Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

Posted by kevinyew 9/4/2025

523 points | 504 commentspage 5

screye 9/4/2025|

I bet this is a computer use agents play. It's an acquisition of Perplexity Comet's main competitor.

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 ?

bhouston 9/4/2025||

Why were they acquired at that price? What is the competitive/technological advantage that Atlassian is acquiring?

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.

drewbeck 9/4/2025|

The only natural synergy I can see is with Arc – PMs and product people loved Arc (myself, a designer, included). There's a very interesting play to be made by capitalizing on that market but IDK if that's what Atlassian is thinking.

vinnymac 9/4/2025||

I find Atlassian to be a strange buyer of The Browser Company and there products. I don’t see the philosophical match here.

Does Atlassian want them to become an Enterprise AI arm?

flkiwi 9/4/2025|

Trying to bootstrap a new-generation Lotus Notes from parts, with Dia as the container.

testfrequency 9/4/2025||

The most impressive thing I find about this is that Atlassian felt compelled to buy a Chromium skinned browser running third party AI agents.

Did we learn nothing from Windsurf?

rank0 9/4/2025||

Arc always interested me for the UX and design choices (especially since I'm one of those who constantly has 100s of tabs open). But the account requirement is a hard blocker for me adopting as my daily driver. Anyone know of similar projects? I recall there being a arc-inspired linux-supported project, but they refused to sign their macOS release for god knows what reason.

NoGravitas 9/4/2025|

Have you tried Zen?

rank0 9/5/2025||

Just did! Been great so far!

webworker 9/5/2025||

Arc was the only Chrome browser that I could stomach as a development browser/environment. Kind of tight-lipped, but I assume it'll keep getting updates?

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.

avazhi 9/4/2025||

lol

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.

JohnFen 9/4/2025||

> their asinine sign up waiting list kept me from pursuing it further

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.

blackqueeriroh 9/5/2025|||

You mean the browser primarily funded by Google giving Mozilla a giant bucket of cash every year to be the default search engine for?

pezgrande 9/4/2025||

Am I the only one having isses with Firefox on Linux? While playing videos the image sometimes freeze and the audio keeps playing. Ironically the best media-player so far has been Edge, even chrome have some issues. All installed from Fedora discovery store, so prob related to Flatpak packaging.

edoceo 9/4/2025|||

I'm on Gentoo using the firefox-bin package - things work great. Spotify all day, YouTubes, Vimeo, Zoom - even Teams works.

jlarocco 9/4/2025||

Yeah, same on Debian.

Even Teams video calls work fine. A lot of times it works better than the Windows client I use at work.

unregistereddev 9/4/2025||||

No issues browsing or playing media on Mint XFCE, but I'm not using Flatpak.

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.

Groxx 9/4/2025||||

flatpaks are sometimes funky with highly optimized software - they tend to need lower level access to hardware, which flatpakking sometimes gets in the way of.

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.

troyvit 9/4/2025||||

I personally don't have that issue with Netflix and Youtube on Firefox in kde-neon.

JohnFen 9/4/2025|||

I have no such issues (Debian), but I also don't use the flatpak.

ecshafer 9/4/2025||

This is not Dia the open source diagram editor. Apparently Dia is an AI chatbot that interacts with tabs.

eqvinox 9/4/2025|

I was concerned about the diagram editor for about a minute. Now (especially after scrolling through comments here) I'm annoyed at wasting my attention on this junk.

kedihacker 9/4/2025||

It would be perfect upsell for Atlassian because of their products abysmal performance of their product.

afavour 9/4/2025|

I never understood how the Browser Company expected to be successful on its own terms. Now I guess we have the answer: they don't.

Wild that someone else's browser technology mixed with generic AI is worth $610m. Bubble, you say?

uncircle 9/4/2025||

How are they not successful? They are selling for $610M. Did you not think that was the goal all along?

mirekrusin 9/4/2025||

It's Xm, not Xb = peanuts.

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