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.
> 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.
> 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?
AFAICT, Sun’s underlying vision was more on the side of pervasive RPC and/or downloadable code, i.e. closer to DCOM or NeWS than HTTP.
(We have in fact ultimately ended up layering downloadable code on top of HTTP. I don’t think I like the results, yet some of the things I don’t like seem inherent to downloadable code in general.)
It was more than this. The Sun Ray thin clients were so frigging impressive.
The problem wasn't the tech, the problem was it was SUN. It ran on Sun Hardware, with Sun Software and all at Sun Prices. Metaframe was just so much cheaper (it was also hot garbage but thats another story).
Given that, in the back of every customer's mind, across all segments, they cannot allow one vendor to have or exert too much control, it is a wonder why any company would seek to own a platform to such an extent. The better and more integrated you get, the more of a risk you become.
And of course I'm speaking on the context of what I'm building, not the world we're in. There are plenty of platforms that are more important than what they platform. I believe it was Bill Gates that said the value of all the things on the platform must exceed the platform itself. We have some inversions at present that are ripe to undergo Rayleigh–Taylor instability.
Microsoft is not just Microsoft. It's the cottage industry around products like Excel. It's all the other PC applications. It's WHQL getting hardware vendors into the fold. Compare all that to Apple. Apple is big, but not compared to the greater continent of Microsoft. People are more concerned about Apple's walled gardens than Microsoft's. It's no coincidence that Apple has taken more heavy handed actions to rule their platform more. That is why their platform is smaller overall and why people don't trust them.
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.
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.
I think Chromebooks have done so well because they're cheap and are purchased for locked down environments (education and people who really don't want complexity). Even then, I think they kind of demonstrate that the browser is NOT the OS because users and Google still felt the need to break out of the browser box, with both Android apps and Linux application support.
The browser is the OS that wraps the user not the machine. Just as Linux or Windows or Android wrap the machine and manage its resources, the browser should wrap the user and manage their resources (data, time/focus etc). In this regard nobody has succeeded. The browser isn’t finished until it achieves this
The browser is an application that renders webpages. It doesn't need any mystical vague purpose. Further, the OS doesn't wrap the machine, that's not even a good analogy. When you wrap something you've protected it or hidden it, or even ended it.
I don't need a browser to manage my time or focus. I need it to render websites efficiently so I can interact with them.
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.
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.
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.
The developing for the iphone and app store creates lock-in. I believe the rich web page stuff was just to show the potential of what is possible before influencing developers to build for the app store.
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.
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.
Browsers display content that follows a very specific set of standards. There are also suites of tests to verify your compliance with those standards. So, every browser that is standards compliant should work for the vast majority of websites in existence. Still a big lift but doable for talented team.
Now an OS without application compatibility is kind of DoA unless there is a very compelling reason to switch. Add in hardware compatibility and it gets even worse.
Much bigger hill to climb then incorporating an existing browser engine into a custom spin of a browser. Even a browser engine from scratch would be smaller than a new bare metal OS.
There’s a huge market for OSes that can consistently run Windows software. There’s no market for a brand new general purpose OS that can’t run anything until software developers port to it. Similarly, nobody is keen to pay anyone for an OS that can run Android or Linux software when they can get that for free.
It's partly that (after all so long as your new OS has a decent browser most people won't care), but also hardware support. Every single driver has some specific hardware's ridiculous and strange quirks and "yeah we comply with that standard except for all the times we don't", and re-writing every Windows, Linux, or *BSD driver for $NEW_OS just doesn't pencil out.
A nearby comment repeated the quote "the browser is the OS."
The OS game is over. Desktop computing is becoming a professionals-only thing. We can talk about pros and cons of Windows, MacOS, and Linux, but it's a shrinking market without room for a fourth player.
Take for example FreeBSD, it's not mainstream but also not too obscure, they get some funding through the FreeBSD foundation, and yet wifi drivers are still an issue.
If you mean a paid, consumer OS, you've got to keep in mind that they're essentially tied to a hardware product. The vast majority of your target market is not installing an alternative OS manually. You would need to either sell hardware with your OS or get hardware companies to package your OS over the existing options.
With how mature the personal computer market is, this is a very big hurdle.
…and Linux, Android, WebOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonflyBSD, GNU Hurd, Minix, QNX, Inferno, L4, FreeDOS, OpenSolaris forks like Illumos, OpenIndina and SmartOS, the various embedded real time OSs, the various Sony PlayStation and Nintendo Switch system softwares, various different bootloaders and UEFI interfaces, networking firmware like Draytek firmware, Cisco IOS, etc.
And that’s not even covering the numerous hobby OSs out there like Haiku, SerenityOS, ReactOS, TempleOS, SkyOS.
Then you have experimental OSs like Singularity too. There’s numerous examples of them alone but I think you get my point. :)
Even though I run it full time now personally; I still think Linux has massive problems something like Windows or macOS don't have: app development. You can't target a thing, you have to target all the things and bloat your app like crazy so you might as well just ship a chromium based app because its practically the same thing anyway (shipping an entire userland because its not stable anyway)
If there were instead 10 viable and competitive desktop operating system with no clear leader, and macos and windows were there just among the others.. wouldn't you try to target as many as you can? Maybe we can think of linux itself as a microcosm of OSes we never got to have, and you have to target as many variants as you can in order for no dominant force to emerge. It ain't pretty but its what we have..
The part of the "microcosm" that prevents you from being able to easily compile a binary and have it run on a wide variety of distros doesn't have any upside I can see. The fact that you have to jump through hoops to target particular glibc symbol versions and that a stable OpenSSL ABI gets rug-pulled in new distro versions every few years aren't key to any benefits of distro/OS diversity. What would suffer if gcc/clang had a `--min-glibc-version=...` flag and OpenSSL settled on a long-term stable ABI subset for establishing TLS connections?
The way this all gets worked around is that people come up with stuff like Docker or Flatpak that ship their own copies of as many dependencies as possible. The disadvantage is that now I can't just patch an OpenSSL vulnerability by updating the system's copy of OpenSSL, the way Windows can for all software built on SChannel.
This is just not true. You can still write GTK2 or SDL apps, you just need to package your app for the target distro or open source it because it's an open-source-first ecosystem.
If you're looking for binary stability and to ship your app as a file, ELF is extremely stable. If your app accesses files, accesses the network through sockets, and use stable libraries like SDL or GTK it will work fine as a regular binary and be easy to ship. People just don't want to write their apps in C, when the operating system is designed for that.
Many native apps like Blender, Firefox, etc ship portable Linux x64 and arm64 binaries as tar gz files. This works fine. You can also use flatpak if you want automatic cross platform updates but yes, the format is unfortunately bloated.
It's not that easy to ship a JavaScript app on other OSes either and electron apps abound there too.
What does ELF being stable or people not writing apps in C have to do with Linux binary compatibility? No matter what language you use, it’s either dynamically linking to the distro’s libc or using Linux system calls directly.
Also, I recommend taking a gander at what the Linux build process/linking looks like for large apps that “just work” out of the box like Firefox or Chromium. There’s games they have to play just to get consistent glibc symbol versions, and basically anything graphics/GUI related has to do a bunch of `dlopen`s at runtime.
Flatpak and similar take a cop-out by bundling their own copies of glibc and other libraries, and then doing a bunch of hacks to get the system’s userspace graphics libraries to work inside the container.
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.
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...
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.
Did they drop data sync? Could have sworn all of my spaces, tabs, folders, favorites and etc synced anytime I logged back in on my other machine (with access to spaces on iOS well)
It’s been a while since I used it regularly though.
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
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?
You're assuming that Dia is what Atlassian wanted in this acquisition, and nothing else. We don't know what things would look like if they had continued developing Arc.
Almost every successful company has got there by grinding away on hard problems. No one launches a product and gets endless growth for free. Not to say that Arc would have definitely succeeded, but to date it's been a lot more successful than Dia.
I don't think this is a good comparison. There are many startups that have succeeded developing good products, but very few that could match the success of Apple.
> 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.
