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.
If going from a product with miniscule market share and no revenue to a $610M exit is a tragic unforced downfall, I really need to start failing more.
Failing upwards in a nutshell
> Nobody wants to use an Atlassian browser.
False.
On my work machine, I would grasp at any straw that promised to make JIRA less annoying.
Based on my usage of Jira over the years, I believe all the annoying parts of Jira come from _within_ the walls of Atlassian HQ...
This. They consistently ignore user feedback on problems with their ui. It’s really a mess and slow as hell.
Or they could take that money and actually improve the UX instead of needing an AI to navigate it?
They used to have an iPad app that made it actually tolerable. Then killed it.
RIP ipad app. You are missed.
Did any Atlassian product ever make JIRA less annoying ?
My impression was JiRA is the planet and everything else are satellites turning around. They come and go but never touch JIRA.
yeah, lots of them. Every day. All the time. But you’d have to learn to understand that most of the problem you have with Jira has nothing to do with the tool and everything to do with how it’s been implemented.
I beg to differ. Jira can be used in a sensible way, but that absolutely not how the tool is pitched nor how it guides user and companies. I'd compare it to giving users a 30 tools swiss army knife when all they should be using is the + driver and the scissors.
The issue being that teams that have that maturity don't need to kitchen sink in the first place and will be combining their own selected tools. That's how so many teams can get by with Notion and Gitlab only.
I spent more than a decade in JIRA and the Atlassian suite and can't think of any synergy that I miss TBH. Confluence in particular was fine for the time but does it stand the current competition ?
Somehow all the implementations are equally lacklustre though? What is the common denominator.
I hate Jira like all good people, though in fairness I haven't really found a replacement for it that I actually liked.
The closest I've used was Pivotal Tracker, which I believe is dead now, but I still remember finding stuff annoying about it (though drawing a blank on those facts right now). I wonder if dedicated ticket management stuff at scale is just inherently going to be annoying.
I use Obsidian with the Tasks plugin as a Jira-lite, and for whatever reason it doesn't bother me. I think it's because I can tune it however I want without a bunch of menus and write my own arbitrary queries, but I also think part of the appeal is that the tasks can be part of my notes, instead of a separate application (which is why I couldn't stick with OmniFocus).
We had Gitlab issues for 7 years at work. It was a clear and reponsive UI, simple but powerful markdown editing. Probably only 20% of the functionality what you can theoretically do with Jira, but just more pleasant to use and we got everything done. Over the years Gitlab kept adding more features and response times slightly decreased, but still nothing compared to Jira. After changing jobs I have to use Jira and hate it every day.
Out of interest, what issues did you have with Linear?
I don’t think I’ve used Linear, I hadn’t heard of it until just now.
I switched to it for projects in my consulting side gigs, and it’s quite low friction, but I don’t see it gaining the same traction in enterprise as JIRA until they add the ability for big companies to completely fuck up and over-complicate issue workflows and add 100+ custom fields and turn Linear into the system that gates velocity.
Hammer meet everything is a nail
> Nobody wants to use Atlassian browser.
I don't want to use Jira either but yet I can't run away from it
> having managed to get their swift-centric development working on _Windows_. That's a huge and difficult undertaking!
im not a swift expert, but building your project for one of the officially supported targets shouldn't be considered a "phenomenal" achievent? lol
Considering TBC hired the one guy doing anything with Swift on Windows and paid for much of the work needed to make Windows an officially supported platform, it was still an achievement. I'm not even sure I'd call Windows officially supported since most of the support comes from TBC and not Apple or official Swift channels.
sounds like they made a stupid decision and had to pay for it w/ technical overhead?
chrome already has ui rendering set up on windows, all they had to was not reinvent the wheel and just make tweaks to the ui and some server side magick on their end, but that would reveal the fact that they're an half a billion dollar 100 person chrome fork for nerds with no way to generate profit lol
The achievement wasn't building Swift code on Windows, it was using Swift to build a native Windows application utilising Windows API's.
https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-everywhere-windows-interop/
I recall something about them trying to get SwiftUI working on Windows, which would've been a pretty big thing indeed. No idea if they ever did or how exactly they built the Windows UI in the end.
Ah, fair enough. Showing my ignorance on that one. I know little about their tech stack and was under the impression they had some secret sauce.
You're not ignorant, the other person was.
i mean they did have some really cool designs, but technically they just had relatively advanced chrome fork...