Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company
I'm a huge fan of Arc and generally not a fan of TBCNY due to their abandonment of the browser for their AI hype machine, Dia. What's odd about this acquisition is that the move to Dia was (publicly) presented as a move toward the consumer; that consumers weren't ready for a radical reinvention of the browser interface so it made sense to revert to something more standard if you wanted to do something new with the 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.
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.
What is with this need for a single application to do so many different tasks instead of just being focused on doing its job and doing it well (browsing the web in this case).
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.
$610M, all cash??? How were they worth that much... all they seemed to ever do was rebrand
I lost all faith in The Browser Company when they went into a maintenance-only mode with Arc to shift to Dia, without any real announcement. Just a reply to a Twitter post calling them out. They figured no one would notice. I think they eventually addressed it after some public pressure, but I don’t think they sold the decision well.
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've switched to Zen browser recently (I like it's spaces and folder structure to organize work on a daily basis, same as Arc). fFox nightly is not there yet but it's getting close with tabs on the left..
I would've actually expected a buyer like OpenAI or Anthropic, if I'm being perfectly honest. Atlassian is such a strange buyer. $610m in cash is really low in the grand scheme of AI pricing too. If they're only worth $610m, I feel like this says a lot that "AI browsers" aren't actually worth that much. Remember, Instagram was $1b. The Windsurf acquihire was $2.4b and there are surely a lot more people in business that use browsers than write code.
Was Atlassian the highest bidder, or was Atlassian the only bidder?
Building Dia was such a colossal mistake, and the folks running TBCNY seem to not understand. They believe they are reinventing the wheel, and every time I hear them talk I cringe.
Isn't Atlassian where products go to die? :)
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.
I really appreciate that there's a company trying to reimagine browsers. Arc was an interesting idea, I used it for a few months, but in the end I switched back to Firefox. I haven't tried Dia yet, and now I'm not sure if I should.
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.
Arc Browser is an excellent "what could have been" story. The UI came together amazingly fast, there was excellent posts every week with updates from the project lead, and it felt fresh and exciting. It would be an amazing open source project, but there just not a good way to monetize it. There's no other browser, including newer projects like Zen, with a better ui. I would strongly encourage Atlassian to open source Arc.
Atlassian owns: jira, confluence, trello, bitbucket, loom, and a couple of other small products
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!
I use Arc as my primary browser but, well, I guess I won’t be using an Atlassian browser (only thinking about it sounds insane) because we all know what will happen with telemetry and tracking.
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.
What was the Browser Company even doing? First they had a successful consumer product with Arc as a Chrome clone, then they decided to shut it down for...a whole new browser called Dia that essentially acted as a browser extension that so many vibe coded clones were made of?
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.
$610m for a Chromium skin with generic AI bolted on feels like a lot. But what do I know?
Any guesses as to what this means for Arc?
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.
They messed with Dia thing. Arc had a clear value proposition, a better browser for power users. I'd pay for that, mostly because the browser itself, but also because they had pretty straightforward approaches on their communication, how small things work, how bad features should be removed and so on...
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.
I bet this is a computer use agents play. It's an acquisition of Perplexity Comet's main competitor.
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 still use Arc as my primary browser. I prefer tabs on the side - I like how you can just drag tabs up and they will be saved (like Bookmarks, but I actually use it) I like pinned tabs which I use for calendar and my other top used "web apps"
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.
In terms of newer browsers, I started playing around with Zen after seeing a post about it on HN some weeks ago. So far, really liking that experience. It's not without bugs (i.e, 'compact mode' shortcut works about 50% of the time lol).
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.
Arc was actually full of some really great ideas. There was plenty of nonsense, but their Air Traffic Control feature is still unmatched on other browsers. Multi-container/profile browsing is managed so poorly across other browsers.
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.
Surely the Browser Company will move to Jira, even though it's using a direct competitor for Product Management... https://linear.app/customers/browsercompany Heh.
Surprising I don't think Atlassian hasn't even recovered from Loom acquisition. It was good for Loom but hardly any positive impact for Atlassian. Now Arc and Dia - it seems to be an obsession to acquire an AI BROWSER
What a shame! I've loved Arc, haven't been able to give it up even though it's now maintenance-only. It was nearly dead, I'm sure Atlassian will finish it off.
Would Atlassian be building a agentic version for their AI Coding agent - Rovo.
Arc always interested me for the UX and design choices (especially since I'm one of those who constantly has 100s of tabs open). But the account requirement is a hard blocker for me adopting as my daily driver. Anyone know of similar projects? I recall there being a arc-inspired linux-supported project, but they refused to sign their macOS release for god knows what reason.
Why were they acquired at that price? What is the competitive/technological advantage that Atlassian is acquiring?
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.
from a glitzy reimagining of "how we use the internet" to joining the ranks of shitty Jira...what an ending!
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!
AI jammed into a browser really isn't going to make any Atlassian product any more pleasant to use
Lots of respect to Josh Miller, the CEO. TBC got to a difficult place. They built a product that was very very good, but evidently not good enough to support the capital they raised or the workforce they hired.
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
I'd like to be proven wrong but I'm feeling the same point Carmack was making about not building "VR" operating systems[1][2] applies to "AI" browsers as well. It seems like a futile effort especially considering revenue generation and it seems pointless to not pick Chromium for that even if you're hellbent on going down that road.
[1]: https://xcancel.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1961172409920491849 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45066395
We switched from jir to linear, what a fresh starts !
