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Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

• gniting 1y ago
  Details on the price Atlassian paid: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/04/atlassian-the-browser-company-deal.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/04/atlassian-the-browser-compan...
• chuckreynolds 1y ago
  WELP..... that was a fun run. Probably switch back to chrome at some point.
• Illniyar 1y ago
  Isn't Atlassian where products go to die? :) Is this is an acquihire? Atlassian does not seem to have strategic overlap with making a browser in any meaningful way I can think of.
  • cpach 1y ago
    I think Atlassian is kind of trying to be the Lotus Notes of the 20s. If so, I can see why their upper management approved this acquisition. Will anything good come out of it…? I could be wrong, but I seriously doubt it.
  • blackqueeriroh 1y ago
    Which products have ton to Atlassian to die?
    • ghiculescu 1y ago
      Hipchat RIP
      • apwell23 1y ago
        Brings back so many memories. I bought TEAM stock at $17 when they bought hipchat. turned out to be a nice investment even though they killed the product.
    • TiredOfLife 1y ago
      Trello
• sangeeth96 1y ago
  I'd like to be proven wrong but I'm feeling the same point Carmack was making about not building "VR" operating systems[1][2] applies to "AI" browsers as well. It seems like a futile effort especially considering revenue generation and it seems pointless to not pick Chromium for that even if you're hellbent on going down that road. [1]: https://xcancel.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1961172409920491849 https://xcancel.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1961172409920491849 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45066395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45066395
• bradhe 1y ago
  This is going to be remembered as a really weird tale in the annals of our industry’s history.
• dbg31415 1y ago
  Like grandpa always said: "When a company lays off staff so the founders can buy an island, it's time to move to GitHub Projects." Ha! Here are the real reasons to drop Atlassian: 1 -- You're already paying for GitHub. Atlassian has no alternative to GitHub Actions, and nothing else matches it at scale. 2 -- GitHub works better with AI coding tools, most dev tools, and most CI/CD pipelines. Open source is ~5x more likely to be on GitHub than anywhere else. 3 -- Your devs like GitHub more. Honestly, everyone does. The only person who tolerates Jira is the guy who thinks changing fonts on TPS reports counts as productivity. 4 -- And the best part: you can close an issue with a pull request. If you can't tie a task to the code commit, and show clean automated tests before merging, that's not project management -- it's project theater.
• thor-rodrigues 1y ago
  I’m not sure whether I find it more worrisome or fascinating that we live in a world where a company that, as far as I know, has never generated a single dollar in revenue has managed to exist for over five years, employ more than 100 people, and still get acquired for this amount. This isn’t criticism or sarcasm — I’m genuinely impressed, but also very curious about the rationale behind it.
  • rvz 1y ago
    VCs are not allowed to lose.
    • BoorishBears 1y ago
      Atlassian invested in their series A. Atlassian decided Atlassian isn't allowed to lose
  • porridgeraisin 1y ago
    Atlassian essentially got a big fairly locked-in userbase that they will now squeeze using their existing proven mechanisms. Oh and they probably got a few free competent developers without needing to go through an expensive hiring process. All told, probably worth 610M.
    • mritchie712 1y ago
      are they locked-in tho? People loved Arc, but they killed it. Doesn't seem the reviews of Dia are all that great.
      • porridgeraisin 1y ago
        I haven't kept track for a while, but whoever I knew that used arc, they found it hard to go back to standard browsers after getting used to its various UI affordances. Even when they pulled the "you need an account" thing most people I knew just sucked it up and created an account. I am assuming a good portion of them will submit to whatever atlassian demands.
• deleted 1y ago
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• BenFranklin100 1y ago
  Arc had privacy concerns. How will those concerns be addressed by Atlassian, given they handle very sensitive data?
• ricokatayama 1y ago
  They messed with Dia thing. Arc had a clear value proposition, a better browser for power users. I'd pay for that, mostly because the browser itself, but also because they had pretty straightforward approaches on their communication, how small things work, how bad features should be removed and so on... I never understood Dia. ofc I downloaded Dia and tried using it a while, but never clicked on the agent bar. They told somewhere sometime that they were seeking a bigger user base. Dia definitely is not that place. A browser powered by AI definitely is nothing something beyond the geek/early adopter crew. Things become worse when we think about how they handled this whole situation. Sometimes shady, sometimes with a lot of arrogance and always shunning off their loyal users. We don't have the whole information, of course the team and maybe investors know better in details what happened, but definitely things weren't going well. The recent tweet from the design guy cheering up the side bar is almost a suffocated scream from the team imo. From the company journey perspective that's a depressing way to have an exit. Wish them the best, but I'm deleting any traces of TBC from my computer.
• jcmontx 1y ago
  Switched to Zen last week over a bug that prevented me from opening my favs. Good timing to jump ship.
• Pfhortune 1y ago
  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 toy. And now they're selling to Atlassian and I would bet money, will just evaporate. Nothing they ever built will mean anything to Atlassian in the long term. Nobody wants to use an Atlassian browser.
  • taminka 1y ago
    > having managed to get their swift-centric development working on _Windows_. That's a huge and difficult undertaking! im not a swift expert, but building your project for one of the officially supported targets shouldn't be considered a "phenomenal" achievent? lol
    • Pfhortune 1y ago
      Ah, fair enough. Showing my ignorance on that one. I know little about their tech stack and was under the impression they had some secret sauce.
      • taminka 1y ago
        i mean they did have some really cool designs, but technically they just had relatively advanced chrome fork...
      • basisword 1y ago
        You're not ignorant, the other person was.
    • askonomm 1y ago
      I recall something about them trying to get SwiftUI working on Windows, which would've been a pretty big thing indeed. No idea if they ever did or how exactly they built the Windows UI in the end.
• cush 1y ago
  It's so hard to switch browsers yet I took the leap on Arc, putting so much faith in this company that they wouldn't sell out. Such a waste of an incredible product.
• deleted 1y ago
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• deleted 1y ago
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• bhouston 1y ago
  Why were they acquired at that price? What is the competitive/technological advantage that Atlassian is acquiring? I am a little confused because at first glance their product appeared to fail to find a market. There must be something of value here.
