[DELETE] [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.
> 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.
It could have been awesome. But this stopped me dead in my tracks. Hard pass and I gave them no recommendations to anyone.
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).
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.
Atlasian are the masters of inshitification/jirafication of the products they buy. Turning loved products into hated gartner matrixes.
Enterprise browsers are an existing category, and even Google offers an enterprise version of Chrome.
The idea of an enterprise browser is that all of the interoperability that has been built has been between the desktop and web servers. Most desktop browsers don't have many features that allow an organization to manage them, beyond managed policies which honestly aren't that great. For the most part, standard desktop browsers are a big hole in both inbound and outbound security.
Atlassian would want integration with their backend products to increase lock-in and provide a place where their products are centered. IT control how products are presented to end users in organizations that matter (in terms of sales volume.) Establishing visibility and driving engagement is hard if the Atlassian tools are a niche and they want to attack SharePoint or other products. Being able to more efficiently use the tools the company has bought is attractive (even if not a reality.)
Making their browser incompatible is a bad outcome for them because it's an IT choice to adopt their browser. This carries visibility and risk for IT who could be embarrassed. Any backlash carries over to other Atlassian products or affects renewals.
I don't believe that in a long term. If atlassian creates an enterprise-managed browser they can charge for, there will be a big incentive to making their suite work better in that browser only. Or JIRA/Confluence features will be released using APIs only available there. It will be their EEE.
If they really cared about actual security, they'd optimise their services enough to use them with JIT disabled. And maybe push the industry to do the same. And publish some SSO auth standard that integrates with the browser.
> Any backlash carries over to other Atlassian products
Atlassian doesn't care about users and what they think. If they did, markdown textboxes would still be there and JIRA wouldn't be a slow abomination. But they sell to businesses, not users. So instead of fixed issues or QoL improvements, I get an AI button.
A secure browser was never a concern.
Because majority of malware if not all was written for PCs. Nowadays still most of the malware targets PCs but now attacks targeting web users are more prevalent. Attackers attack through compromised websites or phishing websites using social engineering techniques or exploit kits[0]. Websites are dominant attack surface not web browsers because it is hard to find 0-day exploits and usually they are found and used by state sponsored attackers. Chrome is still the most secure browser because it has enormous market share and everybody is attacking it, both whitehat and blackhat actors so Chrome team is constantly fixing and patching Chrome.
Think about putting your business VPN and security controls in the browser. And if you can put your connection to AI and start building a productive workflow around it, that's an interesting proposition. It doesn't change interoperability on the web; it's a controlled client for the business use case.
This is being marketed to an entirely different group.
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...
It could be a few options away on Firefox for example if people cared about the "secure" part more than the "enterprise sales" part.
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.
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...
Also, my point was just just say that there's a market for something like this. Chrome Enterprise is not even really that competitive of a product in the space.
For the most part, default Chrome and Firefox are designed primarily for B2C use cases.
That just sounds like going back to making thick clients/desktop apps vs. web with extra steps. They might as well make their own native Jira app instead of making an entire web browser and breaking their web app to only work in their new browser.
My point is this is coded language to give corporations an excuse to have another foothold on their employee's data.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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
I will keep suggesting Atlassian, because everything else I used since the 1990's was worse.
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.
[1]: https://xcancel.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1961172409920491849 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45066395
What’s the play here? Just throwing money into anything AI at this point and seeing what sticks?
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.
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 ?
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.
Does Atlassian want them to become an Enterprise AI arm?
Did we learn nothing from Windsurf?
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.
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.
Wild that someone else's browser technology mixed with generic AI is worth $610m. Bubble, you say?
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.
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
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.
What respect does delusions of grandeur and crashing out at Atlassian deserve?
I certainly enjoyed working with him and Hurst in the early days at Obvious 2.0 when we were incubating Branch.
A bunch of Medium & Obvious 2.0 alumni I respect work or worked at TBC (Dustin, DanB, Connor, Cemre, maybe others).
If you see bugs, you can probably assume they're just regular ol' bugs most of the time. A lot of the web is just plain broken or badly designed.
So I'll see if I can make FF work but it's mostly cause it's the best option at this point.
could've shortened this to 'Edge is off the table since its Microsoft' :)
Report compatibility issues and they'll either try to work with the websites or browser vendors to mitigate the issue.
