Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

The strategic insight behind Arc was perfect – your browser IS the Operating System, and so we should build a browser that can function as that platform.

Arc had pretty good market validation with early adopters, they say that growth was flattened out but IMO that's normal for most products, and it's up to the company to find out WHY growth flattened and then solve that problem. Not kill the product and chase some entirely new idea about AI.

I wouldn't be surprised if the investors were fed up with the business and wanted out, pretty good exit all things considered.

100% on point, classic case of drinking ai cool aid and killing what users wanted

The thing is they make the correct diagnoses of Arc's issues [1], but then instead of addressing them and doing the hard work of building a great product, they took the easy way out and started another greenfield project. How often has that ever been a good decision?

1 - https://browsercompany.substack.com/p/letter-to-arc-members-...

I think that we should be fine with growth flattening out.

Spent more money on marketing + steve jobs cosplaying than building a browser that is better than chrome but had zero revenue for years to show for it.

They betted on the possibility that OpenAI or Perplexity would buy them. With the Google monopoly suit not requiring them to sell Chrome after all, there was no reason to raise any more money as they continued to lose money.

That looks like an exit on terrible terms, like Humane and HP.

All things considered the cash looks pretty good – maybe not the deal they wanted, but doesn't look bad all things considered.

> How often has that ever been a good decision?

It got them acquired, so certainly it worked for them this time.

> doing the hard work of building a great product

How often has that ever been a good decision?

> The strategic insight behind Arc was perfect – your browser IS the Operating System, and so we should build a browser that can function as that platform.

Marc Andreessen said famously (or at least is paragraphed as saying) in 1994 that the "Browser is the Operating System" and people have been doing riffs on that since then.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/04/22/always...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/09/software-...

This was also the idea behind Chromebooks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChromeOS

Which is why tactics are so important. I would say no one has actually got the experience right yet, 'browser is the OS' has been true for a long time, and no one has delivered it yet.

Similar to ambient computing and augmented reality.

You're assuming that Dia is what Atlassian wanted in this acquisition, and nothing else. We don't know what things would look like if they had continued developing Arc.

Almost every successful company has got there by grinding away on hard problems. No one launches a product and gets endless growth for free. Not to say that Arc would have definitely succeeded, but to date it's been a lot more successful than Dia.

> How often has that ever been a good decision?

The migration to OSX or all Windows upgrades certainly payed off for those companies.

> The strategic insight behind Arc was perfect – your browser IS the Operating System, and so we should build a browser that can function as that platform.

I'm sorry, but this is the exact same insight that MSN Explorer had. And everyone in retrospect sees that as an absolute spamfest. Ironically, in a very similar way as AI features are seen today.

One might suggest Cromebooks have done so well because Google got it more or less right.

I think that they had the fact that in chromebook, they could run whole linux containers in the browser , right?

I'm a little surprised how many Chromium browser builders we have in the market, and how each continues to convince a group of investors that _they_ are going to be the ones to finally get it right, while still building on Chrome's skeleton.

But, there's a bunch on WebKit and Gecko as well.

On the other hand, it's kind of crazy no one can make an OS except Windows, Apple and Google? Trillion dollar market and no one can compete.

I think Chromebooks have done so well because they're cheap and are purchased for locked down environments (education and people who really don't want complexity). Even then, I think they kind of demonstrate that the browser is NOT the OS because users and Google still felt the need to break out of the browser box, with both Android apps and Linux application support.

RIP BeOS

Linux?

OS is the perfect software to create lock in for consumers. Once a company is successful there, it is very difficult for others to compete.

Browsers display content that follows a very specific set of standards. There are also suites of tests to verify your compliance with those standards. So, every browser that is standards compliant should work for the vast majority of websites in existence. Still a big lift but doable for talented team.

Now an OS without application compatibility is kind of DoA unless there is a very compelling reason to switch. Add in hardware compatibility and it gets even worse.

Much bigger hill to climb then incorporating an existing browser engine into a custom spin of a browser. Even a browser engine from scratch would be smaller than a new bare metal OS.