  • drewbeck 1y ago
    The only natural synergy I can see is with Arc – PMs and product people loved Arc (myself, a designer, included). There's a very interesting play to be made by capitalizing on that market but IDK if that's what Atlassian is thinking.
• drewbeck 1y ago
  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 browser. I always saw Dia as fundamentally a move toward AI investor bux, but I did find the "Arc was too novel for large uptake" a reasonable perspective. Atlassian, tho, has nothing for the regular every-day consumer, they make SaaS for business. So what's the deal? My dream for Arc, from the beginning, was that it could act as a middle-man between all the various SaaS platforms we use daily at work. Imagine: your Shortcut tickets link automatically to Slack and you can one-click open the relevant Slack channel in a side-by-side view. We do so much switching between contexts and imo the browser could be a great surface for improving our workflows.
  • NaomiLehman 1y ago
    Opera and Vivaldi have some impressive features up their sleeves. Similar philosophies to Arc Browser. Worth giving them a try!
  • joeblubaugh 1y ago
    > 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.
  • blackqueeriroh 1y ago
    > Atlassian, tho, has nothing for the regular every-day consumer, they make SaaS for business. So what's the deal? Do you know why Windows computers ended up dominating the home PC market? Because everyone was using them at work, and they wanted the same experience they were familiar with. Hundreds of millions of regular old people use Atlassian’s products every day at work. If they get familiar with a browser that helps them get their work done faster, they’ll demand it at home, too.
  • rafram 1y ago
• i1856511 1y ago
  Can somebody please tell me what is the business play behind The Browser Company. It has always seemed very suspicious to me, well-funded, not making money, and now this
  • praz4HN 1y ago
    Same as Edge & Chrome - primarily to funnel users to web pages, which in turn powers engagement/searches & ads. Once you have enough users on a browser, the business play is ad revenue.
    • warkdarrior 1y ago
      How do Edge & Chrome collect ad revenue?
      • praz4HN 1y ago
        They don't directly, but they are the major source of ad revenue for search engines & content, since they drive both the search and page view traffic. Besides regular browsing, examples of browser features that drive ad revenue include search suggestions in the address bar, and the browser homepage (Edge defaults to msn content, used to just show msn.com earlier).
• kdazzle 1y ago
  If the AI browser can use Jira for us, then this is a step forward for humanity.
• yrcyrc 1y ago
  Been an Atlassian consultant for a while and I just left (Rather I was let go) from an established Atlassian partner, and I can only feel relief. I was always more of a data center on prem person and all this cloud nonsense has been going nowhere, except for them. Those acquisitions are always half baked and you *might see some of it somewhere in a product. All I can say is I’m happy I’m no longer doing Atlassian consulting.
• rank0 1y ago
  Arc always interested me for the UX and design choices (especially since I'm one of those who constantly has 100s of tabs open). But the account requirement is a hard blocker for me adopting as my daily driver. Anyone know of similar projects? I recall there being a arc-inspired linux-supported project, but they refused to sign their macOS release for god knows what reason.
  • NoGravitas 1y ago
    Have you tried Zen?
    • rank0 1y ago
      Just did! Been great so far!
• jhaile 1y ago
  I still use Arc as my primary browser. I prefer tabs on the side - I like how you can just drag tabs up and they will be saved (like Bookmarks, but I actually use it) I like pinned tabs which I use for calendar and my other top used "web apps" It also has good support for profiles and spaces. For example, I have a "Work" space, a "Demo" space (with tabs open for sales demos), a "Personal" space, and even a "Travel" space for travel planning stuff. And another killer feature is the ability to "route" specific urls to specific spaces, so for example I can have all github links open in my "Work" space. It's a great browser, and I hope Atlassian doesn't ditch ongoing support for it.
  • fwip 1y ago
    Zen is a Firefox-based browser that has copied a lot of Arc's good ideas, if you are looking for an alternative.
  • buddhu 1y ago
    For what it's worth, and from what you've described (I haven't used Arc myself), most of those features are also available in Firefox with the Sidebery extension. Instead of "spaces" it has "tab panels", with a horizontal row of icons above your tabs that lets you switch to different panels of vertical tabs. You can pin tabs in a panel, you can setup URL patterns to automatically move tabs to the right panel, and it works with Firefox's multi-account containers so you can even have an URL automatically re-opened in a specific container associated with that panel. [Side note: I'm hooked on Firefox's multi-account container feature because I can have different containers for general use, for work, isolated social media containers, etc, without needing an entirely different profile as in Chrome/Chromium and its variants. I've tried Vivaldi and other Chrome-based alternatives recently, but profiles are just too big of a separation by comparison, with separate extensions, bookmarks, settings, etc. I want all those things in one synced account where I can just open new tabs with their own set of signed-in accounts. Does Arc's profile feature have the same level of separation as Chrome? Am I missing something about how Chrome profiles work?] And for anyone concerned about Firefox's recent statement about personal data, there's a great Firefox-based alternative called Waterfox that adds some nice features and has a much stronger emphasis on privacy.
• jimmyshoes 1y ago
  I’ll never understand why they didn’t even bother to experiment with monetization for Arc. Normally, I’d scoff at the idea. But they genuinely made the browser useful again in ways for which I’d happily shill $30/mo. Superhuman proved you can do it for email, which was also previously laughable. I guess that ended in a buyout, too, but at least they tried. Arc also had a solid wedge into team space, especially if going AI-native was their little dream. You own the browser. Just build a capable browser-first agent that helps teams do work. Make it a shared space (separate from personal ofc) and start charging for teams. As I write this, it’s pretty clear that’s what Atlassian wants to do with this. The only real loss is: - They decided to roundtrip the entire product story of Arc with Dia, and drag users through 0->1 again - It’s Atlassian, and you know they’re gonna suffocate anything that isn’t related to Atlassian All in all, this looks like a fear-based sellout. They could have done it on their own but didn’t have the chops to scale into a company of that size. So instead they took the guaranteed payoff and tucked themselves inside this big ** kangaroo’s pouch for safety while they get to play with AI indefinitely. “We coulda been something real.” ———— EDIT: unironically, they now offer the option to pay $20/mo for Dia Pro… it’s basically comedy at this point.
