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.

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.

I always saw Dia as fundamentally a move toward AI investor bux, but I did find the "Arc was too novel for large uptake" a reasonable perspective.

Atlassian, tho, has nothing for the regular every-day consumer, they make SaaS for business. So what's the deal?

My dream for Arc, from the beginning, was that it could act as a middle-man between all the various SaaS platforms we use daily at work. Imagine: your Shortcut tickets link automatically to Slack and you can one-click open the relevant Slack channel in a side-by-side view.

We do so much switching between contexts and imo the browser could be a great surface for improving our workflows.

I just don't understand how they can with a straight face say "Today’s browsers weren’t built for work." when their entire business relies on browsers ability to do exactly that and have basically been fine (heavy javascript usage in Jira aside which this is not going to magically fix).

Looking at any of this I just don't see what this is actually supposed to solve.

Was Atlassian the highest bidder, or was Atlassian the only bidder?

AI seems like a feature to add to existing browsers, not something that needs its own dedicated browser. People’s workflows get tied to a browser, especially one like Arc, so to proclaim it done, with no need for any new features after just a couple years, while most expect a browser to carry on for decades, left a really bad taste in my mouth.

I was excited when they launched, but won’t miss them. They felt more like a dev backed hype machine. I’m not sure what Atlassian has planned, but won’t be surprised if they kill the browsers and integrate some tools into their existing product line.

I do think that selling a browser is going to be an extremely difficult task, so having an enterprise software machine with huge customer base might help it, but Atlassian strikes me as a company that will eventually just kill the project and turn this into a de facto acquihire.

Is this is an acquihire? Atlassian does not seem to have strategic overlap with making a browser in any meaningful way I can think of.

It doesn’t feel like a strong strategic or product fit. These are all complex power user products meant to serve enterprises at scale. Integration doesn’t seem useful either. Bummer but congrats to the team!

What was even the point of all this roundabout engineering and the time and manpower to do so? What a waste. This seems more like an acquihire than actually about IP.

Dia is a joke, but I guess it has a chance in the age of ever-more-popular AI functionality.

My only curiosity is whether this means that Atlassian will lock these browsers down to just paying customers or keep some limited functionality versions available for personal use. Of all the companies who might’ve bought TBC, I did not expect Atlassian, based on the services they offer already.

Then again, all the potential anti-trust stuff happening with Google and the push to separate Google from Chrome could be a bit catalyst for this move.

They did help push the established players in the field forward a bit though, so I will be thankful for that.

Also: It's always funny to see how people really feel about an acquisition. eg the comments in this thread feel like a eulogy.

I absolutely love Arc for Mac. It gets all the little things right -- at least for my workflow and mindset. But "getting all the little things right" in a browser isn't something you can monetize.

But there's an even worse company that wanted to buy them out of losing money and has no solid plan to use it.

This looks like a very bad deal, equivalent to the Humane and HP acquisition.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42213288

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/04/atlassian-the-browser-compan...

But, the UI is good (to me), and I like that it's based on FF rather than another Chromium shell.

I should say though, I don't consider myself a 'power user', and I'm not a web developer so never user the dev tools.

I never understood Dia. ofc I downloaded Dia and tried using it a while, but never clicked on the agent bar. They told somewhere sometime that they were seeking a bigger user base. Dia definitely is not that place. A browser powered by AI definitely is nothing something beyond the geek/early adopter crew.

Things become worse when we think about how they handled this whole situation. Sometimes shady, sometimes with a lot of arrogance and always shunning off their loyal users.

We don't have the whole information, of course the team and maybe investors know better in details what happened, but definitely things weren't going well. The recent tweet from the design guy cheering up the side bar is almost a suffocated scream from the team imo.

From the company journey perspective that's a depressing way to have an exit. Wish them the best, but I'm deleting any traces of TBC from my computer.

it's hard not to be bitter after they squandered so much goodwill by abandoning Arc

my personal thesis for consumer apps is that power users will always sustain over the latest hype cycle (even if that means your addressable market will be smaller - maybe don't take an obscene amount of VC money?)

The best thing to come out of Arc was the lovely design, the tab switcher, Nate's experiments on Twitter, the astounding welcome screen, Little Arc, the announcements which acknowledged the individual engineers etc. To me, those really pushed the boundaries. For that, thank you!

It also has good support for profiles and spaces. For example, I have a "Work" space, a "Demo" space (with tabs open for sales demos), a "Personal" space, and even a "Travel" space for travel planning stuff.

And another killer feature is the ability to "route" specific urls to specific spaces, so for example I can have all github links open in my "Work" space.

It's a great browser, and I hope Atlassian doesn't ditch ongoing support for it.

I’ve been using Zen [1] on and off for some time but it’s time to go full time on Firefox again!

It’s such a shame tho, Arc is a great browser and I’ve felt more productive using it, not to mention the UI, which is cleaner and just slicker than any other browser.

[1] https://zen-browser.app

I wish they had managed to keep Arc around. It's a product I'd glad pay for, and it seems like maybe there are enough fans that subscriptions could've supported a smaller team. Hopefully Atlassian doesn't kill it after 5 months

Here are the real reasons to drop Atlassian:

1 -- You're already paying for GitHub. Atlassian has no alternative to GitHub Actions, and nothing else matches it at scale.

2 -- GitHub works better with AI coding tools, most dev tools, and most CI/CD pipelines. Open source is ~5x more likely to be on GitHub than anywhere else.

3 -- Your devs like GitHub more. Honestly, everyone does. The only person who tolerates Jira is the guy who thinks changing fonts on TPS reports counts as productivity.

4 -- And the best part: you can close an issue with a pull request. If you can't tie a task to the code commit, and show clean automated tests before merging, that's not project management -- it's project theater.

