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Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

cnbc.com

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Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#381

Post by hnlmorg »

crowcroft wrote: post #363
mattlutze wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

…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. :)

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#383

Post by blehn »

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…

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...

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#384

Post by ausssssie »

scosman wrote: post #202
Waraqa wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

Or... A UI framework? what's the other $612m for?

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#385

Post by RachelF »

Shank wrote: post #25

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 th…

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

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#386

Post by sagarm »

forbiddenvoid wrote: post #154
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 facilitie…

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.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#387

Post by tomjakubowski »

crowcroft wrote: post #259
bhouston wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

They say the browser is the OS, and yet eww is only one small part of Emacs.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#389

Post by jereees »

sniffers wrote: post #130
whalesalad wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#390

Post by daveidol »

manquer wrote: post #210
Waraqa wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 ?

ObjC is mostly dead, and most Swift devs are not comfortable with C++.
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