• coffeeling 1y ago
  I've tried their Arc Search mobile browser, and the UX is just absolute trash unless you're specifically using it via search only workflows. It's not really a browser in the normal sense.
• screye 1y ago
  I bet this is a computer use agents play. It's an acquisition of Perplexity Comet's main competitor. Atlassian is in the 'productivity' business. The natural next step is to allow agents to do the productivity tasks for you. Agents rely on semantics (ie. business logic). Often, business logic lives on the frontend, with backend API calls having little resemblance to their intended business outcome. This means computer use agents, inefficient as they may be, win by default. Browser automation is fragile and needs a lot of domain knowledge to do robustly. Why not acquire a group that literally built their own browser ?
• rmonvfer 1y ago
  I use Arc as my primary browser but, well, I guess I won’t be using an Atlassian browser (only thinking about it sounds insane) because we all know what will happen with telemetry and tracking. I’ve been using Zen [1] on and off for some time but it’s time to go full time on Firefox again! It’s such a shame tho, Arc is a great browser and I’ve felt more productive using it, not to mention the UI, which is cleaner and just slicker than any other browser. [1] https://zen-browser.app https://zen-browser.app
• karel-3d 1y ago
  Finally, I can have JIRA in my face all the time while I browse
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• abrowne2 1y ago
  Surely the Browser Company will move to Jira, even though it's using a direct competitor for Product Management... https://linear.app/customers/browsercompany https://linear.app/customers/browsercompany Heh.
• thecrumb 1y ago
  Say it with me. Bubble.
• xyst 1y ago
  I don’t understand why the most hated ticket managing system is acquiring a browser? They want to further bloat a browser with their crappy ticket management system? And AI? What’s the play here? Just throwing money into anything AI at this point and seeing what sticks?
• basisword 1y ago
  It's sad the tech industry is in such a state that a team can build a really great, innovative product, and then have to abandon it to create a little bit of AI slop so they can sell that to a company that is completely unrelated to that products market. You have a great product, passionate users, and you have to throw it all away (because you've accepted too much money from investors who don't care about anything other than quick returns).
• daft_pink 1y ago
  I feel like I’m in the wrong business lol
• user3939382 1y ago
  People I respect like it but Google is a non starter and always was for me. Still sad to see no diversity in the browser space. I’m convinced the web, app stores, and HTTP all have to go.
• wouldbecouldbe 1y ago
  Maybe finally Jira will be fast?
• dbbk 1y ago
  I don't say this lightly, but this disgusts me. $610M for a dead company with no future and no revenue. So much good can be done in the world with that kind of cash. Disgusting.
• pmkary 1y ago
  When I git Arc, I thought "how are they going to monetize this?" Red flag I just didn't take seriously. Then I saw remains of the chromium branding, they hadn't even changed the icon. I thought this isn't time consuming, why they haven't done such a thing? And honestly it felt like one of those ADHD brains that go to many ideas and never finish any, Arc was exactly one in every sense. I knew this was huge red flag but then the beautiful interface (which till this day is—after Apple's—the most crafted and beautiful one) made me break my lines. I knew this could not keep going. Arc Search is a horrible browse, and I actually always used it because it was syncing with the desktop, the desktop was broken in so many different places that I cannot name (just try to open the downloads and you see). And well Arc is just another browser with some ideas borrowed from here and there. I mean it's still some sandboxed web frames, nothing integrated, no special new feature and infrastructure to make the browser an OS. My whole point with this is that it astonishes me how they never finish anything (Arc, Arc Sync, Arc Search, Arc Windows, Easels...) and they actually sell big time and have all of this hype around them
• dcreater 1y ago
  What was ground breaking about Arc? The tabs on the side had been possible with other browsers for a long time
  • thunkle 1y ago
    Live github PRs that you are tagged in.
• democracy 1y ago
  Atlassian want to look cool being on the AI edge - nothing more )) But tbh looks a bit stupid but its owners/top management are living in the ivory tower for decades now, so no suprises here
  • blackqueeriroh 1y ago
    lol, you should actually try using the Ai feature inside Atlassian’s products, they’re pretty revolutionary
• smoyer 1y ago
  Two more browsers that Confluence and Jira can fail in!
• back2dafucha 1y ago
  Someone just bought your browsing history. [DELETE] [ARC]
• webworker 1y ago
  Arc was the only Chrome browser that I could stomach as a development browser/environment. Kind of tight-lipped, but I assume it'll keep getting updates? I use Safari day-to-day, but its behaviors are inconsistent with caching which makes development hell. I notice this caching behavior even when you have it disabled in the network developer tools.
• 827a 1y ago
  Is this the most valuable acquisition of a zero revenue company ever? I understand there's been larger acquisitions of unprofitable companies, but zero revenue at all is truly special.
  • yroc92 1y ago
    Was WhatsApp 0 revenue?
    • ehfeng 1y ago
      No, WhatsApp charged a $1 annual subscription fee prior to 2016.
• usr1106 1y ago
  To be honest I don't understand the logic in acquisation and I don't care. As a forced Jira user I just hope it's a good thing for me that the money they have spent on the acquisation cannot be used to make already overloaded Jira more overloaded.
• 3uler 1y ago
  Another excellent product off to the gallows at atlasian. Joining ops genie and trello.
  • blackqueeriroh 1y ago
    Opsgenie still exists
    • 3uler 1y ago
      So does trello, they are not good anymore. Atlasian are the masters of inshitification/jirafication of the products they buy. Turning loved products into hated gartner matrixes.
• stuaxo 1y ago
  Well, this may be a shame for those browsers.
• captainboggle 1y ago
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• danieltfydu 1y ago
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• _kush 1y ago
  Atlassian's announcement: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/atlassian-acquires-the-browser-company https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/atlassian-acqui...
