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Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

(www.cnbc.com)
520 points kevinyew | 9 comments | 04 Sep 25 12:12 UTC | HN request time: 1.485s | source | bottom
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Pfhortune ◴[04 Sep 25 17:05 UTC] No.45129487[source]▶
It has been so tragic to see the unforced downfall of this company. Arc is such an amazing browser that really did some new and interesting things. They clearly have some phenomenal talent on the team, having managed to get their swift-centric development working on _Windows_. That's a huge and difficult undertaking!

And they threw it away to work on (probably) the CEO's new fixation and threw Arc away like an old toy. And now they're selling to Atlassian and I would bet money, will just evaporate. Nothing they ever built will mean anything to Atlassian in the long term. Nobody wants to use an Atlassian browser.

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1. taminka ◴[04 Sep 25 17:55 UTC] No.45130131[source]▶
> having managed to get their swift-centric development working on _Windows_. That's a huge and difficult undertaking!

im not a swift expert, but building your project for one of the officially supported targets shouldn't be considered a "phenomenal" achievent? lol

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2. Pfhortune ◴[04 Sep 25 18:08 UTC] No.45130295[source]▶
Ah, fair enough. Showing my ignorance on that one. I know little about their tech stack and was under the impression they had some secret sauce.
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3. taminka ◴[04 Sep 25 18:16 UTC] No.45130407[source]▶
i mean they did have some really cool designs, but technically they just had relatively advanced chrome fork...
4. askonomm ◴[04 Sep 25 19:14 UTC] No.45131112[source]▶
I recall something about them trying to get SwiftUI working on Windows, which would've been a pretty big thing indeed. No idea if they ever did or how exactly they built the Windows UI in the end.
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5. basisword ◴[04 Sep 25 20:17 UTC] No.45131772[source]▶
The achievement wasn't building Swift code on Windows, it was using Swift to build a native Windows application utilising Windows API's.

https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-everywhere-windows-interop/

6. basisword ◴[04 Sep 25 20:18 UTC] No.45131782[source]▶
You're not ignorant, the other person was.
7. ◴[04 Sep 25 21:05 UTC] No.45132180[source]▶
8. jshier ◴[04 Sep 25 22:01 UTC] No.45132711[source]▶
Considering TBC hired the one guy doing anything with Swift on Windows and paid for much of the work needed to make Windows an officially supported platform, it was still an achievement. I'm not even sure I'd call Windows officially supported since most of the support comes from TBC and not Apple or official Swift channels.
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9. taminka ◴[05 Sep 25 20:45 UTC] No.45143385[source]▶
sounds like they made a stupid decision and had to pay for it w/ technical overhead?

chrome already has ui rendering set up on windows, all they had to was not reinvent the wheel and just make tweaks to the ui and some server side magick on their end, but that would reveal the fact that they're an half a billion dollar 100 person chrome fork for nerds with no way to generate profit lol