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Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

(www.cnbc.com)
520 points kevinyew | 3 comments | 04 Sep 25 12:12 UTC | HN request time: 0.718s | source
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jshchnz ◴[04 Sep 25 14:58 UTC] No.45128040[source]▶
$610M, all cash??? How were they worth that much... all they seemed to ever do was rebrand
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Waraqa ◴[04 Sep 25 15:38 UTC] No.45128484[source]▶
"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...

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1. manquer ◴[04 Sep 25 16:27 UTC] No.45129027[source]▶
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 ?

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2. daveidol ◴[04 Sep 25 22:33 UTC] No.45132991[source]▶
ObjC is mostly dead, and most Swift devs are not comfortable with C++.
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3. manquer ◴[05 Sep 25 00:05 UTC] No.45133645[source]▶
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.