• dtagames 1y ago
  This is so strange. How would Atlassian convince their enterprise customers to switch browsers? That seems really unlikely, and unnecessary. The main feature being touted is the ability to take context from multiple tabs and ... do something with it? So unconstrained access to what you're doing in multiple tabs feeding into exactly what and why? The announcement is concerning because it mentions "AI skills" which are, of course, nonexistent. If anything, the "arc" of The Browser Company proves a fundamental tenet of the post-capitalist era: You can get rich without making or selling any products that anyone wants. It's all stock transactions between wealthly elites. The software, if any, is an afterthought.
  • DanielHB 1y ago
    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.
    • dtagames 1y ago
      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.
      • ProcessOptimist 1y ago
        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_trello_for_teams_i_will_promote_sort/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ndj8mn/remembering_t...
• theuur 1y ago
  https://investors.atlassian.com/news/news-details/2025/Atlassian-Enters-Into-Definitive-Agreement-to-Acquire-The-Browser-Company-of-New-York/default.aspx https://investors.atlassian.com/news/news-details/2025/Atlas...
• pavlov 1y ago
  I never knew the Browser Company had such an awesome logo! Anyway, the idea of making Dia into the knowledge worker's browser sounds good. For me, this new browser would be successful the day I prefer to run Linear and Notion in Dia rather than using the companies' own Electron desktop apps (which are pretty terrible on Mac at least, so the bar is not necessarily very high).
  • smsx 1y ago
    I don't think first class Linear or Notion support will be high on their list given who acquired them.
• nerdjon 1y ago
  What is with this need for a single application to do so many different tasks instead of just being focused on doing its job and doing it well (browsing the web in this case). I just don't understand how they can with a straight face say "Today’s browsers weren’t built for work." when their entire business relies on browsers ability to do exactly that and have basically been fine (heavy javascript usage in Jira aside which this is not going to magically fix). Looking at any of this I just don't see what this is actually supposed to solve.
  • threetonesun 1y ago
    Zawinski's Law in action. I suppose the good thing with AI is we're coming close to being able to roll our own versions of whatever we want when the software we were using ascends to the enterprise plane.
    • ozgrakkurt 1y ago
      I would like to see you and all people think that they can roll own software with AI come together with AI as well and write chromium one day
      • threetonesun 1y ago
        I don't think I was suggesting you build your own Chromium so much as do what all these other browser projects do and fork it. The "software A got too bloated so we released software B" cycle is eternal but I'm optimistic it's moving even closer to the actual user than it has been in a while.
        • bargainbin 1y ago
          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.
• oldpersonintx2 1y ago
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• rvz 1y ago
  Well this is a surprise. Thought OpenAI or Perplexity would buy them. [0][1] But there's an even worse company that wanted to buy them out of losing money and has no solid plan to use it. This looks like a very bad deal, equivalent to the Humane and HP acquisition. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42213288 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42213288 [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/04/atlassian-the-browser-company-deal.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/04/atlassian-the-browser-compan...
• viraptor 1y ago
  It was nice knowing them. > less than 10% of organizations have adopted a secure browser Yes Gartner, let's invent a "secure enterprise browser", because there's too much interoperability on the web - there's definitely some business on splitting that up. I'm sure atlassian people love that idea.
  • jgalt212 1y ago
    > less than 10% of organizations have adopted a secure browser That's the value prop (along with better application interop+) of the Here browser. + I do think the File System API did somewhat mitigate this value prop. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System...
    • thewebguyd 1y ago
      I haven't heard of Here browser until now, but lookin at the website I guess I don't understand what the point is? For Windows shops, Edge is already an "enterprise browser." I can control literally every aspect of it via MDM policies or Group Policy for the on-prem AD folks. If using EntraID, SSO is already included, and you can go as far as whitelisting sites as well. I can set custom tab groups, pinned tabs, etc all with policy. Even on non-managed/BYOD devices, once signed in to the work account Edge can be managed the same way via MAM policies. I can even force documents and links from other "work" apps to open in the managed Edge profile. The only thing Here seems to offer that I couldn't configure Edge to do is the split-pane view in their "Supertabs" but Edge does have the sidebar, that I can configure to be pinned with Teams, Outlook, Copilot, etc.
    • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      Also these guys [1]. [1] https://www.island.io https://www.island.io
    • viraptor 1y ago
      I'm not sure we need a new browser for that. Between corporate proxies filtering content and the ability to disable JIT by policy, you get 99% there with security. Add some containers for zero trust / auto-sso and we'd be there... There's really no reason to make a new browser. It could be a few options away on Firefox for example if people cared about the "secure" part more than the "enterprise sales" part.
• johnhamlin 1y ago
  404
• drbscl 1y ago
  AI in a web browser isn't going to make Atlassian products any more usable
  • pjmlp 1y ago
    If only competition was half as good. I will keep suggesting Atlassian, because everything else I used since the 1990's was worse.
• drbscl 1y ago
  AI jammed into a browser really isn't going to make any Atlassian product any more pleasant to use
• arnvald 1y ago
  I really appreciate that there's a company trying to reimagine browsers. Arc was an interesting idea, I used it for a few months, but in the end I switched back to Firefox. I haven't tried Dia yet, and now I'm not sure if I should. I do think that selling a browser is going to be an extremely difficult task, so having an enterprise software machine with huge customer base might help it, but Atlassian strikes me as a company that will eventually just kill the project and turn this into a de facto acquihire.
  • blackqueeriroh 1y ago
    Atlassian doesn’t kill the products of companies they acquire
  • conradfr 1y ago
    I never tried it because I was on Windows at the time but I remember my brother raving about it constantly, that I had to try it etc (and reading other people saying the same thing). I think he's still using it. He probably would have paid something for it. But then overnight they just weren't interested on building it. So strange.
    • ljbred08 1y ago
      Right! So many people would have actually paid for Arc to keep active development going, but without even giving that option they switched to Dia...
  • Cu3PO42 1y ago
    If you liked Arc, you should try Zen. I understand it brings many of the same ideas to a Firefox base.
