Posted by kevinyew 9/4/2025
https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/atlassian-acqui...
https://www.theverge.com/web/770947/browser-company-arc-dia-...
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?
(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.
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.
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.
But, there's a bunch on WebKit and Gecko as well.
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.
With how mature the personal computer market is, this is a very big hurdle.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
It’s been a while since I used it regularly though.
At least, that was their justification publicly, maybe the real numbers were less optimistic
1 - https://browsercompany.substack.com/p/letter-to-arc-members-...
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.
I'm sorry, but this is the exact same insight that MSN Explorer had. And everyone in retrospect sees that as an absolute spamfest. Ironically, in a very similar way as AI features are seen today.
I mainly brought them up in a "we've tried this before" sense.
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.
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.
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.
False.
On my work machine, I would grasp at any straw that promised to make JIRA less annoying.
RIP ipad app. You are missed.
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).
My impression was JiRA is the planet and everything else are satellites turning around. They come and go but never touch JIRA.
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 ?
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Was Atlassian the highest bidder, or was Atlassian the only bidder?
"A new AI browser from the makers of Arc: Chat with your tabs"
say what??? )))
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 ?
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.
I hope I am wrong.
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.
That's like 17 hot new frameworks out of date!
Also 2 years or even 4 years is not that long at all
And can you read dog minds?
And your dog wants pets and treats.
Why would I try/migrate to a new workflow after they axed my old one. You can't rebuild customer trust after that
$0.
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
Edit: lol I read conned as convinced.
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.