Posted by kevinyew 9/4/2025
https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/atlassian-acqui...
https://www.theverge.com/web/770947/browser-company-arc-dia-...
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.
turned out to be a nice investment even though they killed the product.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.