    • 4ggr0 1y ago
      +1, i used firefox since my childhood, never interested by Arc because it's idiotic to me that a browser requires an account. a while back someone suggested Zen, i now use it as my main browser since a bit over a month. really happy :)
• dcchambers 1y ago
  The thing the Browser Company does best is marketing. I have always felt like they really wanted to market their products more than build them. The founders should let Dia/Arc go and just go into product marketing. Many would hire them.
  • bb82 1y ago
    [dead]
  • joeguilmette 1y ago
    I always wondered who did their marketing. Their Arc Act II video was so good I watched it a few times (https://youtu.be/WIeJF3kL5ng?si=R1fHA87355dXDuZH https://youtu.be/WIeJF3kL5ng?si=R1fHA87355dXDuZH). I immediately thought Sandwich made it. Some of their stuff like https://youtu.be/5GeR8XTWR3M?si=RX-NBCMicnUPw1jA https://youtu.be/5GeR8XTWR3M?si=RX-NBCMicnUPw1jA is so good I just periodically watch it. If The Browser Company folks made that video, their superpower is really marketing and you are actually correct. But I feel like it must have been an agency.
    • frankdenbow 1y ago
      Nashilu Makoua did a lot of their storytelling and strategy, very talented.
• timw4mail 1y ago
  Maybe they can finally make Jira responsive /s
• kedihacker 1y ago
  It would be perfect upsell for Atlassian because of their products abysmal performance of their product.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• dcchambers 1y ago
  Arc had some novel ideas but ultimately it was DOA for me because I needed something that I could access on both desktop and mobile for shared tabs/history/etc. They did help push the established players in the field forward a bit though, so I will be thankful for that. Also: It's always funny to see how people really feel about an acquisition. eg the comments in this thread feel like a eulogy.
  • joeguilmette 1y ago
    It does that.
    • dcchambers 1y ago
      There was no Arc Mobile when it first released.
• secfirstmd 1y ago
  ARC always feels like a feature not a product. Don't see how Atlassian connection is really gonna make either better.
  • techjamie 1y ago
    It has the kind of buzzwords to get executives to buy in, who will then force it on their employees. I mean, if you offered a CEO an "Enterprise AI Browser," it feels like the sort of thing they'd salivate over. Then they can go tell the investors that they're AI now and line can go up.
• Shank 1y ago
  I would've actually expected a buyer like OpenAI or Anthropic, if I'm being perfectly honest. Atlassian is such a strange buyer. $610m in cash is really low in the grand scheme of AI pricing too. If they're only worth $610m, I feel like this says a lot that "AI browsers" aren't actually worth that much. Remember, Instagram was $1b. The Windsurf acquihire was $2.4b and there are surely a lot more people in business that use browsers than write code. Was Atlassian the highest bidder, or was Atlassian the only bidder?
  • RachelF 1y ago
    Given Atlassian's terrible product quality, I give it two years until anything they buy becomes borderline unusable frustration.
    • blackqueeriroh 1y ago
      Would love hear what, specifically, you find terrible about the quality of their products!
  • warthog 1y ago
    Considering they never made revenue, there must be more than one bidder - otherwise the price could have been much lower. I remember them raising at $500 MM at the last round
  • k9294 1y ago
    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).
    • tripletpeaks 1y ago
      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.
• amrrs 1y ago
  Surprising I don't think Atlassian hasn't even recovered from Loom acquisition. It was good for Loom but hardly any positive impact for Atlassian. Now Arc and Dia - it seems to be an obsession to acquire an AI BROWSER
  • blackqueeriroh 1y ago
    How so? The Loom acquisition has been a huge success for Atlassian.
  • utyop22 1y ago
    Its just funny to watch isnt it. The reality is, most people at the top of these firms had great initial success because they had some advantage but over time, you realise that advantage acquired can be explained more by luck than skill. Very few can have sustained success.
• neodymiumphish 1y ago
  Arc was actually full of some really great ideas. There was plenty of nonsense, but their Air Traffic Control feature is still unmatched on other browsers. Multi-container/profile browsing is managed so poorly across other browsers. Dia is a joke, but I guess it has a chance in the age of ever-more-popular AI functionality. My only curiosity is whether this means that Atlassian will lock these browsers down to just paying customers or keep some limited functionality versions available for personal use. Of all the companies who might’ve bought TBC, I did not expect Atlassian, based on the services they offer already. Then again, all the potential anti-trust stuff happening with Google and the push to separate Google from Chrome could be a bit catalyst for this move.
• vinnymac 1y ago
  I find Atlassian to be a strange buyer of The Browser Company and there products. I don’t see the philosophical match here. Does Atlassian want them to become an Enterprise AI arm?
  • flkiwi 1y ago
    Trying to bootstrap a new-generation Lotus Notes from parts, with Dia as the container.
• ghm2199 1y ago
  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..
  • dutchCourage 1y ago
    I've also made the move to Zen. I think Arc users will feel right at home there. It hasn't quite reached he same level of polish just yet but being in active development is a big plus. On top of that, Zen can be personalized with CSS. As someone who spends a lot of time in the browser, it's been awesome to be able to tailor it to my needs. https://docs.zen-browser.app/guides/live-editing https://docs.zen-browser.app/guides/live-editing
  • bathwaterpizza 1y ago
    One big limitation for me is how they can't display DRM protected content like Netflix
  • keijay 1y ago
    zen's performance issues really need to be addressed tho... it hogs an insane amount of memory (and somehow even more than arc)
  • jdlyga 1y ago
    Zen is nice, but it's nowhere near as powerful as Arc is. It's still missing a lot of Arc's features like Air Traffic Control.
  • jimmydoe 1y ago
    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.
    • shuckles 1y ago
      Pinned tabs in Safari propagate between windows.
• hbn 1y ago
  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.
  • dblohm7 1y ago
    This calls for a plug for https://webcompat.com/ https://webcompat.com/ Report compatibility issues and they'll either try to work with the websites or browser vendors to mitigate the issue.
