talking about Dia. The two browsers do not have UI parity, and much of what I loved about Arc would need to be recreated in Dia.

ljbred083• 11 months ago

Exactly! I hope Atlassian actually has some sense: either Arc's UX needs to be merged into Dia or Dia's functionality needs to be merged into Arc. You can't keep either going otherwise.

petralithic• 11 months ago

What was the Browser Company even doing? First they had a successful consumer product with Arc as a Chrome clone, then they decided to shut it down for...a whole new browser called Dia that essentially acted as a browser extension that so many vibe coded clones were made of?

What was even the point of all this roundabout engineering and the time and manpower to do so? What a waste. This seems more like an acquihire than actually about IP.

ivanjermakov• 11 months ago

Why would anyone acquire a company that made a successful VSCode fork or a wrapped Chromium browser? I expect these people making such decisions to be far from understanding tech behind it.

Spivak• 11 months ago

Arc I think graduated from wrapper status, it was a really interesting and unique browser while it lasted.

conradev• 11 months ago

In The Browser Company’s case, they have a lot of engineers who work on Chromium. Not sure about the other wrapper companies!

alberth• 11 months ago

Cursor is a VSCode fork, generating reported $500M+ in revenue and is only a couple years old.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/05/cursors-anysphere-nabs-9-9...

nailer• 11 months ago

Because those companies own the customers.

ClaraForm• 11 months ago

I think the play was something along the lines of being "the new iOS". Lots of new apps (see: LLMs) are browser-first, forgoing building platform-targeting apps entirely. When they couldn't see any app devs lining up to build Arc-specific extensions, apps, or such, they pivoted. Dia was more of an LLM-host browser, with the play being they're hoping for OpenAI or Perplexity or one of the big foundation-players to "pay" to be the "exclusive" AI provider, like old-Google pays to be the default on Safari. But ... both plays didn't find any audience or customer, rightly so, as they didn't try to "fix" anything anyone actually considered a problem, just tried to build a niche their own. :(

jmull• 11 months ago

What was the Browser Company even doing?

Probably something like this all along.

If you have investors, and give away for free a product that costs a lot of money to develop, there is surely a strategy for those investors to get their money back, plus a lot more.

It doesn't always work, of course. But it seems to have worked well in this case.

netghost• 11 months ago

There was an interview with the founders not long ago on Every's podcast: https://every.to/podcast/inside-the-browser-company-why-they...

I never really got where the innovation was in Arc, and never got a chance to see or try Dia, but the interview at least gave me some empathy for what they were going for.

Ancapistani• 11 months ago

From my perspective, as a user, the big thing is compartmentalization.

Arc breaks the traditional paradigm of "bookmarks", using "Spaces" and "Pins" instead.

"Pins" are the closest to bookmarks. They appear at the top of the sidebar, and can be organized into folders. They differ from bookmarks in that they are pretty much native tabs that are unloaded until you open them.

"Spaces" are sets of tabs, both pinned and normal. You can associate a space with a specific profile, and each profile has separate cookies and such - but you don't have to.

From a usage perspective, pinned tabs instead of bookmarks mean that I can press Cmd+t and enter a URL, a search query, or the name of a pinned tab. It's smart enough to choose the correct one which means I don't have to think about it. That's handy, and was unique when I adopted it, but I'm sure it's either been implemented in other browsers or can be easily enough.

Spaces are _very_ handy, though. Right now, I have eight spaces. One "default" that I use normally, five for various projects I'm actively working on, one for a long-running project that requires me to log into a different Zoom account (so that one has its own profile, to prevent my accidentally being logged into the wrong Zoom account when joining a meeting), and one for personal stuff.

I have it on my list to look for an alternative and migrate, but it's still working for my needs. I'm going to miss it, though.

doix• 11 months ago

I never really got where the innovation was in Arc

I worked with a PM that absolutely loved it and insisted on using it. When he showed me it, all I could think of was "this is what my Firefox looked like before they killed XUL extensions".

polytely• 11 months ago

pivoting to AI to get the bag while getting acquired

uni_baconcat2• 11 months ago

I never really got where the innovation was in Arc

Arc on Windows was build in Swift. And they built Swift WinRT.

zero0529• 11 months ago

Alas the last piece of information falls into place

amykhar3• 11 months ago

I love the Arc Browser, but they discontinued development on that. I honestly have no interest in Dia at this point. AI is already available in any of the tools that I would want it in, and I don't think I would want any one company having visibility into more of my apps and data.

frankfrank13• 11 months ago

[flagged]

dang• 11 months ago

Can you please not do this here? We're trying for something a bit different:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

avazhi• 11 months ago

lol

Hug Firefox close, it's an awful world out there, especially with Google being given the greelight to continue their monopolising with Chrome.

I remember being tempted by this thing when it first came out - their asinine sign up waiting list kept me from pursuing it further and then I forgot about it until they eventually fully dumped it and moved into full AI-enshittification territory. There are really 30 years of reasons why most people will never trust a new entrant to the browser market - this is just the latest and probably greatest.

What a shitshow.

JohnFen2• 11 months ago

their asinine sign up waiting list kept me from pursuing it further

Yeah, this -- combined with the fact that their website told you nearly nothing about why their browser was worth signing up to something just to try it out someday -- is why I never used it. I don't personally know anyone who did.