What’s the play here? Just throwing money into anything AI at this point and seeing what sticks?

[1]: https://xcancel.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1961172409920491849 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45066395

I know Firefox is the "right" option, and I'm fully in favour of chipping away at Chromium marketshare (even if the EU is determined to solidify it further with demands of Apple to allow non-Safari rendering in iOS) but I've used it in the past, and even if it's fine 99% of the time, there is that occasional website that has issues because web devs only test in Chromium. And it leaves me with an ever-looming sense of "is this broken because the site is actually broken or was it just not tested with anything but Chrome?" and then I'm obsessively opening Chrome every time I have an issue to test it there.

So I figured I'll just use one of the many Chromium-based alternatives that's going to continue supporting manifest V2, and I've generally heard good things about them anyway. Edge is off the table since Microsoft said they'd only support it as long as Google did, and I already swore it off after using it for like the first year after they switched to Chromium and it was okay, but it quickly got destroyed by the typical suspects at Microsoft, turning it into a Microsoft adware shitshow. Not to mention their quality control was clearly not up to snuff cause they frequently pushed terribly broken builds to stable, which I rarely experienced with Chrome in 15-ish years of using it.

I tried Arc a little bit but something about the onboarding process and browser experience feels more like their top priority is being cute and unique rather than just making a good browser.

I've settled on Brave for now. After disabling all their crapware, it's been... okay. But like Edge, it seems to have some quality control issues. I have very weird performance issues, like for a long time typing in the youtube comment box would be incredibly laggy. I think that's mostly fixed now? But I still get regular issues where the entire browser will lock up if I'm playing a video and I pull the tab into a separate window, and I have to kill the window to unfreeze everything. The bugs are annoying on their own but it also gives me concern about the skillset of the people making it. I'm trusting my browser with fairly sensitive data, and who knows how difficult it will be in a few years to continue supporting manifest V2. They got all that work done for them by Google/open source contributors. Wouldn't surprise me if Google maliciously made manifest V2 more and more difficult to support by moving Chromium in a direction that's increasingly incompatible with it.

Atlassian is in the 'productivity' business. The natural next step is to allow agents to do the productivity tasks for you.

Agents rely on semantics (ie. business logic). Often, business logic lives on the frontend, with backend API calls having little resemblance to their intended business outcome. This means computer use agents, inefficient as they may be, win by default.

Browser automation is fragile and needs a lot of domain knowledge to do robustly. Why not acquire a group that literally built their own browser ?

I am a little confused because at first glance their product appeared to fail to find a market.

There must be something of value here.

Does Atlassian want them to become an Enterprise AI arm?

Did we learn nothing from Windsurf?

I use Safari day-to-day, but its behaviors are inconsistent with caching which makes development hell. I notice this caching behavior even when you have it disabled in the network developer tools.

Hug Firefox close, it's an awful world out there, especially with Google being given the greelight to continue their monopolising with Chrome.

I remember being tempted by this thing when it first came out - their asinine sign up waiting list kept me from pursuing it further and then I forgot about it until they eventually fully dumped it and moved into full AI-enshittification territory. There are really 30 years of reasons why most people will never trust a new entrant to the browser market - this is just the latest and probably greatest.

What a shitshow.

Wild that someone else's browser technology mixed with generic AI is worth $610m. Bubble, you say?

The web as a whole is also built on this discovery and people visiting pages and interacting with other. This gets lost when you get into the flow of just AI'ing everything.

This isn’t criticism or sarcasm — I’m genuinely impressed, but also very curious about the rationale behind it.

Anyway, the idea of making Dia into the knowledge worker's browser sounds good.

For me, this new browser would be successful the day I prefer to run Linear and Notion in Dia rather than using the companies' own Electron desktop apps (which are pretty terrible on Mac at least, so the bar is not necessarily very high).

Normally, I’d scoff at the idea. But they genuinely made the browser useful again in ways for which I’d happily shill $30/mo. Superhuman proved you can do it for email, which was also previously laughable. I guess that ended in a buyout, too, but at least they tried.

Arc also had a solid wedge into team space, especially if going AI-native was their little dream.

You own the browser. Just build a capable browser-first agent that helps teams do work. Make it a shared space (separate from personal ofc) and start charging for teams.

As I write this, it’s pretty clear that’s what Atlassian wants to do with this. The only real loss is: - They decided to roundtrip the entire product story of Arc with Dia, and drag users through 0->1 again - It’s Atlassian, and you know they’re gonna suffocate anything that isn’t related to Atlassian

All in all, this looks like a fear-based sellout. They could have done it on their own but didn’t have the chops to scale into a company of that size. So instead they took the guaranteed payoff and tucked themselves inside this big ** kangaroo’s pouch for safety while they get to play with AI indefinitely.

“We coulda been something real.”

————

EDIT: unironically, they now offer the option to pay $20/mo for Dia Pro… it’s basically comedy at this point.

> less than 10% of organizations have adopted a secure browser

Yes Gartner, let's invent a "secure enterprise browser", because there's too much interoperability on the web - there's definitely some business on splitting that up. I'm sure atlassian people love that idea.

It could have been awesome. But this stopped me dead in my tracks. Hard pass and I gave them no recommendations to anyone.

[DELETE] [ARC]

You have a great product, passionate users, and you have to throw it all away (because you've accepted too much money from investors who don't care about anything other than quick returns).

The main feature being touted is the ability to take context from multiple tabs and ... do something with it? So unconstrained access to what you're doing in multiple tabs feeding into exactly what and why? The announcement is concerning because it mentions "AI skills" which are, of course, nonexistent.

If anything, the "arc" of The Browser Company proves a fundamental tenet of the post-capitalist era: You can get rich without making or selling any products that anyone wants. It's all stock transactions between wealthly elites. The software, if any, is an afterthought.