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Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

(www.cnbc.com)
520 points kevinyew | 1 comments | 04 Sep 25 12:12 UTC | HN request time: 0.21s | source
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petralithic ◴[04 Sep 25 14:48 UTC] No.45127917[source]▶
What was the Browser Company even doing? First they had a successful consumer product with Arc as a Chrome clone, then they decided to shut it down for...a whole new browser called Dia that essentially acted as a browser extension that so many vibe coded clones were made of?

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.

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1. ClaraForm ◴[04 Sep 25 14:55 UTC] No.45128004[source]▶
I think the play was something along the lines of being "the new iOS". Lots of new apps (see: LLMs) are browser-first, forgoing building platform-targeting apps entirely. When they couldn't see any app devs lining up to build Arc-specific extensions, apps, or such, they pivoted. Dia was more of an LLM-host browser, with the play being they're hoping for OpenAI or Perplexity or one of the big foundation-players to "pay" to be the "exclusive" AI provider, like old-Google pays to be the default on Safari. But ... both plays didn't find any audience or customer, rightly so, as they didn't try to "fix" anything anyone actually considered a problem, just tried to build a niche their own. :(