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Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

(www.cnbc.com)
520 points kevinyew | 1 comments | 04 Sep 25 12:12 UTC | HN request time: 0.28s | source
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crowcroft ◴[04 Sep 25 15:30 UTC] No.45128398[source]▶
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.

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mattlutze ◴[04 Sep 25 20:24 UTC] No.45131834[source]▶
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.

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crowcroft ◴[04 Sep 25 20:29 UTC] No.45131884[source]▶
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.
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1. alemanek ◴[04 Sep 25 20:42 UTC] No.45131991[source]▶
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.