I love the Arc Browser, but they discontinued development on that. I honestly have no interest in Dia at this point. AI is already available in any of the tools that I would want it in, and I don't think I would want any one company having visibility into more of my apps and data.
Finally, I can have JIRA in my face all the time while I browse
AI in a web browser isn't going to make Atlassian products any more usable
Details on the price Atlassian paid: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/04/atlassian-the-browser-compan...
I don’t understand why the most hated ticket managing system is acquiring a browser? They want to further bloat a browser with their crappy ticket management system? And AI?
What’s the play here? Just throwing money into anything AI at this point and seeing what sticks?
Can somebody please tell me what is the business play behind The Browser Company. It has always seemed very suspicious to me, well-funded, not making money, and now this
I've been trying to find a Chrome replacement since they finally cut the cord on manifest v2.
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.
WELP..... that was a fun run. Probably switch back to chrome at some point.
It's so hard to switch browsers yet I took the leap on Arc, putting so much faith in this company that they wouldn't sell out. Such a waste of an incredible product.
The most impressive thing I find about this is that Atlassian felt compelled to buy a Chromium skinned browser running third party AI agents.
Did we learn nothing from Windsurf?
lol
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.
I find Atlassian to be a strange buyer of The Browser Company and there products. I don’t see the philosophical match here.
Does Atlassian want them to become an Enterprise AI arm?
I’m not sure whether I find it more worrisome or fascinating that we live in a world where a company that, as far as I know, has never generated a single dollar in revenue has managed to exist for over five years, employ more than 100 people, and still get acquired for this amount.
This isn’t criticism or sarcasm — I’m genuinely impressed, but also very curious about the rationale behind it.
The thing the Browser Company does best is marketing. I have always felt like they really wanted to market their products more than build them. The founders should let Dia/Arc go and just go into product marketing. Many would hire them.
If the AI browser can use Jira for us, then this is a step forward for humanity.
I never understood how the Browser Company expected to be successful on its own terms. Now I guess we have the answer: they don't.
Wild that someone else's browser technology mixed with generic AI is worth $610m. Bubble, you say?
Switched to Zen last week over a bug that prevented me from opening my favs. Good timing to jump ship.
This is not Dia the open source diagram editor. Apparently Dia is an AI chatbot that interacts with tabs.
Zen has replaced Arc for me nicely.
The link seems to be serving a 404 (at least from the Arc Search app on iOS, ironically)
It would be perfect upsell for Atlassian because of their products abysmal performance of their product.
I’ll never understand why they didn’t even bother to experiment with monetization for Arc.
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.
Atlassian's announcement: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/atlassian-acqui...
This is going to be remembered as a really weird tale in the annals of our industry’s history.
Alas the last piece of information falls into place
Been an Atlassian consultant for a while and I just left (Rather I was let go) from an established Atlassian partner, and I can only feel relief. I was always more of a data center on prem person and all this cloud nonsense has been going nowhere, except for them. Those acquisitions are always half baked and you *might see some of it somewhere in a product. All I can say is I’m happy I’m no longer doing Atlassian consulting.
Interesting idea. Replace a bunch of different clients with one for purpose client but the devil we be in the details.
It's sad the tech industry is in such a state that a team can build a really great, innovative product, and then have to abandon it to create a little bit of AI slop so they can sell that to a company that is completely unrelated to that products market.
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).
Hmm so those aren't alternative web browsers but "AI" crammed on top of ... chromium or something?
Arc had some novel ideas but ultimately it was DOA for me because I needed something that I could access on both desktop and mobile for shared tabs/history/etc.
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.
ARC always feels like a feature not a product. Don't see how Atlassian connection is really gonna make either better.
Imagine, a browser with the polished experience and performance of Jira
I've tried their Arc Search mobile browser, and the UX is just absolute trash unless you're specifically using it via search only workflows. It's not really a browser in the normal sense.
I’m really curious to see how Dia will evolve toward being enterprise-ready. The Arc vision was sadly killed, and I assume the same might happen with Dia. Rather than competing with Claude for Chrome or Gemini in Chrome, it seems more likely it will become a conservative, secure AI browser tightly integrated into the Atlassian ecosystem.
I never knew the Browser Company had such an awesome logo!
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).
Arc brwoser literally required "creating an account" in order to... download text files (html) over a TCP socket, off the internet, and parse/display them.
It could have been awesome. But this stopped me dead in my tracks. Hard pass and I gave them no recommendations to anyone.
Well this is a surprise. Thought OpenAI or Perplexity would buy them. [0][1]
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...
Honestly I think Dia and any other AI first browsers are a bad idea.You lose out on the exploratory nature of the web. How are you going to stumble upon a random nugget during a web search session that you never would have found otherwise. This kind of thing happens to be frequently when I don't go to AI to figure something out. I find a new product or new library for the language I am currently working with that may not solve my current issue but I come back to later to improve something I am working on.
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.
It was nice knowing them.
> 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.
Well, it was a good run.
RIP
Say it with me. Bubble.
Arc had privacy concerns. How will those concerns be addressed by Atlassian, given they handle very sensitive data?
Like grandpa always said: "When a company lays off staff so the founders can buy an island, it's time to move to GitHub Projects." Ha!
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.
404
This is so strange. How would Atlassian convince their enterprise customers to switch browsers? That seems really unlikely, and unnecessary.
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.
Why on earth would they shelve out money for these horrible, totally mislead, borderline useless, alien like things (browsers)?
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Maybe they can finally make Jira responsive /s
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.