How many actual regular every day people are using either? ChromeOS's big market is "tired and underfunded K-12 IT/Library/HVAC admin who just doesn't give a fuck give the kids a chromebook so I can go do something else", it's not exactly making waves among the general populace.
> 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.
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.
yeah, lots of them. Every day. All the time. But you’d have to learn to understand that most of the problem you have with Jira has nothing to do with the tool and everything to do with how it’s been implemented.
I beg to differ. Jira can be used in a sensible way, but that absolutely not how the tool is pitched nor how it guides user and companies. I'd compare it to giving users a 30 tools swiss army knife when all they should be using is the + driver and the scissors.
The issue being that teams that have that maturity don't need to kitchen sink in the first place and will be combining their own selected tools. That's how so many teams can get by with Notion and Gitlab only.
I spent more than a decade in JIRA and the Atlassian suite and can't think of any synergy that I miss TBH. Confluence in particular was fine for the time but does it stand the current competition ?
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).
We had Gitlab issues for 7 years at work. It was a clear and reponsive UI, simple but powerful markdown editing. Probably only 20% of the functionality what you can theoretically do with Jira, but just more pleasant to use and we got everything done. Over the years Gitlab kept adding more features and response times slightly decreased, but still nothing compared to Jira. After changing jobs I have to use Jira and hate it every day.
I switched to it for projects in my consulting side gigs, and it’s quite low friction, but I don’t see it gaining the same traction in enterprise as JIRA until they add the ability for big companies to completely fuck up and over-complicate issue workflows and add 100+ custom fields and turn Linear into the system that gates velocity.
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.
sounds like they made a stupid decision and had to pay for it w/ technical overhead?
chrome already has ui rendering set up on windows, all they had to was not reinvent the wheel and just make tweaks to the ui and some server side magick on their end, but that would reveal the fact that they're an half a billion dollar 100 person chrome fork for nerds with no way to generate profit lol
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.
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.
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.
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.
I want to. I like that I can open multiple windows, tab them, share and save URLs, all with no stupid app-specific updater widget, a pretty good sandbox, and explicit permissions for breaking out of that sandbox in limited ways (e.g. notifications). All that works seamlessly and consistently on Windows, MacOS, and Linux. Often the same URLs also work well on mobile (Android) without installing more stupid apps. Extensions allow you to modify the apps, while staying in the sandbox.
Native app updaters and tray icons and startup services are incredibly obnoxious.
Sounds like more than half the problem is the lack of standardization in desktop operating systems. There’s no reason why all Mac apps can’t take advantage of the system standard tabbing like AppKit Mac apps do, but most don’t, so in most apps you don’t get apps unless the dev implements them.
Same deal with updaters. If macOS and Windows had a standardized way to update apps Linux distros do that wouldn’t be nearly as annoying.
Startup services and to some degree tray icons fall under enshittification. Some apps have a legitimate need for these (like Alfred or Raycast or an audio mixer applet) but most are blatant mindspace/metrics booster grabs.
For me the upsides of web apps are counteracted by omnipresent annoying browser chrome, resource consumption, and the general flakiness stemming from nobody being able to agree on how to develop web app UIs (even just within the React sphere, let alone beyond it). The number of manhours set on fire and level of potential for refinement left on the table by the innumerable redundant bespoke widget reimplementations is unreal.
> Sounds like more than half the problem is the lack of standardization in desktop operating systems. There’s no reason why all Mac apps can’t take advantage of the system standard tabbing like AppKit Mac apps do, but most don’t, so in most apps you don’t get apps unless the dev implements them.
Yep. "Every app ships most of Chrome" is a profoundly stupid way to get a sensible cross-platform application runtime to develop on, but it's the only one that works, and at that point you might as well make the app run in actual Chrome instead.
> general flakiness stemming from nobody being able to agree on how to develop web app UIs (even just within the React sphere, let alone beyond it). The number of manhours set on fire and level of potential for refinement left on the table by the innumerable redundant bespoke widget reimplementations is unreal.
Disagree. That's creative destruction at work, it's messy but it's the only way to get better. Like it or not (and I don't like it), the best UIs around these days are built on React or similar webtech.
> Disagree. That's creative destruction at work, it's messy but it's the only way to get better. Like it or not (and I don't like it), the best UIs around these days are built on React or similar webtech.
It may be a matter of perspective, but from where I’m standing web UIs have barely improved in the past 5-7 years. In many products they’ve gotten considerably worse. At the very least, there’s been an awful lot of tail chasing for the amount of improvement yielded.
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.
I don't think I was suggesting you build your own Chromium so much as do what all these other browser projects do and fork it. The "software A got too bloated so we released software B" cycle is eternal but I'm optimistic it's moving even closer to the actual user than it has been in a while.
Anecdotally the company I work for is scuppered by bureaucracy when it comes to getting tools to work with, yet they want us to work at unhindered startup.
We’ve found it’s actually quicker to just recreate the app (Postman, Obsidian, Claude desktop) than it is to go through the rigmarole of getting the download/license approved.
And now you have to maintain all those tool clones! Seems like a losing battle and waste of resources to me. This is just not-invented-here syndrome wearing a different sweater
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..
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
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.
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.
Arc is based on chromium I believe and that has manifest v3 which means poorer ad blocking afaiu. I won't touch any chromium implementation with a 10 foot pole because of this exact reason. Arc also does not allow you to export bookmarks natively. i had to use a 3p script to do it
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)
I think the one you replied to was referring the fact that Arc can have multiple windows (terminal) "attach" to same tab (tmux session), that has nothing to do with profile.
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?
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).
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.
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
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.
"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++."
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 ?
C++ isn't all that much harder or different from Swift to learn. They play fairly well with each other, you can import and call C++ quite easily from Swift.
It is not like switching from a REPL, browser friendly,inferred typed forgiving language like say JavaScript to Rust with the occasionally cryptic compiler, the unforgiving borrow checker and ownership concepts.
Perhaps people are less comfortable with the libraries and SDKs and tooling from the C++ world for app development. I didn't imagine that such a market was worth buying a company for $610M in 2025 when most apps are web based in one way or other.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I don't really need AI in my browser. I do like spaces in Arc, and how it handles cleaning up my tabs. The color coding of the sidebar for the various profiles is the one feature I haven't been able to find in things like Orion, Vivaldi, Firefox, etc. By color coding, I mean the ability to make the entire sidebar a different color, which helps me make certain I don't do stupid things in prod.
Agreed; the occasional Raycast AI query using their web extension suits me well.
Haven’t used Arc as my daily driver in a while now, but I used a similar setup with a semi-bright green sidebar as my debugging space when my last project was in active development. I’m rarely at a desk these days so back to Safari for the time being, but one thing I miss the most is Arc’s near-borderless window ‘frame’.
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.
Yes! What good is a chatbot if you keep the old terrible UX? Chatbot + Arc: great! Chatbot + Chrome: Perplexity already did it pretty well so what's the point...
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.
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.
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.
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.
preaching to the choir in absolute terms. in relative terms, if a random feature flag company can be bought for over a billion by an AI company, an AI browser company should be able to be sold for at least that much.
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.
+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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
I mean. Like. It files tickets. Closes them. Links them. Accepts comments. Sends email to me when all that stuff happens. I can make it send email to others too. All that seems fine? The web UI of the hosted version runs like absolute ass, and its inability to preserve a ticket being created when I accidentally close the tab is downright offensive, or at least what comes out of my mouth when I experience that definitely is. But otherwise fine? ( /s, a bit)
I haven’t had to use the more egregious stuff like time tracking, as you can tell. I think one of our projects has a kanban board somewhere, but I’m not a release manager so I’m mostly living in happy ignorance of what’s on it. It’s not a large outfit, thankfully.
Or resolves them. Or sometimes both, or sometimes neither, and maybe you can undo one but not the other. I wouldn't say it manages to make sense with that piece of functionality.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :(
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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
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.
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?
I've heard when things got tight, empathy vanished. When things were great he was great, if a bit overzealous about Dia. When things got hard, you better hope you were the kind of person he liked or you'd find yourself out the door quickly, no matter what your output was.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
That's very interesting. I downloaded arc because I saw it in some twitter screenshot and I thought the UI was neat, when I could have actually been looking for Zed instead of Arc.
