As for what this all means for The Browser Company’s browsers, it’s still too early to say for sure. Miller promises no favored-nation features for Atlassian products, nor any Microsoft Edge-style popups begging you to sign up for Jira. Miller says the team is even more committed to being a truly cross-platform product, and that Windows in particular is about to get a lot more attention. He also says there’s an aggressive roadmap for bringing the best of Arc to Dia, after the company’s pivot angered some of its most dedicated users. Arc’s status hasn’t changed, and will still be maintained but not actively developed. (Reading between the lines, though? I wouldn’t count on Arc being around for too long — there’s just no place for it in this new arrangement.)
I’m glad I’ve been exploring alternatives already… On that front, I’m still trialing Zen. I don’t like the Firefox ecosystem at all, though. Really hoping Kagi/Orion figures out split tabs ASAP.
Hence why they pivoted Dia. If you can’t monetize Arc, monetize yourself by demonstrating the ability of building an AI enabled browser. Dia has been built very fast (no doubt they were burning VC as crazy) perhaps this need for speed was what made them take the decision of beginning from scratch in Dia.
Anyway, I’d say this movement was well executed by their team. Regarding the future, well… Atlassian does not have a great track record (whatever happened to Trello?) but then Salesforce would have been worse.
If the browser is really going to be AI’s “Killer App” then we will probably continue to see new ones come and go for the next couple of years. In the meantime there are really only 6, . . . and everyone else.
Obviously not great news, but I’m optimistic enough to stick with Arc for now.
Reasons to be optimistic:
Trello acquisition has gone fairly well. Just looked at my boards to double-check that.
Mike@Atlassian really likes the browser. An acquihire and shutdown of Arc would be personally painful, hopefully.
The indication they’ll keep moving Arc power features into Dia.
If they make Dia good enough to make the Arc power users at Atlassian happy, I’m guessing I’ll be happy.
Atlassian products features can be implemented through the skill system, hopefully orthogonally to the core browser design. That’s similar to how Trello power-ups co-exist with basic kanban.
My strong hunch is that Chrome will continue to have the biggest share. Maybe it’ll even increase beyond 70%. The reason being…
Google’s AI vision is pretty good and execution is going great as well.
people are super lazy . Most people I know don’t just switch browsers because they have bookmarks in Chrome and history in Chrome. LOL, which is such a stupid reason as every browser allows importing. Even if other browsers provide more privacy or other features, people are just lazy.
I’d say the future looks brighter for Arc users than it did 6 months ago. It felt like one of those start ups whose aim was to get bought out in the first place, and when that didn’t happen, they changed focus to something else, with the aim of attracting buyers again. Now the buyout has happened, I’d say there’s a better chance that development will start again.
I continue to make good use of Arc as a secondary browser (Safari is my primary browser). I’ve looked at quite a few other options (including Zen), and keep coming back to Arc.
On a side note, I use Anybox to house my extensive library of bookmarks and Velja to direct traffic to the appropriate browser (e.g. admin for websites is automatically directed to Arc). The combination of Anybox + Velja makes it very easy to switch web browsers.
. Most people I know don’t just switch browsers because they have bookmarks in Chrome and history in Chrome. LOL, which is such a stupid reason as every browser allows importing. Even if other browsers provide more privacy or other features, people are just lazy.