• ecshafer 1y ago
  This is not Dia the open source diagram editor. Apparently Dia is an AI chatbot that interacts with tabs.
  • eqvinox 1y ago
    I was concerned about the diagram editor for about a minute. Now (especially after scrolling through comments here) I'm annoyed at wasting my attention on this junk.
• coronapl 1y ago
  I’m really curious to see how Dia will evolve toward being enterprise-ready. The Arc vision was sadly killed, and I assume the same might happen with Dia. Rather than competing with Claude for Chrome or Gemini in Chrome, it seems more likely it will become a conservative, secure AI browser tightly integrated into the Atlassian ecosystem.
• delfinom 1y ago
  RIP
• al_borland 1y ago
  I lost all faith in The Browser Company when they went into a maintenance-only mode with Arc to shift to Dia, without any real announcement. Just a reply to a Twitter post calling them out. They figured no one would notice. I think they eventually addressed it after some public pressure, but I don’t think they sold the decision well. AI seems like a feature to add to existing browsers, not something that needs its own dedicated browser. People’s workflows get tied to a browser, especially one like Arc, so to proclaim it done, with no need for any new features after just a couple years, while most expect a browser to carry on for decades, left a really bad taste in my mouth. I was excited when they launched, but won’t miss them. They felt more like a dev backed hype machine. I’m not sure what Atlassian has planned, but won’t be surprised if they kill the browsers and integrate some tools into their existing product line.
  • neodymiumphish 1y ago
    Actually, I think the switch to Dia was them providing certain potential buyers proof that they (as a dev team) could build a new browser with a completely different UI and mindset/intent quickly. Essentially just something to prove their "Arc Dev Kit" efficiency.
  • uni_baconcat 1y ago
    The transition from Arc to Dia feels like Windows 10 to 11. They try to add new things to the old software, like Copilot on Windows and AI in Arc Max. But then they decide to make something entirely new instead, like Windows 11 and Dia.
  • julianozen 1y ago
    Yep, you nailed it. Why would I try/migrate to a new workflow after they axed my old one. You can't rebuild customer trust after that
    • CarbonNanotubes 1y ago
      I just switched to Zen instead.
• danielo1rye 1y ago
  [dead]
• bichiliad 1y ago
  The link seems to be serving a 404 (at least from the Arc Search app on iOS, ironically)
• sniffers 1y ago
  Building Dia was such a colossal mistake, and the folks running TBCNY seem to not understand. They believe they are reinventing the wheel, and every time I hear them talk I cringe.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • whalesalad 1y ago
    Selling for over half a billion dollars sounds like zero mistakes were made.
    • afavour 1y ago
      Doesn't mean it isn't a mistake, just means you've conned someone into thinking your mistake was a good choice.
      • whalesalad 1y ago
        That is 99.99999% of all things in life. Business. Sales. Dating.
        • sniffers 1y ago
          What a horrifying outlook.
          • jereees 1y ago
            Horrifying? I think it’s humble to say unless you believe in perfection Edit: lol I read conned as convinced.
            • sniffers 1y ago
              Yeah, treating dating like a con is a wild thing to assert.
• s5300 1y ago
  [dead]
• lofaszvanitt 1y ago
  Why on earth would they shelve out money for these horrible, totally mislead, borderline useless, alien like things (browsers)?
• cwrichardkim 1y ago
  Atlassian owns: jira, confluence, trello, bitbucket, loom, and a couple of other small products It doesn’t feel like a strong strategic or product fit. These are all complex power user products meant to serve enterprises at scale. Integration doesn’t seem useful either. Bummer but congrats to the team!
  • Moto7451 1y ago
    There’s a bunch of “AI” features being added to Jira if you’re a Jira Cloud customer. I don’t find them useful and maybe that’s a common issue. The features in Dia seem to kind of map to Jira and Confluence if you squint at it. Maybe this is just for that team to fix those features.
  • mananaysiempre 1y ago
    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 than the site’s actual search). It’s just no good at what it’s sup posed to do.
    • blackqueeriroh 1y ago
      Completely disagree. Rovo has been an incredible game changer for us. It speeds up work by like 30% and brings context to information rapidly.
    • Esophagus4 1y ago
      Agreed. Though I will say using the AI to JQL tool is nice. And I use Confluence’s AI pretty often.
    • sevensor 1y ago
      > Jira’s AI features to be basically nonsensical Unlike its other features?
• findthewords 1y ago
  Zen has replaced Arc for me nicely.
  • gniting 1y ago
    Zen does not handle tab sharing (when using Google Meet) gracefully. That's the only major blocker left.
    • gbalduzzi 1y ago
      Yeah I hope they are able to solve this and achieve feature parity with Arc
• nottorp 1y ago
  Hmm so those aren't alternative web browsers but "AI" crammed on top of ... chromium or something?
• testfrequency 1y ago
  The most impressive thing I find about this is that Atlassian felt compelled to buy a Chromium skinned browser running third party AI agents. Did we learn nothing from Windsurf?
• julianozen 1y ago
  Lots of respect to Josh Miller, the CEO. TBC got to a difficult place. They built a product that was very very good, but evidently not good enough to support the capital they raised or the workforce they hired. I wish they had managed to keep Arc around. It's a product I'd glad pay for, and it seems like maybe there are enough fans that subscriptions could've supported a smaller team. Hopefully Atlassian doesn't kill it after 5 months
  • flkiwi 1y ago
    I know it's not fashionable to blame founders, but I genuinely don't understand this. What has he done to deserve "lots of respect" in the context of this conversation? TBC got to a difficult place because of their choices. Rugpulling users by creating a product nobody asked for, squandering investor money, cashing out by selling to a company antithetical to all the marketing copy TBC had produced to that point. If you live by the rule that you only judge leaders by their actions and not by their words, TBC was a failure as soon as they abandoned Arc, and arguably when they couldn't provide a business case for Arc in the first place.