Ironic that I wasn't familiar with this company or their products before today, and having read about both Arc and Dia, including reading this blog post you've linked, the product that makes me want to try it is the one they've stopped developing...
It's still worth trying and using. The developers consider it a "finished product" and I don't disagree. It does lots of small things well* that many browsers (even the self-confessed clones like Zen) don't do out of the box, if at all. Maybe in two years the browser will no longer be distributed or receive Chromium updates, but it exists and works fine now.
* For example, I get a lot of value from renaming my tabs and even replacing their favicons with emojis of my choice. Zen appears to have limited support for this.
Damn, I really appreciate the decision to do this in a new product. Arc is the best browser I've ever used, and I'd hate to see AI features forced upon me. Thanks Browser Company!
I agree. I think Arc was the biggest innovation in browser UI since Chrome.
I think you will eventually have to switch because it will lack behind given that it's not their priority anymore. Zen browser seems like viable alternative but I haven't used it enough yet to know how well polished it is.
It is impressive what a single person with a vision can achieve hacking away on Firefox, especially considering Mozilla's track record in recent years.
A bus factor of 1 is still a bit red flag on something as involved as browser maintenance. Hopefully a community can emerge around the project.
Yeah, this is the unfortunate part about products kept alive in maintenance mode in a rapidly evolving space.
I guess you could argue (as TBC did) it’s actually not rapidly evolving, and that gives it staying power. But eventually someone will reach parity and eventually eclipse the original product.
Hopefully Zen does that. I’m just tired of moving the same data to the effectively the same product run by a different team for no good reason.
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.
I know distilleries will often contract with one or more other distilleries to create a custom blended whisky to sell under their label to get some revenue while they wait for their first batches to mature. There are distilleries that basically specialize in doing this. I assume the wine market probably has similar strategies. I know 3 buck chuck basically started like this, buying overstock from other vineyards and blending them into a generic white or red wine.
My impression is that a large portion of the industry is already structured as distilleries that actually make the liquor, like MGP, and a bunch of labels that put their names on it (each different). Like how many name-brand items across grocery stores are all actually made by the same company.
You might be good at making whisky but not that great at marketing. Either way the market has a desire for generic, unlabeled product and people go in to fill the need.
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?
Pedigree of the team and a believable project plan.
Often times money will be raised at certain valuation and terms, but the cash is held in escrow (effectively) until milestones are hit.
The investors will do their due diligence on the feasibility. It’s a high stakes, high return game (if you succeed). Look around you… any physical device you see is basically funded the same way.
That’s like the point of venture capitalism and to a certain extent all entrepreneurial endeavors. You could start a T-shirt printing company (a completely viable business) and not see any revenue come in for months.
There’s Orion, Zen, plenty of minor browser projects that aspire to better experiences than the majors’. Brave is likely much more widespread than Arc, though that one is monetized via the previous trend (crypto). Never even heard of a lot of these:
There have been a few extremely popular remastered games the last few years and the internet is full of people cranky because folks are posting replies to five year old internet threads about the game.
Well what do you expect people to do when the only non slop result on page 1 is a 5 to 8 year old thread? It’s the top link. You’re still relevant whether you want to be or not. Fuckin deal.
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.
> how many designers I interviewed who told me they used the Arc browser
Looking at their frontpage the design is outright horrible if you have a > 7-8 inch screen. I guess in a way its good to have an example of what not to do.
> I'm sure they'd be killing it
Why, though? I mean the niche is pretty small, most people don't care much about open source or even what browser they are using at all.
Considering the overwhelming majority of Mozilla's funding is coming from Google and in no way could it survive without it being run by Google's plants is not that surprising.
Well, I was one of Arc users but they abandoned it in favor of a new browser with an integrated AI agent that t can work on tabs, Dia. Now I’m using it, but to be honest I use almost none of the AI features beyond some summaries for pages and YouTube videos, but I see a lot of potential there (I.e. make it check the calendar to propose a time in a newly composed email) for the less technical users.
Yep, but admittedly the vertical tab UX is not the greatest. You either have them always be visible with an option to toggle by clicking the sidebar icon (no keyboard shortcut option afaik), or minimised as icons that expand on hover with an awfully annoying animation.
Looking at Zen, I really don't understand how Mozilla fail to capitalise on their browser, and build up a similar experimental project based on Firefox like it. It seems that many of these small QoL improvements could make a big difference. They have such a huge budget, and they waste it on inane things. Their fancy search deal with Google has made them complacent, and neglect one of the few things that ever had any real worth. Curious to see how it develops with the recent Google ruling. And to be fair, it does seem like Firefox development has picked up a bit lately—maybe even due to Zen's competition, who knows.
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.
But how many other people had similar luck and did nothing with it?
Luck is another word for opportunity. Some people are really good at leveraging opportunity for all it's worth. Most of us (myself very much included) are not.
Case in point: I'm the same age as Mark Zuckerberg. Many people say his age is why he was able to be at the right place at the right time to create Facebook. Much like they say about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and every other "self-made" billionaire.
But he still had to choose to do all the right things that I chose not to do in order to be able to experience that kind of luck.
At some point we gotta own up to our own role in guiding our lives.
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.
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.
I haven't kept track for a while, but whoever I knew that used arc, they found it hard to go back to standard browsers after getting used to its various UI affordances. Even when they pulled the "you need an account" thing most people I knew just sucked it up and created an account. I am assuming a good portion of them will submit to whatever atlassian demands.
I love Arc. I tried Dia. I wanted to like it but don't see how it's going to be valuable for me.
The browser features are _much_ worse than Arc (no sidebar, bookmarks are a dropdown, ...) and most of the time the AI can't even "see" or "read" what's on the page I'm viewing, so it's just worse than using Claude/ChatGPT/Gemini.
I'm still using Arc and will probably continue until there's another browser that copies its UI/UX improvements.
- 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.
>- 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.
you think Mark didn't know it when he hired that guy for $250 millions? Anyway, you probably mean an individual hiring cost. Which is a totally different case from hiring and building a multifunctional team of 100. Look around at aqui-hires to understand the price, especially when we're talking about people who has been working with AI products.
$250 million was for a top researcher with more experience than almost anyone else in designing and training massive models.
As far as I know, Dia just calls OpenAI’s API. I’m sure their employees know a lot about using AI at this point, but so does everyone else who’s built an OpenAI wrapper.
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.
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
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.
They don't directly, but they are the major source of ad revenue for search engines & content, since they drive both the search and page view traffic. Besides regular browsing, examples of browser features that drive ad revenue include search suggestions in the address bar, and the browser homepage (Edge defaults to msn content, used to just show msn.com earlier).
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
> 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.
> 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.
From an engineering perspective, most browsers are "pretty much just Chrome(ium)", but that's not what I'm talking about here. The delivery mechanism isn't really relevant from a product perspective. It is a different product with a different price and different features.
Also, my point was just just say that there's a market for something like this. Chrome Enterprise is not even really that competitive of a product in the space.
For the most part, default Chrome and Firefox are designed primarily for B2C use cases.
Which is what Enterprises need. They don't need their own version of Chrome, they need to ability to make changes to it like force Proxy, insert MiTM certs and various other Enterprise stuff.
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.
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.
> 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.
That just sounds like going back to making thick clients/desktop apps vs. web with extra steps. They might as well make their own native Jira app instead of making an entire web browser and breaking their web app to only work in their new browser.
Remember when most organizations only supported IE for their websites, then in some orgs it later became a requirement for working with legacy webapps.
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.
I would wager that if you asked corporations which was more important, knowing what their staff are doing online during work hours vs ensuring that their browser is hardened, they would choose to spy on their employees.
My point is this is coded language to give corporations an excuse to have another foothold on their employee's data.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
> 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
AFAICT, Sun’s underlying vision was more on the side of pervasive RPC and/or downloadable code, i.e. closer to DCOM or NeWS than HTTP.
(We have in fact ultimately ended up layering downloadable code on top of HTTP. I don’t think I like the results, yet some of the things I don’t like seem inherent to downloadable code in general.)
It was more than this. The Sun Ray thin clients were so frigging impressive.
