"Arc isn’t just a Chromium fork. It runs on custom infrastructure we call ADK — the Arc Development Kit. Think of it as an internal SDK for building browsers (especially those with imaginative interfaces). That’s our secret sauce. It lets ex-iOS engineers prototype native browser UI quickly, without touching C++."
https://open.substack.com/pub/browsercompany/p/letter-to-arc...
A UI framework? What’s the other $608m for?
Yeah, I kinda read that as "it's not just a chromium fork with additional code. the code is organized. nobody has ever done that before!"
Or... A UI framework? what's the other $612m for?
Just like the old Carlin joke. Made me chuckle.
I wanted you to know that, due to this comment, I "lost" approximately 45 minutes watching George Carlin's best jokes
What was the joke?
Is a browser SDK for iOS worth that kind of money targeted users who are comfortable with Objective-C and not C++ even a market of note.
It would be one thing if they said it is for say JS developers or something a-la electron there are plenty of apps from MS teams to slack to linear etc who perhaps would pay for that enough, but swift /objective C dev not comfortable with c++ would be minuscule market ?
ObjC is mostly dead, and most Swift devs are not comfortable with C++.
C++ isn't all that much harder or different from Swift to learn. They play fairly well with each other, you can import and call C++ quite easily from Swift.
It is not like switching from a REPL, browser friendly,inferred typed forgiving language like say JavaScript to Rust with the occasionally cryptic compiler, the unforgiving borrow checker and ownership concepts.
Perhaps people are less comfortable with the libraries and SDKs and tooling from the C++ world for app development. I didn't imagine that such a market was worth buying a company for $610M in 2025 when most apps are web based in one way or other.
Sounds perfect for Atlassian's love of "imaginative" interfaces.
For all those playing at home: this blog post contains 46 em-dashes.
that's kinda funny since that's basically exactly how firefox does it with the chrome of the browser being javascript and html and css itself.
How's that different from Electron?
Probably a Swift wrapper for the Chromium Embedded Framework.
Cool, but $600m cool? I don't see how.