It Looks Like Atlassian is Going to Ruin Dia for Everyone ⭐

Well, I’ve got some bad news. Atlassian’s acquisition of The Browser Company is almost certainly going to ruin everything special about Dia, the innovative AI-powered web browser. So if you had your hopes set on using that product, as I did, it’s time to start reevaluating your options.

Last week, Atlassian announced that it was acquiring New York tech startup The Browser Company for $610 million in cash. This is interesting on all kinds of levels, not the least of which being that Perplexity AI also apparently made a bid for the company, too, as it did for Brave (and, hilariously, Google Chrome).

I was cautiously optimistic. But truth be told, Atlassian doesn’t mean much to me, just as companies like Salesforce.com don’t mean much to me. When I Googled this company, I was amused to see that “What does Atlassian do exactly” was the top result under the “People also ask” section in the results. So I guess I’m not alone. But what Atlassian does is uninspiring. It’s a “proprietary software company that specializes in collaboration tools designed primarily for software development and project management,” Google says. It makes products like Jira, which I’ve at least heard of, and Confluence, which I’ve not. And even a cursory look at its webpage is enough to make me close the tab quickly and pretend that never happened. Ugh.

But that’s not the problem.

I mean, Salesforce.com purchased Slack. I couldn’t care less about Salesforce.com if you paid me, but I use Slack every single day. And though I hate it in the same way that I hate anything that interrupts me all day long and then charges me too much money for that honor, I can’t claim that Salesforce has changed Slack in any meaningful way, let alone made it even worse. I assume this his the relationship that many Xbox fans have with Microsoft. Vaguely suspicious of the parent company but so far, so good.

And Atlassian’s announcement post gave me hope. It describes “transforming how work gets done in the AI era,” something that should resonate with me, given my pithy mantra, “Personal technology, with a focus on productivity, mostly Microsoft.” It notes that browsers aren’t built for work, they’re built for browsing, and that “it’s time for a browser that’s actually built for work – a browser that helps you do, not just browse.” (I added that emphasis.) So far, so good.

Granted, the post does mention the term “knowledge worker” several times. And maybe that should have been a red flag. But The Browser Company, the quirkiest of small companies in a market overflowing with quirky companies, was so decidedly focused on advancing the web browser for the AI age, a topic I feel quite strongly about, and one in which we both align. And Dia, like the Arc browser before it, debuted first on the Mac, not on Windows, suggesting a sort of focus on individuals over businesses, with perhaps the smallest imaginable startups in the mix as well. No Fortune 500 company is going to drop Chrome (or Edge) to move to Dia. This thing is about people.

But maybe not anymore. And that is the problem.

Atlassian head of product Sanchan Saxena explained why his company acquired The Browser Company in an interview with Computerworld that was published yesterday. And this interview has destroyed any hope I may have had that Dia could emerge as the AI-powered browser of the future.

Quite specifically, Saxena told the publication that “Arc will continue to exist,” Arc being the web browser that The Browser Company created before moving on to Dia. That sounds like good news, right? I mean, after all, Arc has a small but very dedicated fan base, and while The Browser Company said it would continue to support that browser, it also said that Dia was the focus and that it had no plans to add new features to Arc.

But Saxena said that in response to a question about whether there would be a consumer version of Dia. That was the first thing Saxena said. Not “yes” or “no.” He responded by discussing a product that The Browser Company had essentially given up on.

And then he got more explicit.

“Dia will be the future product we’ll bet on to improve, but for knowledge workers, that’s the priority,” he continued. “For a pure consumer browser — meaning, my mom trying to browse — we’re not going to build that product for her.”

So Dia is not for people anymore. Dia is for businesses. It’s only for businesses.

OK, but that might not be all that bad. Products like Microsoft Office, Google Doc, Notion, and whatever else may primarily target businesses, but they are used by people, individuals, too. And there are free versions of those things. But it’s also possible that Dia will only be a paid product going forward.

“We haven’t decided or announced anything on pricing yet,” Saxena said when asked whether Dia will be a free or paid product. “Dia is in beta format and will go GA very soon.”

Now, The Browser Company did announce a $20-per-month Pro subscription back in August. And I’m not against paying for products and services that I use. In fact, I support that. But web browsers are free. Always. There are paid services that might be used on top of them, like Google Gemini AI Pro, Microsoft 365 Copilot, or whatever. But the apps are free, and there are free tiers for the AI services. Would Atlassian really screw this thing up so badly?

“It’ll be available to users at different pricing,” he continued. “We don’t have further plans to share on how we’re going to monetize or price this.”

“Our vision is that Dia is the best browser for knowledge workers, irrespective of whether they use Atlassian products,” he added. “If you use Figma and Canva, the browser that works deeply well is Dia. If you use Jira, Confluence, Loom, and other Atlassian products, just like Apple’s ecosystem, those parts work better together because they share common infrastructure and AI patterns. The goal is to build the best browser for knowledge workers.”

I do not use those products. I can’t say that I know much or anything about any of them. I can use Google, however, and I can see that there are free tiers for Jira and Confluence, at least, and probably other Atlassian products. So there could be a free Dia browser for those that wish to use it as individuals.

But Atlassian will do what all platform makers do and integrate its offerings deeply into Dia, something that does not interest me in the slightest and may be detrimental to the user experience. It will “bring loved features of Arc into Dia,” which may be good or bad, but I will point out that Arc was too confusing and complex for most people, and that The Browser Company had already announced it would do that.

Worse, Atlassian is trying to “play offense” in this new and ever-shifting world of AI-powered productivity software, but with a decidedly enterprise focus. So for example, when The Browser Company would speak about how the browser never evolved to meet the needs of a world that does most of its work in browsers, I can only agree. But when Atlassian says that “85 percent of the work enterprise employees [do] happens in the browser,” I can only say, and I mean this with all my heart, that I do not give a s#!t. I could not care less what the enterprise does.

And now I have deep worries about Dia and how or whether it will impact the future of web browsers in this AI age.

Here’s the good news.

There will be other options. So far, I’ve looked at Perplexity Comet, Microsoft Edge in Copilot Mode, Dia, Norton Neo, and Google Chrome to evaluate how or whether each moves the needle forward. These things are all a slice in time and each will evolve, or at least change. There are other players coming to market soon, like Opera Neon, and other web browsers like Brave and DuckDuckGo that may or may not rise to the challenge too. There’s at least one browser, Vivaldi, that will purposefully ignore these trends and keep itself rooted in its traditional past.

Of these, Perplexity Comet is by far the most forward-leaning and interesting, at least so far. Dia is—or, maybe, was—promising, but it’s still only available on the Mac right now, limiting its ability to influence the whole world.

And things will change. Perhaps Atlassian will simply make Dia available to everyone, for free, even with some basic AI features. And maybe, just maybe, its enterprise focus won’t completely screw it up for normal people.

Maybe. But I doubt it. And that’s a shame. I cannot for the life of me understand why a quirky web browser startup like The Browser Company chose a stiff, faceless corporation like Atlassian over a similarly minded startup like Perplexity. Or why it didn’t just continue on its previous venture capital-funded path. But it didn’t. And now I find myself a heck of a lot less interested in this company and its browser. I wish that wasn’t the case, as we need more Little Tech and less Big Tech.

That is not what this is.