It seemed dumb at the time -- I was actively looking for a better browser and certainly would have considered Arc, but they were determined to keep me from learning anything about it (let alone try it), so that never happened.

pezgrande• 11 months ago

Am I the only one having isses with Firefox on Linux? While playing videos the image sometimes freeze and the audio keeps playing. Ironically the best media-player so far has been Edge, even chrome have some issues. All installed from Fedora discovery store, so prob related to Flatpak packaging.

edoceo• 11 months ago

I'm on Gentoo using the firefox-bin package - things work great. Spotify all day, YouTubes, Vimeo, Zoom - even Teams works.

troyvit• 11 months ago

I personally don't have that issue with Netflix and Youtube on Firefox in kde-neon.

JohnFen2• 11 months ago

I have no such issues (Debian), but I also don't use the flatpak.

Groxx3• 11 months ago

flatpaks are sometimes funky with highly optimized software - they tend to need lower level access to hardware, which flatpakking sometimes gets in the way of.

check if you have hardware acceleration, maybe other stuff? `about:support` has lots of info, I've had to tweak a few things routinely to get browsers working like their native counterpart.

unregistereddev• 11 months ago

No issues browsing or playing media on Mint XFCE, but I'm not using Flatpak.

On old hardware (~10 year old laptop with a Core i5-5200u and integrated graphics), I do have trouble with Google Video calls lagging. This seems to be caused by a combination of old hardware and certain Google products being overly optimized for Chrome.

My guess is that you don't have hardware acceleration enabled. That could be due to Flatpak packaging, or it could be due to running a less-than-optimal graphics driver. Granted it's been awhile since I've tried the open source graphics drivers and I hear they have improved, but I've had better success with closed source graphics drivers.

blackqueeriroh13• 11 months ago

You mean the browser primarily funded by Google giving Mozilla a giant bucket of cash every year to be the default search engine for?

CarbonNanotubes5• 11 months ago

Honestly I think Dia and any other AI first browsers are a bad idea.You lose out on the exploratory nature of the web. How are you going to stumble upon a random nugget during a web search session that you never would have found otherwise. This kind of thing happens to be frequently when I don't go to AI to figure something out. I find a new product or new library for the language I am currently working with that may not solve my current issue but I come back to later to improve something I am working on.

The web as a whole is also built on this discovery and people visiting pages and interacting with other. This gets lost when you get into the flow of just AI'ing everything.

utyop224• 11 months ago

Yeah I question how many people are actually true innovators and researchers.

Much of my ideas are the results of deep thought but those really great ideas are sporadic at times!

jshchnz• 11 months ago

$610M, all cash??? How were they worth that much... all they seemed to ever do was rebrand

Waraqa• 11 months ago

"Arc isn’t just a Chromium fork. It runs on custom infrastructure we call ADK — the Arc Development Kit. Think of it as an internal SDK for building browsers (especially those with imaginative interfaces). That’s our secret sauce. It lets ex-iOS engineers prototype native browser UI quickly, without touching C++."

https://open.substack.com/pub/browsercompany/p/letter-to-arc...

scosman• 11 months ago

A UI framework? What’s the other $608m for?

manquer2• 11 months ago

Is a browser SDK for iOS worth that kind of money targeted users who are comfortable with Objective-C and not C++ even a market of note.

It would be one thing if they said it is for say JS developers or something a-la electron there are plenty of apps from MS teams to slack to linear etc who perhaps would pay for that enough, but swift /objective C dev not comfortable with c++ would be minuscule market ?

cosmicgadget2• 11 months ago

Sounds perfect for Atlassian's love of "imaginative" interfaces.

hahn-kev2• 11 months ago

How's that different from Electron?

weaksauce• 11 months ago

that's kinda funny since that's basically exactly how firefox does it with the chrome of the browser being javascript and html and css itself.

IshKebab• 11 months ago

Cool, but $600m cool? I don't see how.

buzzert• 11 months ago

Probably a Swift wrapper for the Chromium Embedded Framework.

rafram5• 11 months ago

For all those playing at home: this blog post contains 46 em-dashes.

theappsecguy• 11 months ago

I mean have you seen some of the valuations for VSCode forks with some AI slapped on haha. I agree that this seems a lot for what I assume is a product with no solid revenue stream

djoldman• 11 months ago

100% agree. The odds of this investment paying off feel slim to none.

guluarte• 11 months ago

It would have made sense if they had a large user base or groundbreaking tech, but they are just a Chrome fork with a very niche set of users.

NoteyComplexity• 11 months ago

Probably they were just chasing the hype because the word AI appeared in the browser, considering the news mentions “browser with AI features”. So does their acquisition news.

I hope I am wrong.

eigencoder• 11 months ago

What a shame! I've loved Arc, haven't been able to give it up even though it's now maintenance-only. It was nearly dead, I'm sure Atlassian will finish it off.

exabrial• 11 months ago

Arc brwoser literally required "creating an account" in order to... download text files (html) over a TCP socket, off the internet, and parse/display them.

It could have been awesome. But this stopped me dead in my tracks. Hard pass and I gave them no recommendations to anyone.

__loam• 11 months ago

Just so many decisions that made it unusable from a business continuity perspective.

bastawhiz• 11 months ago

Well, it was a good run.

Insanity• 11 months ago

In terms of newer browsers, I started playing around with Zen after seeing a post about it on HN some weeks ago. So far, really liking that experience. It's not without bugs (i.e, 'compact mode' shortcut works about 50% of the time lol).