The problem wasn't the tech, the problem was it was SUN. It ran on Sun Hardware, with Sun Software and all at Sun Prices. Metaframe was just so much cheaper (it was also hot garbage but thats another story).
Given that, in the back of every customer's mind, across all segments, they cannot allow one vendor to have or exert too much control, it is a wonder why any company would seek to own a platform to such an extent. The better and more integrated you get, the more of a risk you become.
And of course I'm speaking on the context of what I'm building, not the world we're in. There are plenty of platforms that are more important than what they platform. I believe it was Bill Gates that said the value of all the things on the platform must exceed the platform itself. We have some inversions at present that are ripe to undergo Rayleigh–Taylor instability.
Really? Most businesses leave their eternal soul and their firstborn in the care of Microsoft, with no backup plan. I just don't buy this.
Microsoft is not just Microsoft. It's the cottage industry around products like Excel. It's all the other PC applications. It's WHQL getting hardware vendors into the fold. Compare all that to Apple. Apple is big, but not compared to the greater continent of Microsoft. People are more concerned about Apple's walled gardens than Microsoft's. It's no coincidence that Apple has taken more heavy handed actions to rule their platform more. That is why their platform is smaller overall and why people don't trust them.
Sometime I said to myself. If I hacked someone's PC, his hard drive will become my NAS.
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.
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.
One might suggest Cromebooks have done so well because Google got it more or less right.
I think Chromebooks have done so well because they're cheap and are purchased for locked down environments (education and people who really don't want complexity). Even then, I think they kind of demonstrate that the browser is NOT the OS because users and Google still felt the need to break out of the browser box, with both Android apps and Linux application support.
The browser is the OS that wraps the user not the machine. Just as Linux or Windows or Android wrap the machine and manage its resources, the browser should wrap the user and manage their resources (data, time/focus etc). In this regard nobody has succeeded. The browser isn’t finished until it achieves this
The browser is an application that renders webpages. It doesn't need any mystical vague purpose. Further, the OS doesn't wrap the machine, that's not even a good analogy. When you wrap something you've protected it or hidden it, or even ended it.
I don't need a browser to manage my time or focus. I need it to render websites efficiently so I can interact with them.
I think that they had the fact that in chromebook, they could run whole linux containers in the browser , right?
> no one has delivered it yet
Firefox OS? Now KaiOS? The 3rd most popular mobile OS.
They say the browser is the OS, and yet eww is only one small part of Emacs.
Isn't that because eww refuses to implement JavaScript? Which isn't very e/acc of them?
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.
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.
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.
I dont think it was even that.
The developing for the iphone and app store creates lock-in. I believe the rich web page stuff was just to show the potential of what is possible before influencing developers to build for the app store.
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.
You forgot about Firefox OS, which had a fully web-based UI.
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.
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.
Browsers display content that follows a very specific set of standards. There are also suites of tests to verify your compliance with those standards. So, every browser that is standards compliant should work for the vast majority of websites in existence. Still a big lift but doable for talented team.
Now an OS without application compatibility is kind of DoA unless there is a very compelling reason to switch. Add in hardware compatibility and it gets even worse.
Much bigger hill to climb then incorporating an existing browser engine into a custom spin of a browser. Even a browser engine from scratch would be smaller than a new bare metal OS.
There’s a huge market for OSes that can consistently run Windows software. There’s no market for a brand new general purpose OS that can’t run anything until software developers port to it. Similarly, nobody is keen to pay anyone for an OS that can run Android or Linux software when they can get that for free.
Is it? There is Wine/Crossover on Linux. Also, users pay for Sailfish OS, which can run Android apps (while providing better privacy).
It's partly that (after all so long as your new OS has a decent browser most people won't care), but also hardware support. Every single driver has some specific hardware's ridiculous and strange quirks and "yeah we comply with that standard except for all the times we don't", and re-writing every Windows, Linux, or *BSD driver for $NEW_OS just doesn't pencil out.
OS is the perfect software to create lock in for consumers. Once a company is successful there, it is very difficult for others to compete.
A nearby comment repeated the quote "the browser is the OS."
The OS game is over. Desktop computing is becoming a professionals-only thing. We can talk about pros and cons of Windows, MacOS, and Linux, but it's a shrinking market without room for a fourth player.
OS is not only desktop. There is also mobile OS, like KaiOS, which is the 3rd most popular phone OS.
RIP BeOS
Building an OS is easy and straightforward.
Now let's make that OS talk to a graphics card--whoops, no Nvidia for you, peon!
An OS isn't a problem. Hardware support on an OS--that's a huge problem.
Take for example FreeBSD, it's not mainstream but also not too obscure, they get some funding through the FreeBSD foundation, and yet wifi drivers are still an issue.
And then make people want to write for (and make money off)
(The Windows Phone problem)
If you mean a paid, consumer OS, you've got to keep in mind that they're essentially tied to a hardware product. The vast majority of your target market is not installing an alternative OS manually. You would need to either sell hardware with your OS or get hardware companies to package your OS over the existing options.
With how mature the personal computer market is, this is a very big hurdle.
…and Linux, Android, WebOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonflyBSD, GNU Hurd, Minix, QNX, Inferno, L4, FreeDOS, OpenSolaris forks like Illumos, OpenIndina and SmartOS, the various embedded real time OSs, the various Sony PlayStation and Nintendo Switch system softwares, various different bootloaders and UEFI interfaces, networking firmware like Draytek firmware, Cisco IOS, etc.
And that’s not even covering the numerous hobby OSs out there like Haiku, SerenityOS, ReactOS, TempleOS, SkyOS.
Then you have experimental OSs like Singularity too. There’s numerous examples of them alone but I think you get my point. :)
Linux?
Linux has entered the chat...
Even though I run it full time now personally; I still think Linux has massive problems something like Windows or macOS don't have: app development. You can't target a thing, you have to target all the things and bloat your app like crazy so you might as well just ship a chromium based app because its practically the same thing anyway (shipping an entire userland because its not stable anyway)
If there were instead 10 viable and competitive desktop operating system with no clear leader, and macos and windows were there just among the others.. wouldn't you try to target as many as you can? Maybe we can think of linux itself as a microcosm of OSes we never got to have, and you have to target as many variants as you can in order for no dominant force to emerge. It ain't pretty but its what we have..
The part of the "microcosm" that prevents you from being able to easily compile a binary and have it run on a wide variety of distros doesn't have any upside I can see. The fact that you have to jump through hoops to target particular glibc symbol versions and that a stable OpenSSL ABI gets rug-pulled in new distro versions every few years aren't key to any benefits of distro/OS diversity. What would suffer if gcc/clang had a `--min-glibc-version=...` flag and OpenSSL settled on a long-term stable ABI subset for establishing TLS connections?
The way this all gets worked around is that people come up with stuff like Docker or Flatpak that ship their own copies of as many dependencies as possible. The disadvantage is that now I can't just patch an OpenSSL vulnerability by updating the system's copy of OpenSSL, the way Windows can for all software built on SChannel.
Have you heard of Cosmopolitan Libc? A single APE binary for every platform out there.
This is just not true. You can still write GTK2 or SDL apps, you just need to package your app for the target distro or open source it because it's an open-source-first ecosystem.
If you're looking for binary stability and to ship your app as a file, ELF is extremely stable. If your app accesses files, accesses the network through sockets, and use stable libraries like SDL or GTK it will work fine as a regular binary and be easy to ship. People just don't want to write their apps in C, when the operating system is designed for that.
Many native apps like Blender, Firefox, etc ship portable Linux x64 and arm64 binaries as tar gz files. This works fine. You can also use flatpak if you want automatic cross platform updates but yes, the format is unfortunately bloated.
It's not that easy to ship a JavaScript app on other OSes either and electron apps abound there too.
What does ELF being stable or people not writing apps in C have to do with Linux binary compatibility? No matter what language you use, it’s either dynamically linking to the distro’s libc or using Linux system calls directly.
Also, I recommend taking a gander at what the Linux build process/linking looks like for large apps that “just work” out of the box like Firefox or Chromium. There’s games they have to play just to get consistent glibc symbol versions, and basically anything graphics/GUI related has to do a bunch of `dlopen`s at runtime.
