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Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

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Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#411

Post by jonas21 »

Pfhortune wrote: post #236

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 to…

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.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#412

Post by shuckles »

jimmydoe wrote: post #73
ghm2199 wrote: post #43

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..

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.

Pinned tabs in Safari propagate between windows.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#413

Post by johncolanduoni »

sempron64 wrote: post #404
jabwd wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#414

Post by wpm »

johncolanduoni wrote: post #405
crowcroft wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#415

Post by wpm »

foobarchu wrote: post #398
creatonez wrote: post #345

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. 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.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#416

Post by bsder »

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.

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.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#417

Post by wslh »

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…

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.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#418

Post by democracy »

bsder wrote: post #416
crowcroft wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

And then make people want to write for (and make money off)

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#419

Post by democracy »

tripletpeaks wrote: post #314
k9294 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same, and I don't not really wanna try:

"A new AI browser from the makers of Arc: Chat with your tabs"

say what??? )))

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#420

Post by democracy »

julianozen wrote: post #74
hbn wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!
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