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Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

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520 points kevinyew | 2 comments | 04 Sep 25 12:12 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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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amlib ◴[04 Sep 25 23:46 UTC] No.45133521[source]▶
If there were instead 10 viable and competitive desktop operating system with no clear leader, and macos and windows were there just among the others.. wouldn't you try to target as many as you can? Maybe we can think of linux itself as a microcosm of OSes we never got to have, and you have to target as many variants as you can in order for no dominant force to emerge. It ain't pretty but its what we have..
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1. johncolanduoni ◴[05 Sep 25 03:42 UTC] No.45134794[source]▶
The part of the "microcosm" that prevents you from being able to easily compile a binary and have it run on a wide variety of distros doesn't have any upside I can see. The fact that you have to jump through hoops to target particular glibc symbol versions and that a stable OpenSSL ABI gets rug-pulled in new distro versions every few years aren't key to any benefits of distro/OS diversity. What would suffer if gcc/clang had a `--min-glibc-version=...` flag and OpenSSL settled on a long-term stable ABI subset for establishing TLS connections?

The way this all gets worked around is that people come up with stuff like Docker or Flatpak that ship their own copies of as many dependencies as possible. The disadvantage is that now I can't just patch an OpenSSL vulnerability by updating the system's copy of OpenSSL, the way Windows can for all software built on SChannel.

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2. niutech ◴[07 Sep 25 18:05 UTC] No.45160659[source]▶
Have you heard of Cosmopolitan Libc? A single APE binary for every platform out there.