Flatpak and similar take a cop-out by bundling their own copies of glibc and other libraries, and then doing a bunch of hacks to get the system’s userspace graphics libraries to work inside the container.
thats been a solved problem for years with flatpak
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.
All things considered the cash looks pretty good – maybe not the deal they wanted, but doesn't look bad all things considered.
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.
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...
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.
Did they drop data sync? Could have sworn all of my spaces, tabs, folders, favorites and etc synced anytime I logged back in on my other machine (with access to spaces on iOS well)
It’s been a while since I used it regularly though.
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
100% on point, classic case of drinking ai cool aid and killing what users wanted
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-...
> How often has that ever been a good decision?
It got them acquired, so certainly it worked for them this time.
> doing the hard work of building a great product
How often has that ever been a good decision?
You're assuming that Dia is what Atlassian wanted in this acquisition, and nothing else. We don't know what things would look like if they had continued developing Arc.
Almost every successful company has got there by grinding away on hard problems. No one launches a product and gets endless growth for free. Not to say that Arc would have definitely succeeded, but to date it's been a lot more successful than Dia.
> You're assuming that Dia is what Atlassian wanted in this acquisition
I thought it was an acquihire.
They wanted Arc. The founders and others at Atlassian loved Arc. I am sure Dia is allowed to continue until it doesn’t work. Which it wont.
> How often has that ever been a good decision?
The migration to OSX or all Windows upgrades certainly payed off for those companies.
I don't think this is a good comparison. There are many startups that have succeeded developing good products, but very few that could match the success of Apple.
> 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.
Similarly, isn't this the insight that led to both ChromeOS and FirefoxOS?
How many actual regular every day people are using either? ChromeOS's big market is "tired and underfunded K-12 IT/Library/HVAC admin who just doesn't give a fuck give the kids a chromebook so I can go do something else", it's not exactly making waves among the general populace.
In my experience, very few. FirefoxOS failed hard, and anyone who uses ChromeOS quickly becomes acquainted with the limitations of the approach.
I mainly brought them up in a "we've tried this before" sense.
> 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.
I think that we should be fine with growth flattening out.
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.
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.
Failing upwards in a nutshell
> 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.
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...
This. They consistently ignore user feedback on problems with their ui. It’s really a mess and slow as hell.
Or they could take that money and actually improve the UX instead of needing an AI to navigate it?
They used to have an iPad app that made it actually tolerable. Then killed it.
RIP ipad app. You are missed.
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.
yeah, lots of them. Every day. All the time. But you’d have to learn to understand that most of the problem you have with Jira has nothing to do with the tool and everything to do with how it’s been implemented.
I beg to differ. Jira can be used in a sensible way, but that absolutely not how the tool is pitched nor how it guides user and companies. I'd compare it to giving users a 30 tools swiss army knife when all they should be using is the + driver and the scissors.
The issue being that teams that have that maturity don't need to kitchen sink in the first place and will be combining their own selected tools. That's how so many teams can get by with Notion and Gitlab only.
I spent more than a decade in JIRA and the Atlassian suite and can't think of any synergy that I miss TBH. Confluence in particular was fine for the time but does it stand the current competition ?
Somehow all the implementations are equally lacklustre though? What is the common denominator.
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).
We had Gitlab issues for 7 years at work. It was a clear and reponsive UI, simple but powerful markdown editing. Probably only 20% of the functionality what you can theoretically do with Jira, but just more pleasant to use and we got everything done. Over the years Gitlab kept adding more features and response times slightly decreased, but still nothing compared to Jira. After changing jobs I have to use Jira and hate it every day.
Out of interest, what issues did you have with Linear?
I don’t think I’ve used Linear, I hadn’t heard of it until just now.
I switched to it for projects in my consulting side gigs, and it’s quite low friction, but I don’t see it gaining the same traction in enterprise as JIRA until they add the ability for big companies to completely fuck up and over-complicate issue workflows and add 100+ custom fields and turn Linear into the system that gates velocity.
Hammer meet everything is a nail
> Nobody wants to use Atlassian browser.
I don't want to use Jira either but yet I can't run away from it
> 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
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.
sounds like they made a stupid decision and had to pay for it w/ technical overhead?
chrome already has ui rendering set up on windows, all they had to was not reinvent the wheel and just make tweaks to the ui and some server side magick on their end, but that would reveal the fact that they're an half a billion dollar 100 person chrome fork for nerds with no way to generate profit lol
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/
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.
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.
You're not ignorant, the other person was.
i mean they did have some really cool designs, but technically they just had relatively advanced chrome fork...
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.
> 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.
Opera and Vivaldi have some impressive features up their sleeves. Similar philosophies to Arc Browser. Worth giving them a try!
> 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.
> Atlassian, tho, has nothing for the regular every-day consumer, they make SaaS for business.
They do - Trello.
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.
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.
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.
I want to. I like that I can open multiple windows, tab them, share and save URLs, all with no stupid app-specific updater widget, a pretty good sandbox, and explicit permissions for breaking out of that sandbox in limited ways (e.g. notifications). All that works seamlessly and consistently on Windows, MacOS, and Linux. Often the same URLs also work well on mobile (Android) without installing more stupid apps. Extensions allow you to modify the apps, while staying in the sandbox.
Native app updaters and tray icons and startup services are incredibly obnoxious.
Sounds like more than half the problem is the lack of standardization in desktop operating systems. There’s no reason why all Mac apps can’t take advantage of the system standard tabbing like AppKit Mac apps do, but most don’t, so in most apps you don’t get apps unless the dev implements them.
Same deal with updaters. If macOS and Windows had a standardized way to update apps Linux distros do that wouldn’t be nearly as annoying.
Startup services and to some degree tray icons fall under enshittification. Some apps have a legitimate need for these (like Alfred or Raycast or an audio mixer applet) but most are blatant mindspace/metrics booster grabs.
For me the upsides of web apps are counteracted by omnipresent annoying browser chrome, resource consumption, and the general flakiness stemming from nobody being able to agree on how to develop web app UIs (even just within the React sphere, let alone beyond it). The number of manhours set on fire and level of potential for refinement left on the table by the innumerable redundant bespoke widget reimplementations is unreal.
> Sounds like more than half the problem is the lack of standardization in desktop operating systems. There’s no reason why all Mac apps can’t take advantage of the system standard tabbing like AppKit Mac apps do, but most don’t, so in most apps you don’t get apps unless the dev implements them.
Yep. "Every app ships most of Chrome" is a profoundly stupid way to get a sensible cross-platform application runtime to develop on, but it's the only one that works, and at that point you might as well make the app run in actual Chrome instead.
> general flakiness stemming from nobody being able to agree on how to develop web app UIs (even just within the React sphere, let alone beyond it). The number of manhours set on fire and level of potential for refinement left on the table by the innumerable redundant bespoke widget reimplementations is unreal.
Disagree. That's creative destruction at work, it's messy but it's the only way to get better. Like it or not (and I don't like it), the best UIs around these days are built on React or similar webtech.
> Disagree. That's creative destruction at work, it's messy but it's the only way to get better. Like it or not (and I don't like it), the best UIs around these days are built on React or similar webtech.
It may be a matter of perspective, but from where I’m standing web UIs have barely improved in the past 5-7 years. In many products they’ve gotten considerably worse. At the very least, there’s been an awful lot of tail chasing for the amount of improvement yielded.
Personally I want the browser to disappear for applications. For some reason this has never been implemented well.
Well, Atlassian may be acqu-hiring the team specifically to make a JIRA PWA
Are you paying for your browser?
There’s your answer.
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.
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
I don't think I was suggesting you build your own Chromium so much as do what all these other browser projects do and fork it. The "software A got too bloated so we released software B" cycle is eternal but I'm optimistic it's moving even closer to the actual user than it has been in a while.
Anecdotally the company I work for is scuppered by bureaucracy when it comes to getting tools to work with, yet they want us to work at unhindered startup.
We’ve found it’s actually quicker to just recreate the app (Postman, Obsidian, Claude desktop) than it is to go through the rigmarole of getting the download/license approved.
