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Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

cnbc.com

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Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#421

Post by lmm »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #400
sagarm wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Exten…

Sounds like more than half the problem is the lack of standardization in desktop operating systems. There’s no reason why all Mac apps can’t take advantage of the system standard tabbing like AppKit Mac apps do, but most don’t, so in most apps you don’t get apps unless the dev implements them. Same deal with updaters. If macOS and Windows had a standardized way to update apps Linux distros do that wouldn’t be nearly…

> Sounds like more than half the problem is the lack of standardization in desktop operating systems. There’s no reason why all Mac apps can’t take advantage of the system standard tabbing like AppKit Mac apps do, but most don’t, so in most apps you don’t get apps unless the dev implements them.

Yep. "Every app ships most of Chrome" is a profoundly stupid way to get a sensible cross-platform application runtime to develop on, but it's the only one that works, and at that point you might as well make the app run in actual Chrome instead.

> general flakiness stemming from nobody being able to agree on how to develop web app UIs (even just within the React sphere, let alone beyond it). The number of manhours set on fire and level of potential for refinement left on the table by the innumerable redundant bespoke widget reimplementations is unreal.

Disagree. That's creative destruction at work, it's messy but it's the only way to get better. Like it or not (and I don't like it), the best UIs around these days are built on React or similar webtech.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#423

Post by lmm »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #402
sevensor wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 definit…

> Closes them.

Or resolves them. Or sometimes both, or sometimes neither, and maybe you can undo one but not the other. I wouldn't say it manages to make sense with that piece of functionality.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#424

Post by dehrmann »

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.

A nearby comment repeated the quote "the browser is the OS."

The OS game is over. Desktop computing is becoming a professionals-only thing. We can talk about pros and cons of Windows, MacOS, and Linux, but it's a shrinking market without room for a fourth player.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#425

Post by dehrmann »

creatonez wrote: post #345
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. 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.

> I'm sorry, but this is the exact same insight that MSN Explorer had

The internet wasn't fast enough. There are a number of dot-com era ideas that were before their time for various reasons. There's also Wordle. That game could have been made (and I think variants were) for at least a 20-year window, but it caught on late in the pandemic when our streaming queues were exhausted.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#426

Post by joeblubaugh »

drewbeck wrote: post #255

I'm a huge fan of Arc and generally not a fan of TBCNY due to their abandonment of the browser for their AI hype machine, Dia. What's odd about this acquisition is that the move to Dia was (publicly) presented as a move toward the consumer; that consumers weren't ready for a radical reinvention of the browser interface so it made sense to revert to something more standard if you wanted to do something new with the br…

> Atlassian, tho, has nothing for the regular every-day consumer, they make SaaS for business. So what's the deal?

sometimes you just find a big enterprise sucker who's desperate to stay relevant.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#427

Post by bageljlin17 »

blehn wrote: post #383
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...

Exactly, they basically have better designer. For the real tech feature, I really don't think they ever brings any new invention to the product. Data sync, AI, etc. All other competitors have these features. They even need to count on chromium update.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#429

Post by rgblambda »

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.

Dia is the Irish word for "God". Probably not what The Browser Company were going for, but I can't unthink that when I see it.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#430

Post by faizmokh »

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…

> Nobody wants to use Atlassian browser.

I don't want to use Jira either but yet I can't run away from it

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