Linux has entered the chat...

> You're assuming that Dia is what Atlassian wanted in this acquisition

I thought it was an acquihire.

> Marc Andreessen said famously (or at least is paragraphed as saying) in 1994 that the "Browser is the Operating System" and people have been doing riffs on that since then.

Isn't that downstream of Sun Microsystems’ old slogan: The Network is the Computer?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Network_is_the_Computer

AFAICT, Sun’s underlying vision was more on the side of pervasive RPC and/or downloadable code, i.e. closer to DCOM or NeWS than HTTP.

(We have in fact ultimately ended up layering downloadable code on top of HTTP. I don’t think I like the results, yet some of the things I don’t like seem inherent to downloadable code in general.)

…and Linux, Android, WebOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonflyBSD, GNU Hurd, Minix, QNX, Inferno, L4, FreeDOS, OpenSolaris forks like Illumos, OpenIndina and SmartOS, the various embedded real time OSs, the various Sony PlayStation and Nintendo Switch system softwares, various different bootloaders and UEFI interfaces, networking firmware like Draytek firmware, Cisco IOS, etc.

And that’s not even covering the numerous hobby OSs out there like Haiku, SerenityOS, ReactOS, TempleOS, SkyOS.

Then you have experimental OSs like Singularity too. There’s numerous examples of them alone but I think you get my point. :)

Isn't that basically the same premise as Chrome, which already dominates the market? Google even made something called ChromeOS. Arc wasn't really more than a distracting skin on Chromium with a few innovative bits of UI...

They say the browser is the OS, and yet eww is only one small part of Emacs.

I don't think this is a good comparison. There are many startups that have succeeded developing good products, but very few that could match the success of Apple.

Even though I run it full time now personally; I still think Linux has massive problems something like Windows or macOS don't have: app development. You can't target a thing, you have to target all the things and bloat your app like crazy so you might as well just ship a chromium based app because its practically the same thing anyway (shipping an entire userland because its not stable anyway)

Isn't that because eww refuses to implement JavaScript? Which isn't very e/acc of them?

Similarly, isn't this the insight that led to both ChromeOS and FirefoxOS?

This wasn't a new insight by Arc. ChromeOS exists. Palm's WebOS was a thing. Even Apple pitched rich web apps as the avenue for 3rd party developers to make things for the original iPhone, they were just a bit too early. There is even Electron, for web apps to run as desktop apps on all major operating systems. Most browsers can also turn any website into a self-contained web app that lives along side other local apps.

I don't think Arc ever realized their vision. They gave some cryptic ideas of their vision for the future of the web, but I don't feel like they fundamentally changed anything. I was expecting Arc to eventually get to a place where I could login to Arc on any computer and have my home session, always up to date anywhere I was. Of course, this idea would have been a lot better in the 90s or 00s when computer labs were more common and everyone didn't have a computer in their pocket. The value of a cloud OS isn't as appealing as it once was.

In terms of growth flattening out; they threw in the towel too early. It was only after they stopped adding new features and decided to give up on Arc that it seemed to really start to get traction. I was seeing blog posts and YouTube videos left and right about Arc, all while knowing that it was effectively dead, but the memo never made it to the people who just found it and were sharing it like crazy. A new browser from a new company, that piggybacks on the browser that already has 70+% marketshare isn't going to take over the world in a few years. It was a long play and they were too impatient, and had already given up by the time they started to get some real traction outside of the early adopter space.

I remember when Firefox really hit the mainstream. Friends would see friends using IE, and push them out of the way to install Firefox. It felt very grass roots, but it worked... it just took time.

It was more than this. The Sun Ray thin clients were so frigging impressive.

The problem wasn't the tech, the problem was it was SUN. It ran on Sun Hardware, with Sun Software and all at Sun Prices. Metaframe was just so much cheaper (it was also hot garbage but thats another story).