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.
On old hardware (~10 year old laptop with a Core i5-5200u and integrated graphics), I do have trouble with Google Video calls lagging. This seems to be caused by a combination of old hardware and certain Google products being overly optimized for Chrome.
My guess is that you don't have hardware acceleration enabled. That could be due to Flatpak packaging, or it could be due to running a less-than-optimal graphics driver. Granted it's been awhile since I've tried the open source graphics drivers and I hear they have improved, but I've had better success with closed source graphics drivers.
check if you have hardware acceleration, maybe other stuff? `about:support` has lots of info, I've had to tweak a few things routinely to get browsers working like their native counterpart.
"Look at Jira and tell me what am I supposed to be working on this week" is a super power
You can have your coding agent do it.
Even Teams video calls work fine. A lot of times it works better than the Windows client I use at work.
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.
Much of my ideas are the results of deep thought but those really great ideas are sporadic at times!
This isn’t criticism or sarcasm — I’m genuinely impressed, but also very curious about the rationale behind it.
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).
Anecdotally, everyone I put onto Arc and the person who put me on still uses it.
I’ve been using Arc for the last two years and was genuinely sad on its discontinuation. I now don’t really know what I’ll do when it goes away.
I'd never heard of the damned thing before.
I don't know why, but it appears to be popular with some creative demographics.
The browser is an essential pane of glass to platformization and taxing the web. Anyone who wins a browser with significant market share has a huge opportunity to capitalize on.
Not sure if Arc is that browser, but lots of teams are trying.
Chrome is shitty on purpose because it is designed to sell ads. Other browsers can sell AI or other things to fund their development.
It's a shame we don't have a good open source browser with decent leadership anymore. I'm sure they'd be killing it. I could swear Mozilla is led by a revolving door of paid off Google plants.
Explaining why they're successful and I'm not.
Of course, you need to have other ingredients too, but hundreds of millions, if not even billions of people have those skills too. Who win more among them is pure luck.
And in that, of course a ton of predetermined parameters, like where you born, who your parents are, what your skin color is, etc.
I have a friend who is worse in almost every skills which matter in our work. Not much worse, he is still awesome in his job. But I’m better. Every single person who saw us work in comparable environments would tell you the same thing. His career is still better than mine. And the single reason is that he born in wealth. He had the opportunity to live without income for years, and kick off a startup, and try to start some others, and simply try out, and risk things which I couldn’t do. Nothing else. Pure luck.
All told, probably worth 610M.
- no company generates revenue in its first second. Even if you start a lemonade stand tomorrow, you'll have to buy some lemons first. The time-to-revenue might be very short, but it's never zero. Therefore, making no revenue for 1 day or for 10 years is not a step change, but simply a point on a curve.
- Capitalism is basically a long history of creating vehicles with increasing sophistication to bridge that gap: provide funding for ventures that have returns in the future. This is intrinsically difficult, and it's easy to waste money, but it can work immensely. This started with the Dutch inventing limited liability corporations to fund ship expeditions, and today's VC is essentially an extension of that.
- It has worked well in the past to bet on companies that don't optimize for time-to-revenue, but something else – famous examples being e.g. Amazon, Google, Meta, who all lost lots of money initially.
Hence there can be companies that make no money for quite a while. And it can even turn out that the vast majority of the companies that make no money for a while never make any money. Accepting this risk is a feature, not a bug.
Yea, it's called investment. If you want to get rich overnight play lottery or start gambling.
Often times money will be raised at certain valuation and terms, but the cash is held in escrow (effectively) until milestones are hit.
The investors will do their due diligence on the feasibility. It’s a high stakes, high return game (if you succeed). Look around you… any physical device you see is basically funded the same way.
Well what do you expect people to do when the only non slop result on page 1 is a 5 to 8 year old thread? It’s the top link. You’re still relevant whether you want to be or not. Fuckin deal.
As far as I know, Dia just calls OpenAI’s API. I’m sure their employees know a lot about using AI at this point, but so does everyone else who’s built an OpenAI wrapper.
But how many other people had similar luck and did nothing with it?
Luck is another word for opportunity. Some people are really good at leveraging opportunity for all it's worth. Most of us (myself very much included) are not.
