Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

Posted by kevinyew 9/4/2025

522 points | 504 commentspage 3

rvz 9/4/2025|

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

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/04/atlassian-the-browser-compan...

abrowne2 9/4/2025||

Surely the Browser Company will move to Jira, even though it's using a direct competitor for Product Management... https://linear.app/customers/browsercompany Heh.

eigencoder 9/4/2025||

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.

Insanity 9/4/2025||

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.

ricokatayama 9/4/2025||

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.

outlore 9/4/2025||

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!

aravindputrevu 9/4/2025||

Would Atlassian be building a agentic version for their AI Coding agent - Rovo.

ch4s3 9/4/2025|

What a cursed thought.

ozim 9/4/2025|||

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.

cmrdporcupine 9/4/2025|||

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

thedougd 9/4/2025|||

https://www.atlassian.com/platform/remote-mcp-server

You can have your coding agent do it.

baq 9/4/2025|||

Literally no other reason for them to buy this

drclegg 9/4/2025||

AI jammed into a browser really isn't going to make any Atlassian product any more pleasant to use

jhaile 9/4/2025||

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.

buddhu 9/4/2025||

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.

pzshaikh 7 days ago||

Yes, most of these features are available in Brave. You have Vertical tabs, split view, pinned tabs, grouped tabs, tab sneak previews, tab search, in built AI assistant. Instead of 'spaces' you have old fashioned profiles, single windowed space switcher would be nice to have in Brave. Arc also has a nice Tidy tabs feature.

fwip 9/4/2025||

Zen is a Firefox-based browser that has copied a lot of Arc's good ideas, if you are looking for an alternative.

rmonvfer 9/4/2025|

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

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