  • afavour 1y ago
    > Lots of respect to Josh Miller, the CEO. TBC got to a difficult place. They built a product that was very very good, but evidently not good enough to support the capital they raised or the workforce they hired. Was this not predictable from day one? There's no money in making a web browser. That ought to be obvious to anyone, let alone a superstar CEO. That they would end up selling the company seemed like a foregone conclusion. I don't mean to disrespect the guy but I don't see much to credit here either. He had a problem, used VC cash to ignore it, then sold the company. Hardly uncommon in the tech world.
    • julianozen 1y ago
      I understand your point... but you can predict that every start-up will fail and probably be mostly right. They built a product that many people liked. That's part of why so many people are angry about shutting down Arc. How does one tell during the rapid growth phase that things will level off and that actually even though a lot of people will like your product it won’t be enough to be a mass market success? They took a big swing, and they got a lot further than I thought they would. And it seems like maybe he managed to swing an okay outcome for investors and hopefully employees too. Edited: > Was this not predictable from day one? There's no money in making a web browser. And to this point, before Google no one had cracked monetizing search. Before Facebook, no one had monetized social. No one had monetized online video before Youtube... this is what start ups do... they make people like and figure out how to monetize it
• outlore 1y ago
  from a glitzy reimagining of "how we use the internet" to joining the ranks of shitty Jira...what an ending! it's hard not to be bitter after they squandered so much goodwill by abandoning Arc my personal thesis for consumer apps is that power users will always sustain over the latest hype cycle (even if that means your addressable market will be smaller - maybe don't take an obscene amount of VC money?) The best thing to come out of Arc was the lovely design, the tab switcher, Nate's experiments on Twitter, the astounding welcome screen, Little Arc, the announcements which acknowledged the individual engineers etc. To me, those really pushed the boundaries. For that, thank you!
• daniel55fq3 1y ago
  [dead]
• jeffwask 1y ago
  Interesting idea. Replace a bunch of different clients with one for purpose client but the devil we be in the details.
• afavour 1y ago
  I never understood how the Browser Company expected to be successful on its own terms. Now I guess we have the answer: they don't. Wild that someone else's browser technology mixed with generic AI is worth $610m. Bubble, you say?
  • mirekrusin 1y ago
    It's Xm, not Xb = peanuts.
  • uncircle 1y ago
    How are they not successful? They are selling for $610M. Did you not think that was the goal all along?
• Groxx 1y ago
  Imagine, a browser with the polished experience and performance of Jira
  • cosmicgadget 1y ago
    I do love 500ms delays as yet another pop-up menu appears from one of the half-dozen redundant places in the UI.
  • tom1337 1y ago
    So Internet Explorer 11 you're saying?
  • jgpmm 1y ago
    The one ticket Jira would never get? A speeding ticket.
• afavour 1y ago
  $610m for a Chromium skin with generic AI bolted on feels like a lot. But what do I know?
  • gsoid 1y ago
    It's for the team
    • dbbk 1y ago
      That team is not worth $610m
    • afavour 1y ago
      The team that made a Chromium skin with generic AI on top of it, yes
  • asystole 1y ago
    They did well to get acquired before the AI bubble pops.
• aravindputrevu 1y ago
  Would Atlassian be building a agentic version for their AI Coding agent - Rovo.
  • ch4s3 1y ago
    What a cursed thought.
    • ozim 1y ago
      If that agent does jira stuff instead of me so I don’t have to ever see it again then I am all for it.
      • thedougd 1y ago
        https://www.atlassian.com/platform/remote-mcp-server https://www.atlassian.com/platform/remote-mcp-server You can have your coding agent do it.
      • cmrdporcupine 1y ago
        It's amazing how good Claude is at interacting with it. Via jq or other CLI tools or MCP. "Look at Jira and tell me what am I supposed to be working on this week" is a super power
    • baq 1y ago
      Literally no other reason for them to buy this
• jdlyga 1y ago
  Arc Browser is an excellent "what could have been" story. The UI came together amazingly fast, there was excellent posts every week with updates from the project lead, and it felt fresh and exciting. It would be an amazing open source project, but there just not a good way to monetize it. There's no other browser, including newer projects like Zen, with a better ui. I would strongly encourage Atlassian to open source Arc.
  • kadomony 1y ago
    I bet they were already in talks for being acquired and not open sourcing Arc was one of the conditions. Who knows what Atlassian will do with it, but I did find it a bit frustrating that in the Atlassian blog announcing the acquisition, they showcase images of Arc when they're specifically talking about Dia. The two browsers do not have UI parity, and much of what I loved about Arc would need to be recreated in Dia.
    • ljbred08 1y ago
      Exactly! I hope Atlassian actually has some sense: either Arc's UX needs to be merged into Dia or Dia's functionality needs to be merged into Arc. You can't keep either going otherwise.
• petralithic 1y ago
  What was the Browser Company even doing? First they had a successful consumer product with Arc as a Chrome clone, then they decided to shut it down for...a whole new browser called Dia that essentially acted as a browser extension that so many vibe coded clones were made of? What was even the point of all this roundabout engineering and the time and manpower to do so? What a waste. This seems more like an acquihire than actually about IP.
  • polytely 1y ago
    pivoting to AI to get the bag while getting acquired
  • uni_baconcat 1y ago
    > I never really got where the innovation was in Arc Arc on Windows was build in Swift. And they built Swift WinRT.
  • ivanjermakov 1y ago
    Why would anyone acquire a company that made a successful VSCode fork or a wrapped Chromium browser? I expect these people making such decisions to be far from understanding tech behind it.
    • Spivak 1y ago
      Arc I think graduated from wrapper status, it was a really interesting and unique browser while it lasted.
    • conradev 1y ago
      In The Browser Company’s case, they have a lot of engineers who work on Chromium. Not sure about the other wrapper companies!
    • alberth 1y ago
      Cursor is a VSCode fork, generating reported $500M+ in revenue and is only a couple years old. https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/05/cursors-anysphere-nabs-9-9b-valuation-soars-past-500m-arr/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/05/cursors-anysphere-nabs-9-9...
• zero0529 1y ago
  Alas the last piece of information falls into place
• amykhar 1y ago
  I love the Arc Browser, but they discontinued development on that. I honestly have no interest in Dia at this point. AI is already available in any of the tools that I would want it in, and I don't think I would want any one company having visibility into more of my apps and data.