If there were instead 10 viable and competitive desktop operating system with no clear leader, and macos and windows were there just among the others.. wouldn't you try to target as many as you can? Maybe we can think of linux itself as a microcosm of OSes we never got to have, and you have to target as many variants as you can in order for no dominant force to emerge. It ain't pretty but its what we have..

This is just not true. You can still write GTK2 or SDL apps, you just need to package your app for the target distro or open source it because it's an open-source-first ecosystem.

If you're looking for binary stability and to ship your app as a file, ELF is extremely stable. If your app accesses files, accesses the network through sockets, and use stable libraries like SDL or GTK it will work fine as a regular binary and be easy to ship. People just don't want to write their apps in C, when the operating system is designed for that.

Many native apps like Blender, Firefox, etc ship portable Linux x64 and arm64 binaries as tar gz files. This works fine. You can also use flatpak if you want automatic cross platform updates but yes, the format is unfortunately bloated.

It's not that easy to ship a JavaScript app on other OSes either and electron apps abound there too.

There’s a huge market for OSes that can consistently run Windows software. There’s no market for a brand new general purpose OS that can’t run anything until software developers port to it. Similarly, nobody is keen to pay anyone for an OS that can run Android or Linux software when they can get that for free.

Sometimes there isn't a reason why a product fails to find broad product adoption. If you take VC money, you need a mega hit. Sometimes, all you find is a niche.

What does ELF being stable or people not writing apps in C have to do with Linux binary compatibility? No matter what language you use, it’s either dynamically linking to the distro’s libc or using Linux system calls directly.

Also, I recommend taking a gander at what the Linux build process/linking looks like for large apps that “just work” out of the box like Firefox or Chromium. There’s games they have to play just to get consistent glibc symbol versions, and basically anything graphics/GUI related has to do a bunch of `dlopen`s at runtime.

Flatpak and similar take a cop-out by bundling their own copies of glibc and other libraries, and then doing a bunch of hacks to get the system’s userspace graphics libraries to work inside the container.

It's partly that (after all so long as your new OS has a decent browser most people won't care), but also hardware support. Every single driver has some specific hardware's ridiculous and strange quirks and "yeah we comply with that standard except for all the times we don't", and re-writing every Windows, Linux, or *BSD driver for $NEW_OS just doesn't pencil out.

How many actual regular every day people are using either? ChromeOS's big market is "tired and underfunded K-12 IT/Library/HVAC admin who just doesn't give a fuck give the kids a chromebook so I can go do something else", it's not exactly making waves among the general populace.

Building an OS is easy and straightforward.

Now let's make that OS talk to a graphics card--whoops, no Nvidia for you, peon!

An OS isn't a problem. Hardware support on an OS--that's a huge problem.

In 1994 the browser was not an operating system, was an hyperlink media app. JavaScript was born in 1995 and for years was “only” used for modifying the colors of HTML buttons on a mouse-over.

And then make people want to write for (and make money off)

A nearby comment repeated the quote "the browser is the OS."

The OS game is over. Desktop computing is becoming a professionals-only thing. We can talk about pros and cons of Windows, MacOS, and Linux, but it's a shrinking market without room for a fourth player.

> I'm sorry, but this is the exact same insight that MSN Explorer had

The internet wasn't fast enough. There are a number of dot-com era ideas that were before their time for various reasons. There's also Wordle. That game could have been made (and I think variants were) for at least a 20-year window, but it caught on late in the pandemic when our streaming queues were exhausted.

Exactly, they basically have better designer. For the real tech feature, I really don't think they ever brings any new invention to the product. Data sync, AI, etc. All other competitors have these features. They even need to count on chromium update.

Did they drop data sync? Could have sworn all of my spaces, tabs, folders, favorites and etc synced anytime I logged back in on my other machine (with access to spaces on iOS well)

It’s been a while since I used it regularly though.

In my experience, very few. FirefoxOS failed hard, and anyone who uses ChromeOS quickly becomes acquainted with the limitations of the approach.

I mainly brought them up in a "we've tried this before" sense.