But, the UI is good (to me), and I like that it's based on FF rather than another Chromium shell.

I should say though, I don't consider myself a 'power user', and I'm not a web developer so never user the dev tools.

crowcroft6• 11 months ago

The strategic insight behind Arc was perfect – your browser IS the Operating System, and so we should build a browser that can function as that platform.

Arc had pretty good market validation with early adopters, they say that growth was flattened out but IMO that's normal for most products, and it's up to the company to find out WHY growth flattened and then solve that problem. Not kill the product and chase some entirely new idea about AI.

I wouldn't be surprised if the investors were fed up with the business and wanted out, pretty good exit all things considered.

cryptozeus2• 11 months ago

100% on point, classic case of drinking ai cool aid and killing what users wanted

crowcroft6• 11 months ago

The thing is they make the correct diagnoses of Arc's issues [1], but then instead of addressing them and doing the hard work of building a great product, they took the easy way out and started another greenfield project. How often has that ever been a good decision?

1 - https://browsercompany.substack.com/p/letter-to-arc-members-...

hahn-kev2• 11 months ago

I think that we should be fine with growth flattening out.

rvz3• 11 months ago

Spent more money on marketing + steve jobs cosplaying than building a browser that is better than chrome but had zero revenue for years to show for it.

They betted on the possibility that OpenAI or Perplexity would buy them. With the Google monopoly suit not requiring them to sell Chrome after all, there was no reason to raise any more money as they continued to lose money.

That looks like an exit on terrible terms, like Humane and HP.

crowcroft6• 11 months ago

All things considered the cash looks pretty good – maybe not the deal they wanted, but doesn't look bad all things considered.

rafram5• 11 months ago

Hard for it not to be better than Chrome, considering that it’s a Chrome fork with a few years of extra engineering thrown at it.

bhouston2• 11 months ago

The strategic insight behind Arc was perfect – your browser IS the Operating System, and so we should build a browser that can function as that platform.

Marc Andreessen said famously (or at least is paragraphed as saying) in 1994 that the "Browser is the Operating System" and people have been doing riffs on that since then.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/04/22/always...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/09/software-...

This was also the idea behind Chromebooks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChromeOS

crowcroft6• 11 months ago

Which is why tactics are so important. I would say no one has actually got the experience right yet, 'browser is the OS' has been true for a long time, and no one has delivered it yet.

Similar to ambient computing and augmented reality.

scrlk• 11 months ago

Marc Andreessen said famously (or at least is paragraphed as saying) in 1994 that the "Browser is the Operating System" and people have been doing riffs on that since then.

Isn't that downstream of Sun Microsystems’ old slogan: The Network is the Computer?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Network_is_the_Computer

hippo22• 11 months ago

Sometimes there isn't a reason why a product fails to find broad product adoption. If you take VC money, you need a mega hit. Sometimes, all you find is a niche.

wslh• 11 months ago

In 1994 the browser was not an operating system, was an hyperlink media app. JavaScript was born in 1995 and for years was “only” used for modifying the colors of HTML buttons on a mouse-over.

creatonez• 11 months ago

The strategic insight behind Arc was perfect – your browser IS the Operating System, and so we should build a browser that can function as that platform.

I'm sorry, but this is the exact same insight that MSN Explorer had. And everyone in retrospect sees that as an absolute spamfest. Ironically, in a very similar way as AI features are seen today.

foobarchu2• 11 months ago

Similarly, isn't this the insight that led to both ChromeOS and FirefoxOS?

dehrmann2• 11 months ago

I'm sorry, but this is the exact same insight that MSN Explorer had

The internet wasn't fast enough. There are a number of dot-com era ideas that were before their time for various reasons. There's also Wordle. That game could have been made (and I think variants were) for at least a 20-year window, but it caught on late in the pandemic when our streaming queues were exhausted.

mattlutze2• 11 months ago

I'm a little surprised how many Chromium browser builders we have in the market, and how each continues to convince a group of investors that _they_ are going to be the ones to finally get it right, while still building on Chrome's skeleton.

But, there's a bunch on WebKit and Gecko as well.

crowcroft6• 11 months ago

On the other hand, it's kind of crazy no one can make an OS except Windows, Apple and Google? Trillion dollar market and no one can compete.

blehn• 11 months ago

Isn't that basically the same premise as Chrome, which already dominates the market? Google even made something called ChromeOS. Arc wasn't really more than a distracting skin on Chromium with a few innovative bits of UI...

bageljlin17• 11 months ago

Exactly, they basically have better designer. For the real tech feature, I really don't think they ever brings any new invention to the product. Data sync, AI, etc. All other competitors have these features. They even need to count on chromium update.

al_borland3• 11 months ago

This wasn't a new insight by Arc. ChromeOS exists. Palm's WebOS was a thing. Even Apple pitched rich web apps as the avenue for 3rd party developers to make things for the original iPhone, they were just a bit too early. There is even Electron, for web apps to run as desktop apps on all major operating systems. Most browsers can also turn any website into a self-contained web app that lives along side other local apps.

I don't think Arc ever realized their vision. They gave some cryptic ideas of their vision for the future of the web, but I don't feel like they fundamentally changed anything. I was expecting Arc to eventually get to a place where I could login to Arc on any computer and have my home session, always up to date anywhere I was. Of course, this idea would have been a lot better in the 90s or 00s when computer labs were more common and everyone didn't have a computer in their pocket. The value of a cloud OS isn't as appealing as it once was.