Case in point: I'm the same age as Mark Zuckerberg. Many people say his age is why he was able to be at the right place at the right time to create Facebook. Much like they say about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and every other "self-made" billionaire.
But he still had to choose to do all the right things that I chose not to do in order to be able to experience that kind of luck.
At some point we gotta own up to our own role in guiding our lives.
it's sort of like banks vs vc funds. both lend money to companies, but still they are not competing against each other.
I've found it just as good AND it's open source https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop
The browser features are _much_ worse than Arc (no sidebar, bookmarks are a dropdown, ...) and most of the time the AI can't even "see" or "read" what's on the page I'm viewing, so it's just worse than using Claude/ChatGPT/Gemini.
I'm still using Arc and will probably continue until there's another browser that copies its UI/UX improvements.
Looking at their frontpage the design is outright horrible if you have a > 7-8 inch screen. I guess in a way its good to have an example of what not to do.
> I'm sure they'd be killing it
Why, though? I mean the niche is pretty small, most people don't care much about open source or even what browser they are using at all.
Considering the overwhelming majority of Mozilla's funding is coming from Google and in no way could it survive without it being run by Google's plants is not that surprising.
Tabs on the side nav and the ability to have 3 different AWS accounts open at the same time
Looking at Zen, I really don't understand how Mozilla fail to capitalise on their browser, and build up a similar experimental project based on Firefox like it. It seems that many of these small QoL improvements could make a big difference. They have such a huge budget, and they waste it on inane things. Their fancy search deal with Google has made them complacent, and neglect one of the few things that ever had any real worth. Curious to see how it develops with the recent Google ruling. And to be fair, it does seem like Firefox development has picked up a bit lately—maybe even due to Zen's competition, who knows.
https://browsercompany.substack.com/p/letter-to-arc-members-...
* For example, I get a lot of value from renaming my tabs and even replacing their favicons with emojis of my choice. Zen appears to have limited support for this.
I think you will eventually have to switch because it will lack behind given that it's not their priority anymore. Zen browser seems like viable alternative but I haven't used it enough yet to know how well polished it is.
A bus factor of 1 is still a bit red flag on something as involved as browser maintenance. Hopefully a community can emerge around the project.
ref: https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/graphs/contributors
I guess you could argue (as TBC did) it’s actually not rapidly evolving, and that gives it staying power. But eventually someone will reach parity and eventually eclipse the original product.
Hopefully Zen does that. I’m just tired of moving the same data to the effectively the same product run by a different team for no good reason.
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.
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/technology/2014/apr/09/software-...
This was also the idea behind Chromebooks:
Isn't that downstream of Sun Microsystems’ old slogan: The Network is the Computer?
Similar to ambient computing and augmented reality.
I don't think Arc ever realized their vision. They gave some cryptic ideas of their vision for the future of the web, but I don't feel like they fundamentally changed anything. I was expecting Arc to eventually get to a place where I could login to Arc on any computer and have my home session, always up to date anywhere I was. Of course, this idea would have been a lot better in the 90s or 00s when computer labs were more common and everyone didn't have a computer in their pocket. The value of a cloud OS isn't as appealing as it once was.
In terms of growth flattening out; they threw in the towel too early. It was only after they stopped adding new features and decided to give up on Arc that it seemed to really start to get traction. I was seeing blog posts and YouTube videos left and right about Arc, all while knowing that it was effectively dead, but the memo never made it to the people who just found it and were sharing it like crazy. A new browser from a new company, that piggybacks on the browser that already has 70+% marketshare isn't going to take over the world in a few years. It was a long play and they were too impatient, and had already given up by the time they started to get some real traction outside of the early adopter space.
I remember when Firefox really hit the mainstream. Friends would see friends using IE, and push them out of the way to install Firefox. It felt very grass roots, but it worked... it just took time.
But, there's a bunch on WebKit and Gecko as well.
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.
At least, that was their justification publicly, maybe the real numbers were less optimistic
1 - https://browsercompany.substack.com/p/letter-to-arc-members-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
sometimes you just find a big enterprise sucker who's desperate to stay relevant.
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.
They do - Trello.
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.
I understand that a lot of people live in their browsers, but for web apps I’d rather split them out into “installed” PWAs and have them benefit from system app/window management facilities than have them clog up my browser’s tabs.
