After discontinuing Arc, The Browser Company is back with a new take on its vision for the future of web browsing in the AI era. Dia, its new browser, is now available in beta for existing Arc users on macOS. And while it shares a few design cues from its predecessor, Dia is a very different product with a very different goal. Here’s how to test it out.
When it first came out, Arc made a deservedly big fuss with its complete reimagining of browser UX. Then it proved too cumbersome and commercially unviable. Wtih Dia, The Browser Company seems to be taking a more focused swing, delivering a more familiar interface to classic browsers, but powered by deeply integrated AI.
Whether you’re browsing for travel planning, writing, researching, or even shopping, Dia’s promise is to offer a sidebar smart assistant that will understand what you’re looking at, remember your browsing history, and help you get stuff done.
As The Verge’s David Pierce explains it:
When you ask Dia to find you a coat, the assistant might activate a shopping skill, which knows all the stuff you’ve been looking at from Amazon and Anthropologie; when you ask it to draft an email, a writing skill can see both all the emails you’ve written and the authors you love reading.
A chat-and-AI-first browser
At launch, Dia’s core feature is its AI assistant, which you can invoke at any time. It’s not just a chatbot floating on top of your browser, but rather a context-aware assistant that sees your tabs, your open sessions, and your digital patterns. You can use it to summarize web pages, compare info across tabs, draft emails based on your writing style, or even reference past searches.
The Browser Company says it is building a system of “skills” on top of existing models, designed to match each task with the best AI tool and interface.
Top comment by Terry Benedict
Wouldn't trust them after they said the same thing about your data using Arc.. and that was complete nonsense. They're doing just as much data harvesting as ChatGPT is and that isn't a good thing for anyone.
Ask for help finding a new gadget? It’ll route your query to a “shopping skill” that remembers what you were browsing on Amazon. Want to reply to a Slack thread? There’s a writing skill for that, too. Each skill is tailored with custom memory and UI for its purpose.
The Browser Company says it’s approaching this carefully. As Pierce explained in his conversation with Hursh Agrawal, The Browser Company’s CTO:
Agrawal is also careful to note that all your data is stored and encrypted on your computer. “Whenever stuff is sent up to our service for processing,” he says, “it stays up there for milliseconds and then it’s wiped.” Arc has had a few security issues over time, and Agrawal says repeatedly that privacy and security have been core to Dia’s development from the very beginning. Over time, he hopes almost everything in Dia can happen locally.
Beta now, bigger later
Dia is available today as a beta for Arc users on Mac. It doesn’t yet offer all of Arc’s features, like side-tab organization or workspaces, but those may come later. For now, it’s focused on showing how a browser can feel less like software and more like a browsing partner.
Are you excited to try Dia? Let is know in the comments.
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