Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

There are some businesses that are simply not viable without losing money first. SpaceX cannot generate revenue until it first employs hundreds of people for a few years (maybe a decade) where they focus on building what will eventually bring revenue. Software has those problems too.

I mean this with no snark: I would love to see the investor deck that explains how an AI-powered browser is going to make any multiple of $610M.

yeah and what makes them different compared to half baked fraud startups with no revenue ? most of the world would not believe that they will bring revenue in years?

I would guess by selling personal data and ads.

More charitably by selling the only browser that's actually usable in a few years. The AI will be used to cancel out the effect of other people's AI.

I can't tell you how many designers I interviewed who told me they used the Arc browser. It was at least a dozen.

I'd never heard of the damned thing before.

I don't know why, but it appears to be popular with some creative demographics.

The browser is an essential pane of glass to platformization and taxing the web. Anyone who wins a browser with significant market share has a huge opportunity to capitalize on.

Not sure if Arc is that browser, but lots of teams are trying.

Chrome is shitty on purpose because it is designed to sell ads. Other browsers can sell AI or other things to fund their development.

It's a shame we don't have a good open source browser with decent leadership anymore. I'm sure they'd be killing it. I could swear Mozilla is led by a revolving door of paid off Google plants.

Ha, that's a dark timeline! But sadly quite probable.

I'm told that it can take ten years for a vineyard to start generating profit.

Well, I was one of Arc users but they abandoned it in favor of a new browser with an integrated AI agent that t can work on tabs, Dia. Now I’m using it, but to be honest I use almost none of the AI features beyond some summaries for pages and YouTube videos, but I see a lot of potential there (I.e. make it check the calendar to propose a time in a newly composed email) for the less technical users.

There’s Orion, Zen, plenty of minor browser projects that aspire to better experiences than the majors’. Brave is likely much more widespread than Arc, though that one is monetized via the previous trend (crypto). Never even heard of a lot of these:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrxhVA5NVQ4

Perhaps they are hoping Google will pay them ~$500m/yr to be the default search engine.

Putting the agent into your user agent.

Pedigree of the team and a believable project plan.

Often times money will be raised at certain valuation and terms, but the cash is held in escrow (effectively) until milestones are hit.

The investors will do their due diligence on the feasibility. It’s a high stakes, high return game (if you succeed). Look around you… any physical device you see is basically funded the same way.

That’s like the point of venture capitalism and to a certain extent all entrepreneurial endeavors. You could start a T-shirt printing company (a completely viable business) and not see any revenue come in for months.

There have been a few extremely popular remastered games the last few years and the internet is full of people cranky because folks are posting replies to five year old internet threads about the game.

Well what do you expect people to do when the only non slop result on page 1 is a 5 to 8 year old thread? It’s the top link. You’re still relevant whether you want to be or not. Fuckin deal.

I use Arc for two reasons:

Tabs on the side nav and the ability to have 3 different AWS accounts open at the same time

Firefox does both of those things out of the box with no extensions.

0.01 is a multiple!

It takes 5 years on average til you can harvest some grapes. 10 years for generating profit sounds about right.

I know distilleries will often contract with one or more other distilleries to create a custom blended whisky to sell under their label to get some revenue while they wait for their first batches to mature. There are distilleries that basically specialize in doing this. I assume the wine market probably has similar strategies. I know 3 buck chuck basically started like this, buying overstock from other vineyards and blending them into a generic white or red wine.

Vimperator plugin used to do the rest, but maybe that is no longer needed or working.

And there are business which will never be highly profitable unless the competition implodes for no particular reason (like making your own browser).

> how many designers I interviewed who told me they used the Arc browser

Looking at their frontpage the design is outright horrible if you have a > 7-8 inch screen. I guess in a way its good to have an example of what not to do.

> I'm sure they'd be killing it

Why, though? I mean the niche is pretty small, most people don't care much about open source or even what browser they are using at all.

Considering the overwhelming majority of Mozilla's funding is coming from Google and in no way could it survive without it being run by Google's plants is not that surprising.

Yep, but admittedly the vertical tab UX is not the greatest. You either have them always be visible with an option to toggle by clicking the sidebar icon (no keyboard shortcut option afaik), or minimised as icons that expand on hover with an awfully annoying animation.

Looking at Zen, I really don't understand how Mozilla fail to capitalise on their browser, and build up a similar experimental project based on Firefox like it. It seems that many of these small QoL improvements could make a big difference. They have such a huge budget, and they waste it on inane things. Their fancy search deal with Google has made them complacent, and neglect one of the few things that ever had any real worth. Curious to see how it develops with the recent Google ruling. And to be fair, it does seem like Firefox development has picked up a bit lately—maybe even due to Zen's competition, who knows.

Out of curiosity, why would a company help out their future competitor?

because they may sell the same product, yes, but not compete. there will always be someone starting a new vineyard, distillery or whatever.

it's sort of like banks vs vc funds. both lend money to companies, but still they are not competing against each other.

My impression is that a large portion of the industry is already structured as distilleries that actually make the liquor, like MGP, and a bunch of labels that put their names on it (each different). Like how many name-brand items across grocery stores are all actually made by the same company.

You might be good at making whisky but not that great at marketing. Either way the market has a desire for generic, unlabeled product and people go in to fill the need.