Browsers make terrible operating systems. People live in their browsers because they have to, not because they want to.
There’s your answer.
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.
Was Atlassian the highest bidder, or was Atlassian the only bidder?
Perhaps Atlassian was sitting on cash and needed to make some bets. If you can build a big enough user base for a browser it can earn handsomely from AdWords type referral fees. Look at what Google pays Apple to be default on Safari and how much referral spend Chrome recouped for Google etc. Maybe Atlassian will try and promote Dia to its customer base and look to launch more AI type commercial product discovery experiences like Perplexity Shopping.
Perhaps investors should put on a stupidity discount and discount the value of cash when valuing the value of equity!
https://open.substack.com/pub/browsercompany/p/letter-to-arc...
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 ?
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.
And there are plenty of stories of how they treat their employees that suggest there are absolutely mistakes being made.... company is a joke.
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.
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.
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.
Will anything good come out of it…? I could be wrong, but I seriously doubt it.
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.
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!
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.
Unlike its other features?
And I use Confluence’s AI pretty often.
I immediately thought Sandwich made it. Some of their stuff like 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/04/atlassian-the-browser-compan...
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.
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!
False.
On my work machine, I would grasp at any straw that promised to 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.
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).
I don't want to use Jira either but yet I can't run away from it
im not a swift expert, but building your project for one of the officially supported targets shouldn't be considered a "phenomenal" achievent? lol
https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-everywhere-windows-interop/
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
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.
If you can raise a github issue, we can get to work asap https://github.com/browseros-ai/BrowserOS
I hope I am wrong.
That's like 17 hot new frameworks out of date!
Also 2 years or even 4 years is not that long at all
Why would I try/migrate to a new workflow after they axed my old one. You can't rebuild customer trust after that
These days, I'm trying to migrate to paid tools. I would much rather work with a slower growing company that has a real business model other than grow and sell out.
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.
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.
Anyways, now we are building BrowserOS, an open-source alternative to Dia -- https://github.com/browseros-ai/BrowserOS
Probably something like this all along.
If you have investors, and give away for free a product that costs a lot of money to develop, there is surely a strategy for those investors to get their money back, plus a lot more.
It doesn't always work, of course. But it seems to have worked well in this case.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/05/cursors-anysphere-nabs-9-9...
I never really got where the innovation was in Arc, and never got a chance to see or try Dia, but the interview at least gave me some empathy for what they were going for.
Arc breaks the traditional paradigm of "bookmarks", using "Spaces" and "Pins" instead.
"Pins" are the closest to bookmarks. They appear at the top of the sidebar, and can be organized into folders. They differ from bookmarks in that they are pretty much native tabs that are unloaded until you open them.
"Spaces" are sets of tabs, both pinned and normal. You can associate a space with a specific profile, and each profile has separate cookies and such - but you don't have to.
From a usage perspective, pinned tabs instead of bookmarks mean that I can press Cmd+t and enter a URL, a search query, or the name of a pinned tab. It's smart enough to choose the correct one which means I don't have to think about it. That's handy, and was unique when I adopted it, but I'm sure it's either been implemented in other browsers or can be easily enough.
Spaces are _very_ handy, though. Right now, I have eight spaces. One "default" that I use normally, five for various projects I'm actively working on, one for a long-running project that requires me to log into a different Zoom account (so that one has its own profile, to prevent my accidentally being logged into the wrong Zoom account when joining a meeting), and one for personal stuff.
I have it on my list to look for an alternative and migrate, but it's still working for my needs. I'm going to miss it, though.
I worked with a PM that absolutely loved it and insisted on using it. When he showed me it, all I could think of was "this is what my Firefox looked like before they killed XUL extensions".
Arc on Windows was build in Swift. And they built Swift WinRT.
The developing for the iphone and app store creates lock-in. I believe the rich web page stuff was just to show the potential of what is possible before influencing developers to build for the app store.
It’s been a while since I used it regularly though.
"A new AI browser from the makers of Arc: Chat with your tabs"
say what??? )))
I mainly brought them up in a "we've tried this before" sense.
It is not like switching from a REPL, browser friendly,inferred typed forgiving language like say JavaScript to Rust with the occasionally cryptic compiler, the unforgiving borrow checker and ownership concepts.
