Arc put on ice as The Browser Company bets big on 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. 

What will happen to Arc?

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. ®