In terms of growth flattening out; they threw in the towel too early. It was only after they stopped adding new features and decided to give up on Arc that it seemed to really start to get traction. I was seeing blog posts and YouTube videos left and right about Arc, all while knowing that it was effectively dead, but the memo never made it to the people who just found it and were sharing it like crazy. A new browser from a new company, that piggybacks on the browser that already has 70+% marketshare isn't going to take over the world in a few years. It was a long play and they were too impatient, and had already given up by the time they started to get some real traction outside of the early adopter space.

I remember when Firefox really hit the mainstream. Friends would see friends using IE, and push them out of the way to install Firefox. It felt very grass roots, but it worked... it just took time.

chillfox• 11 months ago

Doesn't help that it didn't run on Linux (where a lot of people are willing to check out new tech), I kept checking in on it a few times a year, but it was never available. I have gotten people to use Firefox and Chrome in the past, but I did not push Arc to anyone as I could not use it myself.

fastball• 11 months ago

Apple wasn't early, they realized that they don't own the web, and therefore that web apps are much worse for them as a business than owning an exclusive App Store.

niutech5• 11 months ago

You forgot about Firefox OS, which had a fully web-based UI.

barrell• 11 months ago

IIRC growth wasn’t flattening, it was growing pretty fast, basically hockey stick. It just wasn’t hockey stick enough to get to a billion users quickly.

At least, that was their justification publicly, maybe the real numbers were less optimistic

cryptozeus2• 11 months ago

We switched from jir to linear, what a fresh starts !

acl• 11 months ago

Any guesses as to what this means for Arc?

I absolutely love Arc for Mac. It gets all the little things right -- at least for my workflow and mindset. But "getting all the little things right" in a browser isn't something you can monetize.

chipotle_coyote• 11 months ago

What it means, I suspect, is that you should look into the Zen browser for Mac (and Windows and Linux, to boot), which is very clearly heavily Arc-inspired but not aiming for VC Unicorn status.

https://zen-browser.app/

Illniyar• 11 months ago

Isn't Atlassian where products go to die? :)

Is this is an acquihire? Atlassian does not seem to have strategic overlap with making a browser in any meaningful way I can think of.

cpach• 11 months ago

I think Atlassian is kind of trying to be the Lotus Notes of the 20s. If so, I can see why their upper management approved this acquisition.

Will anything good come out of it…? I could be wrong, but I seriously doubt it.

blackqueeriroh13• 11 months ago

Which products have ton to Atlassian to die?

ghiculescu• 11 months ago

Hipchat RIP

TiredOfLife• 11 months ago

Trello

sangeeth96• 11 months ago

I'd like to be proven wrong but I'm feeling the same point Carmack was making about not building "VR" operating systems[1][2] applies to "AI" browsers as well. It seems like a futile effort especially considering revenue generation and it seems pointless to not pick Chromium for that even if you're hellbent on going down that road.

[1] https://xcancel.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1961172409920491849 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45066395

bradhe• 11 months ago

This is going to be remembered as a really weird tale in the annals of our industry’s history.

dbg31415• 11 months ago

Like grandpa always said: "When a company lays off staff so the founders can buy an island, it's time to move to GitHub Projects." Ha!

Here are the real reasons to drop Atlassian:

1 -- You're already paying for GitHub. Atlassian has no alternative to GitHub Actions, and nothing else matches it at scale.

2 -- GitHub works better with AI coding tools, most dev tools, and most CI/CD pipelines. Open source is ~5x more likely to be on GitHub than anywhere else.

3 -- Your devs like GitHub more. Honestly, everyone does. The only person who tolerates Jira is the guy who thinks changing fonts on TPS reports counts as productivity.

4 -- And the best part: you can close an issue with a pull request. If you can't tie a task to the code commit, and show clean automated tests before merging, that's not project management -- it's project theater.

thor-rodrigues• 11 months ago

I’m not sure whether I find it more worrisome or fascinating that we live in a world where a company that, as far as I know, has never generated a single dollar in revenue has managed to exist for over five years, employ more than 100 people, and still get acquired for this amount.

This isn’t criticism or sarcasm — I’m genuinely impressed, but also very curious about the rationale behind it.

rvz3• 11 months ago

VCs are not allowed to lose.

BoorishBears• 11 months ago

Atlassian invested in their series A. Atlassian decided Atlassian isn't allowed to lose

porridgeraisin2• 11 months ago

Atlassian essentially got a big fairly locked-in userbase that they will now squeeze using their existing proven mechanisms. Oh and they probably got a few free competent developers without needing to go through an expensive hiring process.

All told, probably worth 610M.

mritchie712• 11 months ago

are they locked-in tho? People loved Arc, but they killed it. Doesn't seem the reviews of Dia are all that great.

gniting3• 11 months ago

Browser users are not (by default) Atlassian ICPs so IMO there's zero lock-in. I am going to most likely change my browser very shortly because I don't see Atlassian building out Arc. TBC raised $50M, they and their investors got a good return in a short amount of time. This chapter is now closed.

colelyman• 11 months ago

Agreed, to make it even more interesting Browser Company discontinued Arc earlier this year. So not only did they do all of the things OP listed, but also didn't have a current product when acquired.

emoII3• 11 months ago

Where can I read about this? It still gets regular updates and is front and center on the browser company website

ar_lan• 11 months ago

They have "Dia" - which is Chrome + AI chat?

https://www.diabrowser.com/

MarcelOlsz2• 11 months ago

My experience with Arc was installing it, asking myself "I have to pay to change the app icon? wtf" and uninstalling it. Horrendous UI as well.

mikodin• 11 months ago

My hunch is a loyal user base.