Perhaps people are less comfortable with the libraries and SDKs and tooling from the C++ world for app development. I didn't imagine that such a market was worth buying a company for $610M in 2025 when most apps are web based in one way or other.
turned out to be a nice investment even though they killed the product.
RIP ipad app. You are missed.
(We have in fact ultimately ended up layering downloadable code on top of HTTP. I don’t think I like the results, yet some of the things I don’t like seem inherent to downloadable code in general.)
The problem wasn't the tech, the problem was it was SUN. It ran on Sun Hardware, with Sun Software and all at Sun Prices. Metaframe was just so much cheaper (it was also hot garbage but thats another story).
And of course I'm speaking on the context of what I'm building, not the world we're in. There are plenty of platforms that are more important than what they platform. I believe it was Bill Gates that said the value of all the things on the platform must exceed the platform itself. We have some inversions at present that are ripe to undergo Rayleigh–Taylor instability.
chrome already has ui rendering set up on windows, all they had to was not reinvent the wheel and just make tweaks to the ui and some server side magick on their end, but that would reveal the fact that they're an half a billion dollar 100 person chrome fork for nerds with no way to generate profit lol
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.
Native app updaters and tray icons and startup services are incredibly obnoxious.
Same deal with updaters. If macOS and Windows had a standardized way to update apps Linux distros do that wouldn’t be nearly as annoying.
Startup services and to some degree tray icons fall under enshittification. Some apps have a legitimate need for these (like Alfred or Raycast or an audio mixer applet) but most are blatant mindspace/metrics booster grabs.
For me the upsides of web apps are counteracted by omnipresent annoying browser chrome, resource consumption, and the 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.
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.
I haven’t had to use the more egregious stuff like time tracking, as you can tell. I think one of our projects has a kanban board somewhere, but I’m not a release manager so I’m mostly living in happy ignorance of what’s on it. It’s not a large outfit, thankfully.
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.
The issue being that teams that have that maturity don't need to kitchen sink in the first place and will be combining their own selected tools. That's how so many teams can get by with Notion and Gitlab only.
I spent more than a decade in JIRA and the Atlassian suite and can't think of any synergy that I miss TBH. Confluence in particular was fine for the time but does it stand the current competition ?
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’.
$0.
It may be a matter of perspective, but from where I’m standing web UIs have barely improved in the past 5-7 years. In many products they’ve gotten considerably worse. At the very least, there’s been an awful lot of tail chasing for the amount of improvement yielded.
It got them acquired, so certainly it worked for them this time.
> doing the hard work of building a great product
How often has that ever been a good decision?
Almost every successful company has got there by grinding away on hard problems. No one launches a product and gets endless growth for free. Not to say that Arc would have definitely succeeded, but to date it's been a lot more successful than Dia.
I thought it was an acquihire.
The migration to OSX or all Windows upgrades certainly payed off for those companies.
Firefox OS? Now KaiOS? The 3rd most popular mobile OS.
And can you read dog minds?
In Zen, if you open two windows, they have different set of tab instances; in Arc, you have same set of tab instances.
And your dog wants pets and treats.
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.
Now an OS without application compatibility is kind of DoA unless there is a very compelling reason to switch. Add in hardware compatibility and it gets even worse.
Much bigger hill to climb then incorporating an existing browser engine into a custom spin of a browser. Even a browser engine from scratch would be smaller than a new bare metal 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.
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.
With how mature the personal computer market is, this is a very big hurdle.
And that’s not even covering the numerous hobby OSs out there like Haiku, SerenityOS, ReactOS, TempleOS, SkyOS.
Then you have experimental OSs like Singularity too. There’s numerous examples of them alone but I think you get my point. :)
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 and be easy to ship. People just don't want to write their apps in C, when the operating system is designed for that.
Many native apps like Blender, Firefox, etc ship portable Linux x64 and arm64 binaries as tar gz files. This works fine. You can also use flatpak if you want automatic cross platform updates but yes, the format is unfortunately bloated.
It's not that easy to ship a JavaScript app on other OSes either and electron apps abound there too.
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.
The way this all gets worked around is that people come up with stuff like Docker or Flatpak that ship their own copies of as many dependencies as possible. The disadvantage is that now I can't just patch an OpenSSL vulnerability by updating the system's copy of OpenSSL, the way Windows can for all software built on SChannel.