Arc Browser Development Halted as The Browser Company Shifts Focus to AI-Powered Dia

The Browser Company explains why it stopped developing Arc

The Arc browser was a big rethink of what browsers should be like, and it has dedicated users, including yours truly. But a lot of the reasons for ceasing Arc's development that Miller gives in the blog -- like that it's too complicated to go mainstream, that it was slow and unstable at times (true!), or that The Browser Company wants to recenter the experience on AI -- he also gave back in October. Why not just roll Dia into Arc? One big thing Miller mentions is security. Arc has had at least one big security issue: a security researcher discovered a vulnerability last year that The Browser Company quickly patched, but which let attackers insert arbitrary code into a users' browser session just by knowing their user ID. According to Miller, The Browser Company has now grown its security engineering team from one person to five. This focus is particularly important, he writes, as AI agents -- AI systems that carry out tasks autonomously -- become more prevalent.

Arc reinvented browsing for the better - and that was apparently the problem

The Browser Company has announced that Arc browser is going the way of the dodo and in its place will be a new AI-centric browser called Dia. Arc browser was first released in April 2022 and was seen as a breath of fresh air by many. The UI was unlike anything we'd ever used, tab management was a standout feature, and it developed a very passionate following. Essentially, the Browser Company created a web browser that was as beautiful as it was functional. Also: 5 ways Arc browser makes browsing the web fun again Unfortunately, even though Arc was a triumph of design, the Browser Company is switching gears, in favor of a new AI-centric browser that will not be as "different" or "complex" as Arc. The Browser Company believes it got several things wrong with Arc. The big issue was that the company knew the data pointed to Arc not gaining traction, but didn't act on it. Second, the company stated that it should have embraced AI much sooner. The Browser Company was founded on the simple idea that the browser is the most important software in our lives and it wasn't getting the appropriate attention. That's why it created such a unique web browser that offered a different kind of workflow (which was very effective) and even placed a premium on the aesthetic. Arc was beautiful and filled with all sorts of amazing features. Also: 6 obscure browsers that are better than Chrome But according to a letter to Arc users, the company had a big problem: After a couple of years of building and shipping Arc, we started running into something we called the 'novelty tax' problem. A lot of people loved Arc -- if you're here, you might just be one of them -- and we'd benefited from consistent, organic growth since basically Day One. But for most people, Arc was simply too different, with too many new things to learn, for too little reward. It wasn't until 2023 that it started seeing ChatGPT and Perplexity threatening Google. According to the announcement, that was the fundamental shift that could challenge user behavior. To that end, Dia seemed like the perfect next step. You're probably wondering: Could The Browser Company have integrated Arc into Dia? The company is hoping that, with Dia, it can fix what it got wrong with Arc. Instead of novelty, the intention is to go with simplicity, and speed has become a foundation instead of a tradeoff. Both of these points mean Arc is out of the picture. Also: Should you ever pay for Linux? 5 times I would - and why The uniqueness of Arc is why I used it from the beginning. From the perspective of someone who really liked Arc, I fear Dia will wind up just another clone of Chromium with some extra AI baked in. I hope I'm wrong. The Browser Company is no longer actively developing Arc. What should it do with this wonderful browser? I was hoping it would open-source Arc so others can pick up the mantle and continue building on it. Unfortunately, Arc isn't just a simple Chromium fork, as it uses a custom infrastructure called ADK (Arc Development Kit), which is the Browser Company's "secret sauce." ADK also happens to be the foundation of Dia, so there's no way the company will open-source the browser. The Browser Company does hope that Arc finds a future, and to that end it'd love to hear from users. You can email CEO Josh Miller to give him your feedback on what the company should do with Arc. If you enjoyed the browser as much as I did, I'm sure you have ideas. Get the morning's top stories in your inbox each day with our Tech Today newsletter.