And now you have to maintain all those tool clones! Seems like a losing battle and waste of resources to me. This is just not-invented-here syndrome wearing a different sweater
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..
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
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.
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.
Arc is based on chromium I believe and that has manifest v3 which means poorer ad blocking afaiu. I won't touch any chromium implementation with a 10 foot pole because of this exact reason. Arc also does not allow you to export bookmarks natively. i had to use a 3p script to do it
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.
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
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)
I think the one you replied to was referring the fact that Arc can have multiple windows (terminal) "attach" to same tab (tmux session), that has nothing to do with profile.
Zen can do that too. Check out: https://docs.zen-browser.app/user-manual/split-view
I use Zen extensively, no that's not the same thing.
In Zen, if you open two windows, they have different set of tab instances; in Arc, you have same set of tab instances.
Pinned tabs in Safari propagate between windows.
Emacs does that.
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.
One big limitation for me is how they can't display DRM protected content like Netflix
zen's performance issues really need to be addressed tho... it hogs an insane amount of memory (and somehow even more than arc)
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?
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).
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.
Dia is the Irish word for "God". Probably not what The Browser Company were going for, but I can't unthink that when I see it.
Same, and I don't not really wanna try:
"A new AI browser from the makers of Arc: Chat with your tabs"
say what??? )))
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
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.
"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!
Given Atlassian's terrible product quality, I give it two years until anything they buy becomes borderline unusable frustration.
Would love hear what, specifically, you find terrible about the quality of their products!
$610M, all cash??? How were they worth that much... all they seemed to ever do was rebrand
"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...
A UI framework? What’s the other $608m for?
Yeah, I kinda read that as "it's not just a chromium fork with additional code. the code is organized. nobody has ever done that before!"
Or... A UI framework? what's the other $612m for?
Just like the old Carlin joke. Made me chuckle.
I wanted you to know that, due to this comment, I "lost" approximately 45 minutes watching George Carlin's best jokes
What was the joke?
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 ?
ObjC is mostly dead, and most Swift devs are not comfortable with C++.
C++ isn't all that much harder or different from Swift to learn. They play fairly well with each other, you can import and call C++ quite easily from Swift.
It is not like switching from a REPL, browser friendly,inferred typed forgiving language like say JavaScript to Rust with the occasionally cryptic compiler, the unforgiving borrow checker and ownership concepts.
Perhaps people are less comfortable with the libraries and SDKs and tooling from the C++ world for app development. I didn't imagine that such a market was worth buying a company for $610M in 2025 when most apps are web based in one way or other.
Sounds perfect for Atlassian's love of "imaginative" interfaces.
For all those playing at home: this blog post contains 46 em-dashes.
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.
How's that different from Electron?
Probably a Swift wrapper for the Chromium Embedded Framework.
Cool, but $600m cool? I don't see how.
100% agree. The odds of this investment paying off feel slim to none.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
I've been using it for 4 years!
We are looking for someone with 10 years of experience though! Rejected!
The java, it is scripting, all day, every day, hakol hayom
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
I'm not a mind reader but I think the post you replied to was sarcasm.
I am a mind reader and can confirm the post he replied to was sarcasm.
Do you do contract work? I've got some minds that need reading.
And can you read dog minds?
No, I only use my powers for good.
And your dog wants pets and treats.
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
I just switched to Zen instead.
Zen was a bit rough around the edges when it first launched, but it's a solid replacement to Arc now. Honestly don't miss Arc anymore.
And you know how much VC it has raised?
$0.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I share your sentiment but still can’t imagine adding a browser-specific AI subscription alongside my current GPT or Claude sub.
I don't really need AI in my browser. I do like spaces in Arc, and how it handles cleaning up my tabs. The color coding of the sidebar for the various profiles is the one feature I haven't been able to find in things like Orion, Vivaldi, Firefox, etc. By color coding, I mean the ability to make the entire sidebar a different color, which helps me make certain I don't do stupid things in prod.
Agreed; the occasional Raycast AI query using their web extension suits me well.
Haven’t used Arc as my daily driver in a while now, but I used a similar setup with a semi-bright green sidebar as my debugging space when my last project was in active development. I’m rarely at a desk these days so back to Safari for the time being, but one thing I miss the most is Arc’s near-borderless window ‘frame’.
Dia was paid. Dia Pro cost $20/mo
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
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.
Yes! What good is a chatbot if you keep the old terrible UX? Chatbot + Arc: great! Chatbot + Chrome: Perplexity already did it pretty well so what's the point...
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.
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.
Selling for over half a billion dollars sounds like zero mistakes were made.
Doesn't mean it isn't a mistake, just means you've conned someone into thinking your mistake was a good choice.
That is 99.99999% of all things in life. Business. Sales. Dating.
What a horrifying outlook.
Horrifying? I think it’s humble to say unless you believe in perfection
Edit: lol I read conned as convinced.
Yeah, treating dating like a con is a wild thing to assert.
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.
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.
On the other hand, what is an AI browser supposed to enable that justifies a billion dollar valuation?
preaching to the choir in absolute terms. in relative terms, if a random feature flag company can be bought for over a billion by an AI company, an AI browser company should be able to be sold for at least that much.
Dia was built for VC, no user will really like it.
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
When someone comes knocking on your door with a check for $610 million let me know if you have the restraint to say no and go back to work.
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.
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.
Which products have ton to Atlassian to die?
Hipchat RIP
Brings back so many memories. I bought TEAM stock at $17 when they bought hipchat.
turned out to be a nice investment even though they killed the product.
Trello
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.
If you liked Arc, you should try Zen. I understand it brings many of the same ideas to a Firefox base.
Thanks for recommendation, I'll give it a try
+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 :)
Skip Dia, it's a security nightmare.
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.
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...
Atlassian doesn’t kill the products of companies they acquire
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
> Jira’s AI features to be basically nonsensical
Unlike its other features?
I mean. Like. It files tickets. Closes them. Links them. Accepts comments. Sends email to me when all that stuff happens. I can make it send email to others too. All that seems fine? The web UI of the hosted version runs like absolute ass, and its inability to preserve a ticket being created when I accidentally close the tab is downright offensive, or at least what comes out of my mouth when I experience that definitely is. But otherwise fine? ( /s, a bit)
I haven’t had to use the more egregious stuff like time tracking, as you can tell. I think one of our projects has a kanban board somewhere, but I’m not a release manager so I’m mostly living in happy ignorance of what’s on it. It’s not a large outfit, thankfully.
> Closes them.
Or resolves them. Or sometimes both, or sometimes neither, and maybe you can undo one but not the other. I wouldn't say it manages to make sense with that piece of functionality.
Agreed. Though I will say using the AI to JQL tool is nice.
And I use Confluence’s AI pretty often.
Completely disagree. Rovo has been an incredible game changer for us. It speeds up work by like 30% and brings context to information rapidly.
Atlassian broke both Trello and Bitbucket for me, so at least, thanks for acquiring these browsers before I got a chance to get attached?
How did they break Bitbucket for you?
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.
There's piles of money to be made training a model on content they have access to
Arc will probably become a product for Atlassian paying users
$610m for a Chromium skin with generic AI bolted on feels like a lot. But what do I know?
It's for the team
The team that made a Chromium skin with generic AI on top of it, yes
That team is not worth $610m
They did well to get acquired before the AI bubble pops.
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.
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.
Nashilu Makoua did a lot of their storytelling and strategy, very talented.
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.
> 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.
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. :(
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.
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...
Yes, and the person you are replying to is clearly referencing Windsurf which was another vscode fork...
Arc I think graduated from wrapper status, it was a really interesting and unique browser while it lasted.
In The Browser Company’s case, they have a lot of engineers who work on Chromium. Not sure about the other wrapper companies!
Because those companies own the customers.
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.
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.
Zen browser is basically a Firefox-based reimplementation of Arc's main features.
Zen browser has spaces
And more importantly Edge.
> 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".
> I never really got where the innovation was in Arc
Arc on Windows was build in Swift. And they built Swift WinRT.
pivoting to AI to get the bag while getting acquired
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
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.