Doesn't help that it didn't run on Linux (where a lot of people are willing to check out new tech), I kept checking in on it a few times a year, but it was never available. I have gotten people to use Firefox and Chrome in the past, but I did not push Arc to anyone as I could not use it myself.

They wanted Arc. The founders and others at Atlassian loved Arc. I am sure Dia is allowed to continue until it doesn’t work. Which it wont.

The part of the "microcosm" that prevents you from being able to easily compile a binary and have it run on a wide variety of distros doesn't have any upside I can see. The fact that you have to jump through hoops to target particular glibc symbol versions and that a stable OpenSSL ABI gets rug-pulled in new distro versions every few years aren't key to any benefits of distro/OS diversity. What would suffer if gcc/clang had a `--min-glibc-version=...` flag and OpenSSL settled on a long-term stable ABI subset for establishing TLS connections?

The way this all gets worked around is that people come up with stuff like Docker or Flatpak that ship their own copies of as many dependencies as possible. The disadvantage is that now I can't just patch an OpenSSL vulnerability by updating the system's copy of OpenSSL, the way Windows can for all software built on SChannel.

(The Windows Phone problem)

Given that, in the back of every customer's mind, across all segments, they cannot allow one vendor to have or exert too much control, it is a wonder why any company would seek to own a platform to such an extent. The better and more integrated you get, the more of a risk you become.

And of course I'm speaking on the context of what I'm building, not the world we're in. There are plenty of platforms that are more important than what they platform. I believe it was Bill Gates that said the value of all the things on the platform must exceed the platform itself. We have some inversions at present that are ripe to undergo Rayleigh–Taylor instability.

Apple wasn't early, they realized that they don't own the web, and therefore that web apps are much worse for them as a business than owning an exclusive App Store.

IIRC growth wasn’t flattening, it was growing pretty fast, basically hockey stick. It just wasn’t hockey stick enough to get to a billion users quickly.

At least, that was their justification publicly, maybe the real numbers were less optimistic

Really? Most businesses leave their eternal soul and their firstborn in the care of Microsoft, with no backup plan. I just don't buy this.

Microsoft is not just Microsoft. It's the cottage industry around products like Excel. It's all the other PC applications. It's WHQL getting hardware vendors into the fold. Compare all that to Apple. Apple is big, but not compared to the greater continent of Microsoft. People are more concerned about Apple's walled gardens than Microsoft's. It's no coincidence that Apple has taken more heavy handed actions to rule their platform more. That is why their platform is smaller overall and why people don't trust them.

thats been a solved problem for years with flatpak

If you mean a paid, consumer OS, you've got to keep in mind that they're essentially tied to a hardware product. The vast majority of your target market is not installing an alternative OS manually. You would need to either sell hardware with your OS or get hardware companies to package your OS over the existing options.

With how mature the personal computer market is, this is a very big hurdle.

I dont think it was even that.

The developing for the iphone and app store creates lock-in. I believe the rich web page stuff was just to show the potential of what is possible before influencing developers to build for the app store.

Sometime I said to myself. If I hacked someone's PC, his hard drive will become my NAS.

Hard for it not to be better than Chrome, considering that it’s a Chrome fork with a few years of extra engineering thrown at it.

Take for example FreeBSD, it's not mainstream but also not too obscure, they get some funding through the FreeBSD foundation, and yet wifi drivers are still an issue.

The browser is the OS that wraps the user not the machine. Just as Linux or Windows or Android wrap the machine and manage its resources, the browser should wrap the user and manage their resources (data, time/focus etc). In this regard nobody has succeeded. The browser isn’t finished until it achieves this

You forgot about Firefox OS, which had a fully web-based UI.

Is it? There is Wine/Crossover on Linux. Also, users pay for Sailfish OS, which can run Android apps (while providing better privacy).

OS is not only desktop. There is also mobile OS, like KaiOS, which is the 3rd most popular phone OS.

> no one has delivered it yet

Firefox OS? Now KaiOS? The 3rd most popular mobile OS.

Have you heard of Cosmopolitan Libc? A single APE binary for every platform out there.