Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

$610M, all cash??? How were they worth that much... all they seemed to ever do was rebrand

"Arc isn’t just a Chromium fork. It runs on custom infrastructure we call ADK — the Arc Development Kit. Think of it as an internal SDK for building browsers (especially those with imaginative interfaces). That’s our secret sauce. It lets ex-iOS engineers prototype native browser UI quickly, without touching C++."

https://open.substack.com/pub/browsercompany/p/letter-to-arc...

A UI framework? What’s the other $608m for?

I mean have you seen some of the valuations for VSCode forks with some AI slapped on haha. I agree that this seems a lot for what I assume is a product with no solid revenue stream

Is a browser SDK for iOS worth that kind of money targeted users who are comfortable with Objective-C and not C++ even a market of note.

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 ?

Sounds perfect for Atlassian's love of "imaginative" interfaces.

How's that different from Electron?

Yeah, I kinda read that as "it's not just a chromium fork with additional code. the code is organized. nobody has ever done that before!"

100% agree. The odds of this investment paying off feel slim to none.

It would have made sense if they had a large user base or groundbreaking tech, but they are just a Chrome fork with a very niche set of users.

that's kinda funny since that's basically exactly how firefox does it with the chrome of the browser being javascript and html and css itself.

Just like the old Carlin joke. Made me chuckle.

Or... A UI framework? what's the other $612m for?

ObjC is mostly dead, and most Swift devs are not comfortable with C++.

C++ isn't all that much harder or different from Swift to learn. They play fairly well with each other, you can import and call C++ quite easily from Swift.

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 wanted you to know that, due to this comment, I "lost" approximately 45 minutes watching George Carlin's best jokes

Probably they were just chasing the hype because the word AI appeared in the browser, considering the news mentions “browser with AI features”. So does their acquisition news.

I hope I am wrong.

What was the joke?

Cool, but $600m cool? I don't see how.

Probably a Swift wrapper for the Chromium Embedded Framework.

For all those playing at home: this blog post contains 46 em-dashes.