How so? The Loom acquisition has been a huge success for Atlassian.
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.
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.
It does that.
There was no Arc Mobile when it first released.
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.
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/
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Would Atlassian be building a agentic version for their AI Coding agent - Rovo.
What a cursed thought.
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.
It's amazing how good Claude is at interacting with it. Via jq or other CLI tools or MCP.
"Look at Jira and tell me what am I supposed to be working on this week" is a super power
https://www.atlassian.com/platform/remote-mcp-server
You can have your coding agent do it.
Literally no other reason for them to buy this
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.
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.
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.
Zen is a Firefox-based browser that has copied a lot of Arc's good ideas, if you are looking for an alternative.
AI jammed into a browser really isn't going to make any Atlassian product any more pleasant to use
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
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
> 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.
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
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.
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?
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).
I've heard when things got tight, empathy vanished. When things were great he was great, if a bit overzealous about Dia. When things got hard, you better hope you were the kind of person he liked or you'd find yourself out the door quickly, no matter what your output was.
AI in a web browser isn't going to make Atlassian products any more usable
If only competition was half as good.
I will keep suggesting Atlassian, because everything else I used since the 1990's was worse.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
Details on the price Atlassian paid: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/04/atlassian-the-browser-compan...
We switched from jir to linear, what a fresh starts !
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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' :)
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.
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.
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?
Or keep Chrome (or Chromium or even Edge if you have it installed anyway) for the rare use case when Firefox won't work?
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.
Did that really happen or is that theorical? I've never been unable to buy a ticket on firefox.
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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?
Trying to bootstrap a new-generation Lotus Notes from parts, with Dia as the container.
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?
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.
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.
Have you tried Zen?
Just did! Been great so far!
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.
> 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.
You mean the browser primarily funded by Google giving Mozilla a giant bucket of cash every year to be the default search engine for?
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.
I'm on Gentoo using the firefox-bin package - things work great. Spotify all day, YouTubes, Vimeo, Zoom - even Teams works.
Yeah, same on Debian.
Even Teams video calls work fine. A lot of times it works better than the Windows client I use at work.
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.
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.
I personally don't have that issue with Netflix and Youtube on Firefox in kde-neon.
I have no such issues (Debian), but I also don't use the flatpak.
This is not Dia the open source diagram editor. Apparently Dia is an AI chatbot that interacts with tabs.
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.
It would be perfect upsell for Atlassian because of their products abysmal performance of their product.
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?
How are they not successful? They are selling for $610M. Did you not think that was the goal all along?
It's Xm, not Xb = peanuts.
This is going to be remembered as a really weird tale in the annals of our industry’s history.
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.
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!
Zen has replaced Arc for me nicely.
Zen does not handle tab sharing (when using Google Meet) gracefully. That's the only major blocker left.
Yeah I hope they are able to solve this and achieve feature parity with Arc
Atlassian's announcement: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/atlassian-acqui...
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.
The link seems to be serving a 404 (at least from the Arc Search app on iOS, ironically)
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.
Was WhatsApp 0 revenue?
No, WhatsApp charged a $1 annual subscription fee prior to 2016.
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
lol, you should actually try using the Ai feature inside Atlassian’s products, they’re pretty revolutionary
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.
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.
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.
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.
Personally I liked the UI (and now use Zen browser, the UI is very much a matter of taste though), but left as the browser itself kept getting worse
That's very interesting. I downloaded arc because I saw it in some twitter screenshot and I thought the UI was neat, when I could have actually been looking for Zed instead of Arc.
same
They have "Dia" - which is Chrome + AI chat?
https://www.diabrowser.com/
Chrome + AI chat is... Chrome + Gemini though
Shhh... don't tell Atlassian.
Lest they attempt to buy Google instead.
I think I would be ok with that, they can both be a mid, bureaucratic, mess together.
When I saw that domain my first thought was it looks like they came up with the name by combining “diabetes” with “browser”
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.
Zen browser now has all the features of Arc (including folders, which they just added) if you’re willing to use a Firefox fork
Where can I read about this? It still gets regular updates and is front and center on the browser company website
This was their blog post back in May
https://browsercompany.substack.com/p/letter-to-arc-members-...
Ironic that I wasn't familiar with this company or their products before today, and having read about both Arc and Dia, including reading this blog post you've linked, the product that makes me want to try it is the one they've stopped developing...
It's still worth trying and using. The developers consider it a "finished product" and I don't disagree. It does lots of small things well* that many browsers (even the self-confessed clones like Zen) don't do out of the box, if at all. Maybe in two years the browser will no longer be distributed or receive Chromium updates, but it exists and works fine now.
* For example, I get a lot of value from renaming my tabs and even replacing their favicons with emojis of my choice. Zen appears to have limited support for this.
Thanks, I will do
It was popular but had no real route to profitability. Hence the acquisition.
It was put on maintenance mode with minimal security updates to favour the development of their newer product Dia (AI browser).
Damn, I really appreciate the decision to do this in a new product. Arc is the best browser I've ever used, and I'd hate to see AI features forced upon me. Thanks Browser Company!
I agree. I think Arc was the biggest innovation in browser UI since Chrome.
I think you will eventually have to switch because it will lack behind given that it's not their priority anymore. Zen browser seems like viable alternative but I haven't used it enough yet to know how well polished it is.
https://zen-browser.app
This video seems informational, and goes over a lot of other new browser projects too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrxhVA5NVQ4
It is impressive what a single person with a vision can achieve hacking away on Firefox, especially considering Mozilla's track record in recent years.
A bus factor of 1 is still a bit red flag on something as involved as browser maintenance. Hopefully a community can emerge around the project.
ref: https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/graphs/contributors
Yeah, this is the unfortunate part about products kept alive in maintenance mode in a rapidly evolving space.
I guess you could argue (as TBC did) it’s actually not rapidly evolving, and that gives it staying power. But eventually someone will reach parity and eventually eclipse the original product.
Hopefully Zen does that. I’m just tired of moving the same data to the effectively the same product run by a different team for no good reason.
Yeah my plan is definitely to move to zen in the long run, it's mostly migrating workspaces and so on that hold me back
I mean, I guess that’s one way of looking at it. On the other hand, they did abandon the product, so you’ll have to switch anyway in time.
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.
I'm told that it can take ten years for a vineyard to start generating profit.
I know distilleries will often contract with one or more other distilleries to create a custom blended whisky to sell under their label to get some revenue while they wait for their first batches to mature. There are distilleries that basically specialize in doing this. I assume the wine market probably has similar strategies. I know 3 buck chuck basically started like this, buying overstock from other vineyards and blending them into a generic white or red wine.
Out of curiosity, why would a company help out their future competitor?
My impression is that a large portion of the industry is already structured as distilleries that actually make the liquor, like MGP, and a bunch of labels that put their names on it (each different). Like how many name-brand items across grocery stores are all actually made by the same company.
You might be good at making whisky but not that great at marketing. Either way the market has a desire for generic, unlabeled product and people go in to fill the need.
because they may sell the same product, yes, but not compete. there will always be someone starting a new vineyard, distillery or whatever.
it's sort of like banks vs vc funds. both lend money to companies, but still they are not competing against each other.
It takes 5 years on average til you can harvest some grapes. 10 years for generating profit sounds about right.
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?
Pedigree of the team and a believable project plan.
Often times money will be raised at certain valuation and terms, but the cash is held in escrow (effectively) until milestones are hit.
The investors will do their due diligence on the feasibility. It’s a high stakes, high return game (if you succeed). Look around you… any physical device you see is basically funded the same way.
That’s like the point of venture capitalism and to a certain extent all entrepreneurial endeavors. You could start a T-shirt printing company (a completely viable business) and not see any revenue come in for months.
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.
Perhaps they are hoping Google will pay them ~$500m/yr to be the default search engine.
0.01 is a multiple!
More charitably by selling the only browser that's actually usable in a few years. The AI will be used to cancel out the effect of other people's AI.
There’s Orion, Zen, plenty of minor browser projects that aspire to better experiences than the majors’. Brave is likely much more widespread than Arc, though that one is monetized via the previous trend (crypto). Never even heard of a lot of these:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrxhVA5NVQ4
Ha, that's a dark timeline! But sadly quite probable.
