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Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

cnbc.com

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Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#201

Post by nartho »

Ancapistani wrote: post #193
netghost wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

Zen browser has spaces

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#202

Post by scosman »

Waraqa wrote: post #177
jshchnz wrote: post #141

$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?

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#203

Post by hahn-kev »

crowcroft wrote: post #173

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 en…

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

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#204

Post by __loam »

exabrial wrote: post #155

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.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#205

Post by muragekibicho »

hbn wrote: post #71
al_borland wrote: post #58

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 ow…

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!

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

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#206

Post by theappsecguy »

jshchnz wrote: post #141

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

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

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#207

Post by mrkramer »

ActionHank wrote: post #57
viraptor wrote: post #13

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.

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

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#208

Post by dbg31415 »

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.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#209

Post by rvz »

crowcroft wrote: post #173

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 en…

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.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#210

Post by manquer »

Waraqa wrote: post #177
jshchnz wrote: post #141

$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...

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 ?

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