Arc frozen as The Browser Company pivots to AI-powered Dia

No more features for the design darling - now it's all about chatting with your tabs like they're sentient AI is rapidly reshaping how we use the web, or so The Browser Company founder Josh Miller argues. That belief helped drive his team's decision to stop building new features for its Arc browser and shift focus to an "AI browser" dubbed Dia. For the unfamiliar, Arc is a design-heavy, Chromium-based browser that tried to rethink tabs, spaces, and how users interact with the web, but it never quite hit the mainstream. Sorry, Arc fans: the project is now effectively in maintenance mode with no new features planned. It won't be getting anything outside of Chromium engine upgrades, security fixes, and other as-needed patches. Instead, the company is going all-in on AI, Miller wrote in a Substack post yesterday - the outfit's first public update in nearly two years. "Five years from now, the most-used AI interfaces on desktop will replace the default browsers of yesteryear," Miller predicted. That's not to say web pages are vanishing, just that we'll increasingly access them through AI-driven interfaces that blend traditional browsing with natural language prompts, designed to "abstract away the tedium of old computing paradigms." Enter Dia. In place of Arc, The Browser Company is now focused on this so-called "AI browser" designed as a context-aware hybrid of chatbot and web browser. Rather than layering new features onto aging browser architecture, Dia aims to usher in a new era where web content "become[s] tool calls with AI chat interfaces." The biz first teased Dia in early 2024 as an AI-powered prototype, then announced plans to build the product earlier this year. While it remains closed to the public, with mostly college students doing early-stage alpha testing, The Browser Company has previewed several intended capabilities. Early demos and release notes show Dia breaking down video lectures into key moments, generating paper titles and outlines from web content, and creating quizzes on the fly, all part of its push to turn browsing into an AI-powered conversation. If you're hoping to try Dia out for yourself, tough luck - unless you have a .edu email address. Students are still able to register for the earliest phase of access, with everyone else being told to just register their interest and hope the app leaves alpha testing soon. We reached out to Miller and The Browser Company to learn more about Dia's future, but didn't hear back. When Arc gained traction in 2023, we speculated that it might eventually go open source - after all, it's built on Chromium, the open-source version of the engine powering Google's Chrome. But according to The Browser Company, that's not happening anytime soon. "Arc isn't just a Chromium fork," Miller pointed out. "It runs on custom infrastructure we call ADK -- the Arc Development Kit." Dia was also built using ADK, so sorry - no open source Arc implementations for you. Miller said that Arc may someday go open source - just that doing so would have to happen at a point when open-sourcing ADK along with it wouldn't put the company or its investors at risk. The Browser Company has also considered selling Arc to allow development to continue, it said. "Our hope and intention is that Arc finds a future that's just as considered as its past," Miller said while soliciting any ideas users might have with an invitation to send him an email. For now, however, it's probably time to wave goodbye to Arc, which Miller admitted "fell short" of The Browser Company's dream to build a new widely-used Chrome alternative. It is not just because features went underused, but because the browser's complexity, novelty, and incremental approach made it a tough sell for the mainstream. And the future of web browsing, at least according to The Browser Company, is increasingly tied to AI, whether you like it or not. "Electric intelligence is here -- and it would be naive of us to pretend it doesn't fundamentally change the kind of product we need to build to meet the moment," Miller said of the company's shift. ®

Arc enters maintenance mode as The Browser Company shifts focus to new browser

As mentioned earlier, the company has pivoted to a new product. True to the company name, this new product is also a browser, and its name is Dia. What separates Dia from Arc is that this browser is centered around AI. Miller explains that his company sees Dia "as an opportunity to fix what we got wrong with Arc." Dia is currently being tested in alpha, but the company plans to open up access to Arc members at a later date. Miller also touches a little on Arc's future. Apparently, the company considered selling the software or going open source. Although going open source would likely make a lot of users happy, it would be a difficult decision for The Browser Company. The reason is that Arc is built on top of an internal SDK that Dia also relies on, so going open source with Arc would also mean going open source with Dia. While the company decided against these options for now, it hasn't ruled out these possibilities in the future.

The beloved Arc browser is in stasis, cast aside for an AI future

Don't expect too much from the Arc browser in the future. The browser's developer admitted over the weekend that while Arc is being maintained, new features are no longer in active development. The explanation, however, is convoluted. In a blog post, the company explained that while they concluded that the Arc browser was "incremental," its novel features weren't being used, either. For example, just under 6 percent of users took advantage of what Arc called a "space," or workspace. "After a couple of years of building and shipping Arc, we started running into something we called the 'novelty tax' problem," the company wrote. "A lot of people loved Arc -- if you're here you might just be one of them -- and we'd benefitted from consistent, organic growth since basically Day One. But for most people, Arc was simply too different, with too many new things to learn, for too little reward." For now, Arc seems to be in limbo. Because Arc runs on a custom infrastructure knows as the Arc Development Kit, it's "too complex to break from Chrome," the company wrote, and it's the company's "secret sauce." Instead, the company has shifted work to Dia, which the company says will be an "AI-first" browser. That browser is currently in alpha testing. The problem, the company says, is that ADK is split between the two browsers, preventing the company from moving forward with Arc. "So while we'd love to open-source Arc someday, we can't do that meaningfully without also open-sourcing ADK. And ADK is still core to our company's value. That doesn't mean it'll never happen. If the day comes where it no longer puts our team or shareholders at risk, we'd be excited to share what we've built with the world. But we're not there yet." The Browser Company of New York said it still believes that the world will move on from the current browsers like Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome, and that traditional web pages won't be its foundation. "Imagine writing an essay justifying why you were moving on from your candle business at the dawn of electric light," the company said. "Electric intelligence is here -- and it would be naive of us to pretend it doesn't fundamentally change the kind of product we need to build to meet the moment." It's certainly possible that the (sigh) The Browser Company of New York will end up being correct, perhaps even ahead of its time. But the metaphors being used here, which carried over into the Arc browser's visual aesthetic, were too twee for me. Perhaps Dia will offer a helping hand to those of us who are still stuck in the past. Perhaps not. There's certainly room for a product that simply wants to break with history and embrace an AI-powered future. Doing so, though, limits your market appeal and also locks you into a younger aesthetic that, incidentally, seems to be aggressively rejecting the use of AI. I'm happy to admit that I don't quite understand what the company is going for. Maybe Dia will make it all clear, someday.