Hacker News Reader

> 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.

I'm sorry, but this is the exact same insight that MSN Explorer had. And everyone in retrospect sees that as an absolute spamfest. Ironically, in a very similar way as AI features are seen today.

View on HN

Similarly, isn't this the insight that led to both ChromeOS and FirefoxOS?

How many actual regular every day people are using either? ChromeOS's big market is "tired and underfunded K-12 IT/Library/HVAC admin who just doesn't give a fuck give the kids a chromebook so I can go do something else", it's not exactly making waves among the general populace.

In my experience, very few. FirefoxOS failed hard, and anyone who uses ChromeOS quickly becomes acquainted with the limitations of the approach.

I mainly brought them up in a "we've tried this before" sense.

> I'm sorry, but this is the exact same insight that MSN Explorer had

The internet wasn't fast enough. There are a number of dot-com era ideas that were before their time for various reasons. There's also Wordle. That game could have been made (and I think variants were) for at least a 20-year window, but it caught on late in the pandemic when our streaming queues were exhausted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com