Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.