• frankfrank13 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • dang 1y ago
    Can you please not do this here? We're trying for something a bit different: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• avazhi 1y ago
  lol Hug Firefox close, it's an awful world out there, especially with Google being given the greelight to continue their monopolising with Chrome. I remember being tempted by this thing when it first came out - their asinine sign up waiting list kept me from pursuing it further and then I forgot about it until they eventually fully dumped it and moved into full AI-enshittification territory. There are really 30 years of reasons why most people will never trust a new entrant to the browser market - this is just the latest and probably greatest. What a shitshow.
  • blackqueeriroh 1y ago
    You mean the browser primarily funded by Google giving Mozilla a giant bucket of cash every year to be the default search engine for?
  • JohnFen 1y ago
    > their asinine sign up waiting list kept me from pursuing it further Yeah, this -- combined with the fact that their website told you nearly nothing about why their browser was worth signing up to something just to try it out someday -- is why I never used it. I don't personally know anyone who did. It seemed dumb at the time -- I was actively looking for a better browser and certainly would have considered Arc, but they were determined to keep me from learning anything about it (let alone try it), so that never happened.
  • pezgrande 1y ago
    Am I the only one having isses with Firefox on Linux? While playing videos the image sometimes freeze and the audio keeps playing. Ironically the best media-player so far has been Edge, even chrome have some issues. All installed from Fedora discovery store, so prob related to Flatpak packaging.
    • JohnFen 1y ago
      I have no such issues (Debian), but I also don't use the flatpak.
    • Groxx 1y ago
• CarbonNanotubes 1y ago
  Honestly I think Dia and any other AI first browsers are a bad idea.You lose out on the exploratory nature of the web. How are you going to stumble upon a random nugget during a web search session that you never would have found otherwise. This kind of thing happens to be frequently when I don't go to AI to figure something out. I find a new product or new library for the language I am currently working with that may not solve my current issue but I come back to later to improve something I am working on. The web as a whole is also built on this discovery and people visiting pages and interacting with other. This gets lost when you get into the flow of just AI'ing everything.
  • utyop22 1y ago
    Yeah I question how many people are actually true innovators and researchers. Much of my ideas are the results of deep thought but those really great ideas are sporadic at times!
• jshchnz 1y ago
  $610M, all cash??? How were they worth that much... all they seemed to ever do was rebrand
  • theappsecguy 1y ago
    I mean have you seen some of the valuations for VSCode forks with some AI slapped on haha. I agree that this seems a lot for what I assume is a product with no solid revenue stream
  • djoldman 1y ago
    100% agree. The odds of this investment paying off feel slim to none.
  • guluarte 1y ago
    It would have made sense if they had a large user base or groundbreaking tech, but they are just a Chrome fork with a very niche set of users.
  • NoteyComplexity 1y ago
    Probably they were just chasing the hype because the word AI appeared in the browser, considering the news mentions “browser with AI features”. So does their acquisition news. I hope I am wrong.
  • Waraqa 1y ago
    "Arc isn’t just a Chromium fork. It runs on custom infrastructure we call ADK — the Arc Development Kit. Think of it as an internal SDK for building browsers (especially those with imaginative interfaces). That’s our secret sauce. It lets ex-iOS engineers prototype native browser UI quickly, without touching C++." https://open.substack.com/pub/browsercompany/p/letter-to-arc-members-2025 https://open.substack.com/pub/browsercompany/p/letter-to-arc...
    • scosman 1y ago
      A UI framework? What’s the other $608m for?
• eigencoder 1y ago
  What a shame! I've loved Arc, haven't been able to give it up even though it's now maintenance-only. It was nearly dead, I'm sure Atlassian will finish it off.
• exabrial 1y ago
  Arc brwoser literally required "creating an account" in order to... download text files (html) over a TCP socket, off the internet, and parse/display them. It could have been awesome. But this stopped me dead in my tracks. Hard pass and I gave them no recommendations to anyone.
  • __loam 1y ago
    Just so many decisions that made it unusable from a business continuity perspective.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• bastawhiz 1y ago
  Well, it was a good run.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• Insanity 1y ago
  In terms of newer browsers, I started playing around with Zen after seeing a post about it on HN some weeks ago. So far, really liking that experience. It's not without bugs (i.e, 'compact mode' shortcut works about 50% of the time lol). But, the UI is good (to me), and I like that it's based on FF rather than another Chromium shell. I should say though, I don't consider myself a 'power user', and I'm not a web developer so never user the dev tools.
• crowcroft 1y ago
  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 entirely new idea about AI. I wouldn't be surprised if the investors were fed up with the business and wanted out, pretty good exit all things considered.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • hahn-kev 1y ago
    I think that we should be fine with growth flattening out.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  • rvz 1y ago
    Spent more money on marketing + steve jobs cosplaying than building a browser that is better than chrome but had zero revenue for years to show for it. They betted on the possibility that OpenAI or Perplexity would buy them. With the Google monopoly suit not requiring them to sell Chrome after all, there was no reason to raise any more money as they continued to lose money. That looks like an exit on terrible terms, like Humane and HP.
    • crowcroft 1y ago
      All things considered the cash looks pretty good – maybe not the deal they wanted, but doesn't look bad all things considered.
    • rafram 1y ago
      Hard for it not to be better than Chrome, considering that it’s a Chrome fork with a few years of extra engineering thrown at it.
• cryptozeus 1y ago
  We switched from jir to linear, what a fresh starts !
• acl 1y ago
  Any guesses as to what this means for Arc? I absolutely love Arc for Mac. It gets all the little things right -- at least for my workflow and mindset. But "getting all the little things right" in a browser isn't something you can monetize.
  • chipotle_coyote 1y ago
    What it means, I suspect, is that you should look into the Zen browser for Mac (and Windows and Linux, to boot), which is very clearly heavily Arc-inspired but not aiming for VC Unicorn status. https://zen-browser.app/ https://zen-browser.app/