Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

> 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

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.

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.

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.

Doesn't help that it didn't run on Linux (where a lot of people are willing to check out new tech), I kept checking in on it a few times a year, but it was never available. I have gotten people to use Firefox and Chrome in the past, but I did not push Arc to anyone as I could not use it myself.

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.

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.

The thing is they make the correct diagnoses of Arc's issues [1], but then instead of addressing them and doing the hard work of building a great product, they took the easy way out and started another greenfield project. How often has that ever been a good decision?

1 - https://browsercompany.substack.com/p/letter-to-arc-members-...

Similarly, isn't this the insight that led to both ChromeOS and FirefoxOS?

> 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.

All things considered the cash looks pretty good – maybe not the deal they wanted, but doesn't look bad all things considered.

Based on my usage of Jira over the years, I believe all the annoying parts of Jira come from _within_ the walls of Atlassian HQ...

Or they could take that money and actually improve the UX instead of needing an AI to navigate it?

I hate Jira like all good people, though in fairness I haven't really found a replacement for it that I actually liked.

The closest I've used was Pivotal Tracker, which I believe is dead now, but I still remember finding stuff annoying about it (though drawing a blank on those facts right now). I wonder if dedicated ticket management stuff at scale is just inherently going to be annoying.

I use Obsidian with the Tasks plugin as a Jira-lite, and for whatever reason it doesn't bother me. I think it's because I can tune it however I want without a bunch of menus and write my own arbitrary queries, but I also think part of the appeal is that the tasks can be part of my notes, instead of a separate application (which is why I couldn't stick with OmniFocus).

Did any Atlassian product ever make JIRA less annoying ?

My impression was JiRA is the planet and everything else are satellites turning around. They come and go but never touch JIRA.

Considering TBC hired the one guy doing anything with Swift on Windows and paid for much of the work needed to make Windows an officially supported platform, it was still an achievement. I'm not even sure I'd call Windows officially supported since most of the support comes from TBC and not Apple or official Swift channels.

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.

The achievement wasn't building Swift code on Windows, it was using Swift to build a native Windows application utilising Windows API's.

https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-everywhere-windows-interop/

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.

I want a browser in my apps, not apps in my browser. The whole thing has just gone completely backwards in the last 20 years.

Browsers make terrible operating systems. People live in their browsers because they have to, not because they want to.

Are you paying for your browser?

There’s your answer.

Well, Atlassian may be acqu-hiring the team specifically to make a JIRA PWA

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

One thing I noticed shortly after when I initially switch Arc a couple years ago from Firefox, ads were more targeted at me and I definitely felt more tracked online. I started using Zen Browser at work because they blocked Arc for Windows (Zen blocked as well but I can run the Twilight build without being blocked :D) and the more I used it I just like it better than Arc in general and it was nice to be back to using Firefox again. When Arc went into maintenance mode it was just that last thing to finally get me to move off of it and over to Zen everywhere.

Pinned tabs in Safari propagate between windows.

We are in early stages, but as a big Arc fan myself, we want to bring build this feature.

If you can raise a github issue, we can get to work asap https://github.com/browseros-ai/BrowserOS

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)

A UI framework? What’s the other $608m for?

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 ?

Sounds perfect for Atlassian's love of "imaginative" interfaces.

How's that different from Electron?

that's kinda funny since that's basically exactly how firefox does it with the chrome of the browser being javascript and html and css itself.

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.

"Perhaps Atlassian was sitting on cash and needed to make some bets

Perhaps investors should put on a stupidity discount and discount the value of cash when valuing the value of equity!

I've been using it for 4 years!

The java, it is scripting, all day, every day, hakol hayom

yea, I guess Google, Microsoft, Apple and Mozilla also ditch their work after only two years as well...

Also 2 years or even 4 years is not that long at all

I just switched to Zen instead.

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

Same. Old business models make more sense to me and seem healthier for customers, employees, and the economy. Growth at all costs, with the goal of a quick and profitable exit only benefits the founders, and is generally a net loss for society as a whole.

I can’t say I’d be above taking the briefcase full of money when dangled in front of my face, but when that’s the goal from the outset, the incentive structure feels backward.

> a real business model other than grow and sell out.

This is why I have problems trusting any new SaaS these days. The industry has changed from wanting to build a good product to wanting to grow fast and then exit, and typically the users get screwed.

You just can't trust that anything will stick around, so why bother adopting the tool in the first place, especially for anything that's not open source.

Assuming the business has access to the data, the backup plan for the business is always to sell the data. There is very little chance the leaders of a business simply wind down the business and close the doors.

I'm also a big fan of Arc, and I'm currently a heavy user. I have zero interest in the upcoming Dia release - I feel like Dia is a step backward compared to Arc.

Doesn't mean it isn't a mistake, just means you've conned someone into thinking your mistake was a good choice.

They talk about their product like it's the reinvention of fire. Seems awful low for that. And if they made no mistakes, surely they wouldn't need to be acquired? Surely they'd be making their own money?

And there are plenty of stories of how they treat their employees that suggest there are absolutely mistakes being made.... company is a joke.

their valuation from last funding in March 2024 was $550m, sold for $610m minus cash on hand. so basically at value...agreed that it's a nice windfall for these folks but relatively bad outcome. When you're building a new browser with AI a year before the trillion dollar AI industry goes bananas for AI browsers and you end up with 600 mil, that feels like an L.

Dia was built for VC, no user will really like it.

why does everything need to be about making macho bucks? Make a good product and support it long term, don't sell out just to fill your pockets

Thanks for recommendation, I'll give it a try

+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 :)