Anecdotally, everyone I put onto Arc and the person who put me on still uses it.

I’ve been using Arc for the last two years and was genuinely sad on its discontinuation. I now don’t really know what I’ll do when it goes away.

darth_avocado3• 11 months ago

There are some businesses that are simply not viable without losing money first. SpaceX cannot generate revenue until it first employs hundreds of people for a few years (maybe a decade) where they focus on building what will eventually bring revenue. Software has those problems too.

turnsout2• 11 months ago

I mean this with no snark: I would love to see the investor deck that explains how an AI-powered browser is going to make any multiple of $610M.

anon191928• 11 months ago

yeah and what makes them different compared to half baked fraud startups with no revenue ? most of the world would not believe that they will bring revenue in years?

echelon• 11 months ago

I can't tell you how many designers I interviewed who told me they used the Arc browser. It was at least a dozen.

I'd never heard of the damned thing before.

I don't know why, but it appears to be popular with some creative demographics.

The browser is an essential pane of glass to platformization and taxing the web. Anyone who wins a browser with significant market share has a huge opportunity to capitalize on.

Not sure if Arc is that browser, but lots of teams are trying.

Chrome is shitty on purpose because it is designed to sell ads. Other browsers can sell AI or other things to fund their development.

It's a shame we don't have a good open source browser with decent leadership anymore. I'm sure they'd be killing it. I could swear Mozilla is led by a revolving door of paid off Google plants.

ChrisMarshallNY• 11 months ago

I'm told that it can take ten years for a vineyard to start generating profit.

pqtyw2• 11 months ago

And there are business which will never be highly profitable unless the competition implodes for no particular reason (like making your own browser).

dkyc• 11 months ago

I would think of it that way:

- no company generates revenue in its first second. Even if you start a lemonade stand tomorrow, you'll have to buy some lemons first. The time-to-revenue might be very short, but it's never zero. Therefore, making no revenue for 1 day or for 10 years is not a step change, but simply a point on a curve.

- Capitalism is basically a long history of creating vehicles with increasing sophistication to bridge that gap: provide funding for ventures that have returns in the future. This is intrinsically difficult, and it's easy to waste money, but it can work immensely. This started with the Dutch inventing limited liability corporations to fund ship expeditions, and today's VC is essentially an extension of that.

- It has worked well in the past to bet on companies that don't optimize for time-to-revenue, but something else – famous examples being e.g. Amazon, Google, Meta, who all lost lots of money initially.

Hence there can be companies that make no money for quite a while. And it can even turn out that the vast majority of the companies that make no money for a while never make any money. Accepting this risk is a feature, not a bug.

mrkramer2• 11 months ago

- no company generates revenue in its first second. Even if you start a lemonade stand tomorrow, you'll have to buy some lemons first. The time-to-revenue might be very short, but it's never zero. Therefore, making no revenue for 1 day or for 10 years is not a step change, but simply a point on a curve.

Yea, it's called investment. If you want to get rich overnight play lottery or start gambling.

specialist• 11 months ago

Atlassian has always baffled me. In that JBoss sort of way.

Explaining why they're successful and I'm not.

ruszki• 11 months ago

Luck. It’s always just luck.

Of course, you need to have other ingredients too, but hundreds of millions, if not even billions of people have those skills too. Who win more among them is pure luck.

And in that, of course a ton of predetermined parameters, like where you born, who your parents are, what your skin color is, etc.

I have a friend who is worse in almost every skills which matter in our work. Not much worse, he is still awesome in his job. But I’m better. Every single person who saw us work in comparable environments would tell you the same thing. His career is still better than mine. And the single reason is that he born in wealth. He had the opportunity to live without income for years, and kick off a startup, and try to start some others, and simply try out, and risk things which I couldn’t do. Nothing else. Pure luck.

trhway2• 11 months ago

less than a $6M/head - it is a steal. Not even counting whatever IP they have.

rafram5• 11 months ago

How much do you think it costs to hire people?

blackqueeriroh13• 11 months ago

This is nothing new.

BenFranklin100• 11 months ago

Arc had privacy concerns. How will those concerns be addressed by Atlassian, given they handle very sensitive data?

ricokatayama• 11 months ago

They messed with Dia thing. Arc had a clear value proposition, a better browser for power users. I'd pay for that, mostly because the browser itself, but also because they had pretty straightforward approaches on their communication, how small things work, how bad features should be removed and so on...

I never understood Dia. ofc I downloaded Dia and tried using it a while, but never clicked on the agent bar. They told somewhere sometime that they were seeking a bigger user base. Dia definitely is not that place. A browser powered by AI definitely is nothing something beyond the geek/early adopter crew.

Things become worse when we think about how they handled this whole situation. Sometimes shady, sometimes with a lot of arrogance and always shunning off their loyal users.

We don't have the whole information, of course the team and maybe investors know better in details what happened, but definitely things weren't going well. The recent tweet from the design guy cheering up the side bar is almost a suffocated scream from the team imo.

From the company journey perspective that's a depressing way to have an exit. Wish them the best, but I'm deleting any traces of TBC from my computer.

