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Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

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Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#521

Post by niutech »

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.

Is it? There is Wine/Crossover on Linux. Also, users pay for Sailfish OS, which can run Android apps (while providing better privacy).

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#522

Post by niutech »

dehrmann wrote: post #424
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.

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.

OS is not only desktop. There is also mobile OS, like KaiOS, which is the 3rd most popular phone OS.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#523

Post by niutech »

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.

> no one has delivered it yet

Firefox OS? Now KaiOS? The 3rd most popular mobile OS.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#524

Post by niutech »

johncolanduoni wrote: post #443
amlib wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

The part of the "microcosm" that prevents you from being able to easily compile a binary and have it run on a wide variety of distros doesn't have any upside I can see. The fact that you have to jump through hoops to target particular glibc symbol versions and that a stable OpenSSL ABI gets rug-pulled in new distro versions every few years aren't key to any benefits of distro/OS diversity. What would suffer if gcc/cl…

Have you heard of Cosmopolitan Libc? A single APE binary for every platform out there.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#525

Post by knr2345 »

amykhar wrote: post #519
knr2345 wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I share your sentiment but still can’t imagine adding a browser-specific AI subscription alongside my current GPT or Claude sub.

I don't really need AI in my browser. I do like spaces in Arc, and how it handles cleaning up my tabs. The color coding of the sidebar for the various profiles is the one feature I haven't been able to find in things like Orion, Vivaldi, Firefox, etc. By color coding, I mean the ability to make the entire sidebar a different color, which helps me make certain I don't do stupid things in prod.

Agreed; the occasional Raycast AI query using their web extension suits me well.

Haven’t used Arc as my daily driver in a while now, but I used a similar setup with a semi-bright green sidebar as my debugging space when my last project was in active development. I’m rarely at a desk these days so back to Safari for the time being, but one thing I miss the most is Arc’s near-borderless window ‘frame’.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#526

Post by jemmyw »

enos_feedler wrote: post #518
jemmyw wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Chromebooks have done so well because they're cheap and are purchased for locked down environments (education and people who really don't want complexity). Even then, I think they kind of demonstrate that the browser is NOT the OS because users and Google still felt the need to break out of the browser box, with both Android apps and Linux application support.

The browser is the OS that wraps the user not the machine. Just as Linux or Windows or Android wrap the machine and manage its resources, the browser should wrap the user and manage their resources (data, time/focus etc). In this regard nobody has succeeded. The browser isn’t finished until it achieves this

The browser is an application that renders webpages. It doesn't need any mystical vague purpose. Further, the OS doesn't wrap the machine, that's not even a good analogy. When you wrap something you've protected it or hidden it, or even ended it.

I don't need a browser to manage my time or focus. I need it to render websites efficiently so I can interact with them.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#527

Post by ProcessOptimist »

dtagames wrote: post #72
DanielHB wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They recently decided to destroy Trello, too. They bought it because it was a legit alternative to Jira for small teams and basically left it alone after the acquisition. But recently they've decided that it's too much of an alternative so it had to be crippled to remove the team features, turning it into a personal information manager that no one asked for.

Yeah I came across a reddit post in r/saas about an upcoming alternative that tells his story on how the acquisition crushed the product he loved that helped him build his successful gaming company.

This prompted him to build his own platform he would want to use instead of Trello. Basically claiming that Trello for teams is dead due to the transition to a "personal producitivty companion" xD

You can check out the post here if interested in reading more and even giving the pro plan for his platform free forever for 30 days.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ndj8mn/remembering_t...

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#528

Post by enos_feedler »

jemmyw wrote: post #526
enos_feedler wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The browser is the OS that wraps the user not the machine. Just as Linux or Windows or Android wrap the machine and manage its resources, the browser should wrap the user and manage their resources (data, time/focus etc). In this regard nobody has succeeded. The browser isn’t finished until it achieves this

The browser is an application that renders webpages. It doesn't need any mystical vague purpose. Further, the OS doesn't wrap the machine, that's not even a good analogy. When you wrap something you've protected it or hidden it, or even ended it. I don't need a browser to manage my time or focus. I need it to render websites efficiently so I can interact with them.

The os wraps the machine. That is literally it's job. Manage hardware resources and broker them to applications
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