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Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

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Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#401

Post by zer00eyz »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #377
scrlk wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#402

Post by mananaysiempre »

sevensor wrote: post #171
mananaysiempre wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#403

Post by amlib »

jabwd wrote: post #396
butterfi wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#404

Post by sempron64 »

jabwd wrote: post #396
butterfi wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

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.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#405

Post by johncolanduoni »

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.

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.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#406

Post by manquer »

daveidol wrote: post #390
manquer wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#408

Post by hippo22 »

bhouston wrote: post #253
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…

> 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…

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.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#410

Post by s__s »

Reagan_Ridley wrote: post #172
nicoka11 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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
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