Pfhortune3• 11 months ago

It has been so tragic to see the unforced downfall of this company. Arc is such an amazing browser that really did some new and interesting things. They clearly have some phenomenal talent on the team, having managed to get their swift-centric development working on _Windows_. That's a huge and difficult undertaking!

And they threw it away to work on (probably) the CEO's new fixation and threw Arc away like an old toy. And now they're selling to Atlassian and I would bet money, will just evaporate. Nothing they ever built will mean anything to Atlassian in the long term. Nobody wants to use an Atlassian browser.

taminka3• 11 months ago

having managed to get their swift-centric development working on _Windows_. That's a huge and difficult undertaking!

im not a swift expert, but building your project for one of the officially supported targets shouldn't be considered a "phenomenal" achievent? lol

Pfhortune3• 11 months ago

Ah, fair enough. Showing my ignorance on that one. I know little about their tech stack and was under the impression they had some secret sauce.

askonomm• 11 months ago

I recall something about them trying to get SwiftUI working on Windows, which would've been a pretty big thing indeed. No idea if they ever did or how exactly they built the Windows UI in the end.

basisword3• 11 months ago

The achievement wasn't building Swift code on Windows, it was using Swift to build a native Windows application utilising Windows API's.

https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-everywhere-windows-interop/

jshier• 11 months ago

Considering TBC hired the one guy doing anything with Swift on Windows and paid for much of the work needed to make Windows an officially supported platform, it was still an achievement. I'm not even sure I'd call Windows officially supported since most of the support comes from TBC and not Apple or official Swift channels.

neutronicus2• 11 months ago

Nobody wants to use an Atlassian browser.

False.

On my work machine, I would grasp at any straw that promised to make JIRA less annoying.

Pfhortune3• 11 months ago

Based on my usage of Jira over the years, I believe all the annoying parts of Jira come from _within_ the walls of Atlassian HQ...

milkshakes• 11 months ago

Or they could take that money and actually improve the UX instead of needing an AI to navigate it?

makeitdouble2• 11 months ago

Did any Atlassian product ever make JIRA less annoying ?

My impression was JiRA is the planet and everything else are satellites turning around. They come and go but never touch JIRA.

tombert2• 11 months ago

I hate Jira like all good people, though in fairness I haven't really found a replacement for it that I actually liked.

The closest I've used was Pivotal Tracker, which I believe is dead now, but I still remember finding stuff annoying about it (though drawing a blank on those facts right now). I wonder if dedicated ticket management stuff at scale is just inherently going to be annoying.

I use Obsidian with the Tasks plugin as a Jira-lite, and for whatever reason it doesn't bother me. I think it's because I can tune it however I want without a bunch of menus and write my own arbitrary queries, but I also think part of the appeal is that the tasks can be part of my notes, instead of a separate application (which is why I couldn't stick with OmniFocus).

stephenhandley• 11 months ago

Hammer meet everything is a nail

jonas21• 11 months ago

If going from a product with miniscule market share and no revenue to a $610M exit is a tragic unforced downfall, I really need to start failing more.

aiiizzz• 11 months ago

Failing upwards in a nutshell

faizmokh• 11 months ago

Nobody wants to use Atlassian browser.

I don't want to use Jira either but yet I can't run away from it

cush• 11 months ago

It's so hard to switch browsers yet I took the leap on Arc, putting so much faith in this company that they wouldn't sell out. Such a waste of an incredible product.

jcmontx• 11 months ago

Switched to Zen last week over a bug that prevented me from opening my favs. Good timing to jump ship.

bhouston2• 11 months ago

Why were they acquired at that price? What is the competitive/technological advantage that Atlassian is acquiring?

I am a little confused because at first glance their product appeared to fail to find a market.

There must be something of value here.

drewbeck2• 11 months ago

The only natural synergy I can see is with Arc – PMs and product people loved Arc (myself, a designer, included). There's a very interesting play to be made by capitalizing on that market but IDK if that's what Atlassian is thinking.

drewbeck2• 11 months ago

I'm a huge fan of Arc and generally not a fan of TBCNY due to their abandonment of the browser for their AI hype machine, Dia. What's odd about this acquisition is that the move to Dia was (publicly) presented as a move toward the consumer; that consumers weren't ready for a radical reinvention of the browser interface so it made sense to revert to something more standard if you wanted to do something new with the browser.

I always saw Dia as fundamentally a move toward AI investor bux, but I did find the "Arc was too novel for large uptake" a reasonable perspective.

Atlassian, tho, has nothing for the regular every-day consumer, they make SaaS for business. So what's the deal?

My dream for Arc, from the beginning, was that it could act as a middle-man between all the various SaaS platforms we use daily at work. Imagine: your Shortcut tickets link automatically to Slack and you can one-click open the relevant Slack channel in a side-by-side view.

We do so much switching between contexts and imo the browser could be a great surface for improving our workflows.

NaomiLehman• 11 months ago

Opera and Vivaldi have some impressive features up their sleeves. Similar philosophies to Arc Browser. Worth giving them a try!

joeblubaugh• 11 months ago

Atlassian, tho, has nothing for the regular every-day consumer, they make SaaS for business. So what's the deal?

sometimes you just find a big enterprise sucker who's desperate to stay relevant.

blackqueeriroh13• 11 months ago

Atlassian, tho, has nothing for the regular every-day consumer, they make SaaS for business. So what's the deal?

Do you know why Windows computers ended up dominating the home PC market?

