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Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

(www.cnbc.com)
520 points kevinyew | 2 comments | 04 Sep 25 12:12 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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butterfi ◴[04 Sep 25 20:54 UTC] No.45132071[source]▶
Linux has entered the chat...
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jabwd ◴[04 Sep 25 22:53 UTC] No.45133162[source]▶
Even though I run it full time now personally; I still think Linux has massive problems something like Windows or macOS don't have: app development. You can't target a thing, you have to target all the things and bloat your app like crazy so you might as well just ship a chromium based app because its practically the same thing anyway (shipping an entire userland because its not stable anyway)
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1. sempron64 ◴[05 Sep 25 00:03 UTC] No.45133633[source]▶
This is just not true. You can still write GTK2 or SDL apps, you just need to package your app for the target distro or open source it because it's an open-source-first ecosystem.

If you're looking for binary stability and to ship your app as a file, ELF is extremely stable. If your app accesses files, accesses the network through sockets, and use stable libraries like SDL or GTK it will work fine as a regular binary and be easy to ship. People just don't want to write their apps in C, when the operating system is designed for that.

Many native apps like Blender, Firefox, etc ship portable Linux x64 and arm64 binaries as tar gz files. This works fine. You can also use flatpak if you want automatic cross platform updates but yes, the format is unfortunately bloated.

It's not that easy to ship a JavaScript app on other OSes either and electron apps abound there too.

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2. johncolanduoni ◴[05 Sep 25 00:31 UTC] No.45133795[source]▶
What does ELF being stable or people not writing apps in C have to do with Linux binary compatibility? No matter what language you use, it’s either dynamically linking to the distro’s libc or using Linux system calls directly.

Also, I recommend taking a gander at what the Linux build process/linking looks like for large apps that “just work” out of the box like Firefox or Chromium. There’s games they have to play just to get consistent glibc symbol versions, and basically anything graphics/GUI related has to do a bunch of `dlopen`s at runtime.

Flatpak and similar take a cop-out by bundling their own copies of glibc and other libraries, and then doing a bunch of hacks to get the system’s userspace graphics libraries to work inside the container.