Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

It does that.

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'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.

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.

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.