Because everyone was using them at work, and they wanted the same experience they were familiar with.

Hundreds of millions of regular old people use Atlassian’s products every day at work.

If they get familiar with a browser that helps them get their work done faster, they’ll demand it at home, too.

rafram5• 11 months ago

Atlassian, tho, has nothing for the regular every-day consumer, they make SaaS for business.

They do - Trello.

i1856511• 11 months ago

Can somebody please tell me what is the business play behind The Browser Company. It has always seemed very suspicious to me, well-funded, not making money, and now this

praz4HN2• 11 months ago

Same as Edge & Chrome - primarily to funnel users to web pages, which in turn powers engagement/searches & ads. Once you have enough users on a browser, the business play is ad revenue.

warkdarrior• 11 months ago

How do Edge & Chrome collect ad revenue?

kdazzle• 11 months ago

If the AI browser can use Jira for us, then this is a step forward for humanity.

yrcyrc• 11 months ago

Been an Atlassian consultant for a while and I just left (Rather I was let go) from an established Atlassian partner, and I can only feel relief. I was always more of a data center on prem person and all this cloud nonsense has been going nowhere, except for them. Those acquisitions are always half baked and you *might see some of it somewhere in a product. All I can say is I’m happy I’m no longer doing Atlassian consulting.

rank02• 11 months ago

Arc always interested me for the UX and design choices (especially since I'm one of those who constantly has 100s of tabs open). But the account requirement is a hard blocker for me adopting as my daily driver. Anyone know of similar projects? I recall there being a arc-inspired linux-supported project, but they refused to sign their macOS release for god knows what reason.

NoGravitas3• 11 months ago

Have you tried Zen?

rank02• 11 months ago

Just did! Been great so far!

jhaile• 11 months ago

I still use Arc as my primary browser. I prefer tabs on the side - I like how you can just drag tabs up and they will be saved (like Bookmarks, but I actually use it) I like pinned tabs which I use for calendar and my other top used "web apps"

It also has good support for profiles and spaces. For example, I have a "Work" space, a "Demo" space (with tabs open for sales demos), a "Personal" space, and even a "Travel" space for travel planning stuff.

And another killer feature is the ability to "route" specific urls to specific spaces, so for example I can have all github links open in my "Work" space.

It's a great browser, and I hope Atlassian doesn't ditch ongoing support for it.

fwip• 11 months ago

Zen is a Firefox-based browser that has copied a lot of Arc's good ideas, if you are looking for an alternative.

buddhu• 11 months ago

For what it's worth, and from what you've described (I haven't used Arc myself), most of those features are also available in Firefox with the Sidebery extension. Instead of "spaces" it has "tab panels", with a horizontal row of icons above your tabs that lets you switch to different panels of vertical tabs. You can pin tabs in a panel, you can setup URL patterns to automatically move tabs to the right panel, and it works with Firefox's multi-account containers so you can even have an URL automatically re-opened in a specific container associated with that panel.

[Side note: I'm hooked on Firefox's multi-account container feature because I can have different containers for general use, for work, isolated social media containers, etc, without needing an entirely different profile as in Chrome/Chromium and its variants. I've tried Vivaldi and other Chrome-based alternatives recently, but profiles are just too big of a separation by comparison, with separate extensions, bookmarks, settings, etc. I want all those things in one synced account where I can just open new tabs with their own set of signed-in accounts. Does Arc's profile feature have the same level of separation as Chrome? Am I missing something about how Chrome profiles work?]

And for anyone concerned about Firefox's recent statement about personal data, there's a great Firefox-based alternative called Waterfox that adds some nice features and has a much stronger emphasis on privacy.

pzshaikh• 11 months ago

Yes, most of these features are available in Brave. You have Vertical tabs, split view, pinned tabs, grouped tabs, tab sneak previews, tab search, in built AI assistant. Instead of 'spaces' you have old fashioned profiles, single windowed space switcher would be nice to have in Brave. Arc also has a nice Tidy tabs feature.

jimmyshoes2• 11 months ago

I’ll never understand why they didn’t even bother to experiment with monetization for Arc.

Normally, I’d scoff at the idea. But they genuinely made the browser useful again in ways for which I’d happily shill $30/mo. Superhuman proved you can do it for email, which was also previously laughable. I guess that ended in a buyout, too, but at least they tried.

Arc also had a solid wedge into team space, especially if going AI-native was their little dream.

You own the browser. Just build a capable browser-first agent that helps teams do work. Make it a shared space (separate from personal ofc) and start charging for teams.

As I write this, it’s pretty clear that’s what Atlassian wants to do with this. The only real loss is: - They decided to roundtrip the entire product story of Arc with Dia, and drag users through 0->1 again - It’s Atlassian, and you know they’re gonna suffocate anything that isn’t related to Atlassian

All in all, this looks like a fear-based sellout. They could have done it on their own but didn’t have the chops to scale into a company of that size. So instead they took the guaranteed payoff and tucked themselves inside this big ** kangaroo’s pouch for safety while they get to play with AI indefinitely.

“We coulda been something real.”

————

EDIT: unironically, they now offer the option to pay $20/mo for Dia Pro… it’s basically comedy at this point.

chuckreynolds• 11 months ago

WELP..... that was a fun run. Probably switch back to chrome at some point.

coffeeling• 11 months ago

I've tried their Arc Search mobile browser, and the UX is just absolute trash unless you're specifically using it via search only workflows. It's not really a browser in the normal sense.

screye• 11 months ago

I bet this is a computer use agents play. It's an acquisition of Perplexity Comet's main competitor.