Putting the agent into your user agent.
There have been a few extremely popular remastered games the last few years and the internet is full of people cranky because folks are posting replies to five year old internet threads about the game.
Well what do you expect people to do when the only non slop result on page 1 is a 5 to 8 year old thread? It’s the top link. You’re still relevant whether you want to be or not. Fuckin deal.
I would guess by selling personal data and ads.
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.
> how many designers I interviewed who told me they used the Arc browser
Looking at their frontpage the design is outright horrible if you have a > 7-8 inch screen. I guess in a way its good to have an example of what not to do.
> I'm sure they'd be killing it
Why, though? I mean the niche is pretty small, most people don't care much about open source or even what browser they are using at all.
Considering the overwhelming majority of Mozilla's funding is coming from Google and in no way could it survive without it being run by Google's plants is not that surprising.
Well, I was one of Arc users but they abandoned it in favor of a new browser with an integrated AI agent that t can work on tabs, Dia. Now I’m using it, but to be honest I use almost none of the AI features beyond some summaries for pages and YouTube videos, but I see a lot of potential there (I.e. make it check the calendar to propose a time in a newly composed email) for the less technical users.
I use Arc for two reasons:
Tabs on the side nav and the ability to have 3 different AWS accounts open at the same time
Firefox does both of those things out of the box with no extensions.
Yep, but admittedly the vertical tab UX is not the greatest. You either have them always be visible with an option to toggle by clicking the sidebar icon (no keyboard shortcut option afaik), or minimised as icons that expand on hover with an awfully annoying animation.
Looking at Zen, I really don't understand how Mozilla fail to capitalise on their browser, and build up a similar experimental project based on Firefox like it. It seems that many of these small QoL improvements could make a big difference. They have such a huge budget, and they waste it on inane things. Their fancy search deal with Google has made them complacent, and neglect one of the few things that ever had any real worth. Curious to see how it develops with the recent Google ruling. And to be fair, it does seem like Firefox development has picked up a bit lately—maybe even due to Zen's competition, who knows.
Vimperator plugin used to do the rest, but maybe that is no longer needed or working.
And there are business which will never be highly profitable unless the competition implodes for no particular reason (like making your own browser).
Atlassian has always baffled me. In that JBoss sort of way.
Explaining why they're successful and I'm not.
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.
Luck was a necessary ingredient, 100%.
But how many other people had similar luck and did nothing with it?
Luck is another word for opportunity. Some people are really good at leveraging opportunity for all it's worth. Most of us (myself very much included) are not.
Case in point: I'm the same age as Mark Zuckerberg. Many people say his age is why he was able to be at the right place at the right time to create Facebook. Much like they say about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and every other "self-made" billionaire.
But he still had to choose to do all the right things that I chose not to do in order to be able to experience that kind of luck.
At some point we gotta own up to our own role in guiding our lives.
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.
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.
are they locked-in tho? People loved Arc, but they killed it. Doesn't seem the reviews of Dia are all that great.
I haven't kept track for a while, but whoever I knew that used arc, they found it hard to go back to standard browsers after getting used to its various UI affordances. Even when they pulled the "you need an account" thing most people I knew just sucked it up and created an account. I am assuming a good portion of them will submit to whatever atlassian demands.
why not Zen https://zen-browser.app/ ?
I've found it just as good AND it's open source https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop
Because for better and for worse - it is Firefox.
I love Arc. I tried Dia. I wanted to like it but don't see how it's going to be valuable for me.
The browser features are _much_ worse than Arc (no sidebar, bookmarks are a dropdown, ...) and most of the time the AI can't even "see" or "read" what's on the page I'm viewing, so it's just worse than using Claude/ChatGPT/Gemini.
I'm still using Arc and will probably continue until there's another browser that copies its UI/UX improvements.
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.
>- 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.
This is nothing new.
less than a $6M/head - it is a steal. Not even counting whatever IP they have.
How much do you think it costs to hire people?
you think Mark didn't know it when he hired that guy for $250 millions? Anyway, you probably mean an individual hiring cost. Which is a totally different case from hiring and building a multifunctional team of 100. Look around at aqui-hires to understand the price, especially when we're talking about people who has been working with AI products.
$250 million was for a top researcher with more experience than almost anyone else in designing and training massive models.
As far as I know, Dia just calls OpenAI’s API. I’m sure their employees know a lot about using AI at this point, but so does everyone else who’s built an OpenAI wrapper.
VCs are not allowed to lose.
Atlassian invested in their series A. Atlassian decided Atlassian isn't allowed to lose
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.
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
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.
How do Edge & Chrome collect ad revenue?
They don't directly, but they are the major source of ad revenue for search engines & content, since they drive both the search and page view traffic. Besides regular browsing, examples of browser features that drive ad revenue include search suggestions in the address bar, and the browser homepage (Edge defaults to msn content, used to just show msn.com earlier).
Alas the last piece of information falls into place
What was ground breaking about Arc? The tabs on the side had been possible with other browsers for a long time
Live github PRs that you are tagged in.
ARC always feels like a feature not a product. Don't see how Atlassian connection is really gonna make either better.
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.
Interesting idea. Replace a bunch of different clients with one for purpose client but the devil we be in the details.
Arc had privacy concerns. How will those concerns be addressed by Atlassian, given they handle very sensitive data?
Hmm so those aren't alternative web browsers but "AI" crammed on top of ... chromium or something?
Switched to Zen last week over a bug that prevented me from opening my favs. Good timing to jump ship.
Maybe finally Jira will be fast?
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).
I don't think first class Linear or Notion support will be high on their list given who acquired them.
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.
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
Imagine, a browser with the polished experience and performance of Jira
The one ticket Jira would never get? A speeding ticket.
So Internet Explorer 11 you're saying?
I do love 500ms delays as yet another pop-up menu appears from one of the half-dozen redundant places in the UI.
If the AI browser can use Jira for us, then this is a step forward for humanity.
https://investors.atlassian.com/news/news-details/2025/Atlas...
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.
WELP..... that was a fun run. Probably switch back to chrome at some point.
Well, this may be a shame for those browsers.
Finally, I can have JIRA in my face all the time while I browse
Two more browsers that Confluence and Jira can fail in!
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.
> 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.
Enterprise Chrome is just regular Chrome with remote policy enforcement. It isn't a different browser.
From an engineering perspective, most browsers are "pretty much just Chrome(ium)", but that's not what I'm talking about here. The delivery mechanism isn't really relevant from a product perspective. It is a different product with a different price and different features.
Also, my point was just just say that there's a market for something like this. Chrome Enterprise is not even really that competitive of a product in the space.
For the most part, default Chrome and Firefox are designed primarily for B2C use cases.
Which is what Enterprises need. They don't need their own version of Chrome, they need to ability to make changes to it like force Proxy, insert MiTM certs and various other Enterprise stuff.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
That just sounds like going back to making thick clients/desktop apps vs. web with extra steps. They might as well make their own native Jira app instead of making an entire web browser and breaking their web app to only work in their new browser.
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.
>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
I would wager that if you asked corporations which was more important, knowing what their staff are doing online during work hours vs ensuring that their browser is hardened, they would choose to spy on their employees.
My point is this is coded language to give corporations an excuse to have another foothold on their employee's data.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
Also these guys [1].
[1] https://www.island.io
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.
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?
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.
breath functionality?
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.
Just so many decisions that made it unusable from a business continuity perspective.
Someone just bought your browsing history.
[DELETE] [ARC]
Why on earth would they shelve out money for these horrible, totally mislead, borderline useless, alien like things (browsers)?
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).
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.
RIP
Well, it was a good run.
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.
404
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.
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.
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.
Luckily they didn't buy Linear, if anything they removed an early-competitor for them.
Another excellent product off to the gallows at atlasian. Joining ops genie and trello.
Opsgenie still exists
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.
I feel like I’m in the wrong business lol
Say it with me. Bubble.
[flagged]
Can you please not do this here? We're trying for something a bit different:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Maybe they can finally make Jira responsive /s