Atlassian is in the 'productivity' business. The natural next step is to allow agents to do the productivity tasks for you.

Agents rely on semantics (ie. business logic). Often, business logic lives on the frontend, with backend API calls having little resemblance to their intended business outcome. This means computer use agents, inefficient as they may be, win by default.

Browser automation is fragile and needs a lot of domain knowledge to do robustly. Why not acquire a group that literally built their own browser ?

rmonvfer• 11 months ago

I use Arc as my primary browser but, well, I guess I won’t be using an Atlassian browser (only thinking about it sounds insane) because we all know what will happen with telemetry and tracking.

I’ve been using Zen [1] on and off for some time but it’s time to go full time on Firefox again!

It’s such a shame tho, Arc is a great browser and I’ve felt more productive using it, not to mention the UI, which is cleaner and just slicker than any other browser.

[1] https://zen-browser.app

karel-3d• 11 months ago

Finally, I can have JIRA in my face all the time while I browse

abrowne2• 11 months ago

Surely the Browser Company will move to Jira, even though it's using a direct competitor for Product Management... https://linear.app/customers/browsercompany Heh.

thecrumb• 11 months ago

Say it with me. Bubble.

xyst• 11 months ago

I don’t understand why the most hated ticket managing system is acquiring a browser? They want to further bloat a browser with their crappy ticket management system? And AI?

What’s the play here? Just throwing money into anything AI at this point and seeing what sticks?

basisword3• 11 months ago

It's sad the tech industry is in such a state that a team can build a really great, innovative product, and then have to abandon it to create a little bit of AI slop so they can sell that to a company that is completely unrelated to that products market.

You have a great product, passionate users, and you have to throw it all away (because you've accepted too much money from investors who don't care about anything other than quick returns).

daft_pink• 11 months ago

I feel like I’m in the wrong business lol

user3939382• 11 months ago

People I respect like it but Google is a non starter and always was for me. Still sad to see no diversity in the browser space. I’m convinced the web, app stores, and HTTP all have to go.

wouldbecouldbe• 11 months ago

Maybe finally Jira will be fast?

dbbk4• 11 months ago

I don't say this lightly, but this disgusts me. $610M for a dead company with no future and no revenue. So much good can be done in the world with that kind of cash. Disgusting.

pmkary• 11 months ago

When I git Arc, I thought "how are they going to monetize this?" Red flag I just didn't take seriously. Then I saw remains of the chromium branding, they hadn't even changed the icon. I thought this isn't time consuming, why they haven't done such a thing? And honestly it felt like one of those ADHD brains that go to many ideas and never finish any, Arc was exactly one in every sense. I knew this was huge red flag but then the beautiful interface (which till this day is—after Apple's—the most crafted and beautiful one) made me break my lines. I knew this could not keep going. Arc Search is a horrible browse, and I actually always used it because it was syncing with the desktop, the desktop was broken in so many different places that I cannot name (just try to open the downloads and you see). And well Arc is just another browser with some ideas borrowed from here and there. I mean it's still some sandboxed web frames, nothing integrated, no special new feature and infrastructure to make the browser an OS. My whole point with this is that it astonishes me how they never finish anything (Arc, Arc Sync, Arc Search, Arc Windows, Easels...) and they actually sell big time and have all of this hype around them

dcreater• 11 months ago

What was ground breaking about Arc? The tabs on the side had been possible with other browsers for a long time

thunkle• 11 months ago

Live github PRs that you are tagged in.

democracy4• 11 months ago

Atlassian want to look cool being on the AI edge - nothing more )) But tbh looks a bit stupid but its owners/top management are living in the ivory tower for decades now, so no suprises here

blackqueeriroh13• 11 months ago

lol, you should actually try using the Ai feature inside Atlassian’s products, they’re pretty revolutionary

smoyer• 11 months ago

Two more browsers that Confluence and Jira can fail in!

back2dafucha• 11 months ago

Someone just bought your browsing history.

[DELETE] [ARC]

webworker• 11 months ago

Arc was the only Chrome browser that I could stomach as a development browser/environment. Kind of tight-lipped, but I assume it'll keep getting updates?

I use Safari day-to-day, but its behaviors are inconsistent with caching which makes development hell. I notice this caching behavior even when you have it disabled in the network developer tools.

827a• 11 months ago

Is this the most valuable acquisition of a zero revenue company ever? I understand there's been larger acquisitions of unprofitable companies, but zero revenue at all is truly special.

yroc92• 11 months ago

Was WhatsApp 0 revenue?

ehfeng• 11 months ago

No, WhatsApp charged a $1 annual subscription fee prior to 2016.

usr11062• 11 months ago

To be honest I don't understand the logic in acquisation and I don't care. As a forced Jira user I just hope it's a good thing for me that the money they have spent on the acquisation cannot be used to make already overloaded Jira more overloaded.

3uler2• 11 months ago

Another excellent product off to the gallows at atlasian. Joining ops genie and trello.

blackqueeriroh13• 11 months ago

Opsgenie still exists

3uler2• 11 months ago

So does trello, they are not good anymore.

Atlasian are the masters of inshitification/jirafication of the products they buy. Turning loved products into hated gartner matrixes.

stuaxo• 11 months ago

Well, this may be a shame for those browsers.

Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

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