Why Dia Isn't the Desirable Arc Successor

After Arc slowly went into maintenance mode, many people were curious to see what The Browser Company would do next. People were hoping for the next great browser, Dia, but instead, what they got was much less exciting.

 

What is Dia?

Dia is a brand new browser based on Chromium, from the same people who built Arc, and it's supposed to be the next big thing in the browser world. But instead of focusing on productivity and elegant design like Arc did, Dia is diving headfirst into the AI craze . This time, The Browser Company wants its browser to be less about organization and more about conversation.

The main selling point of Dia is the way you interact with the browser. No matter what you're looking at, Dia tries to understand the context and lets you ask it questions through the AI sidebar. It uses a large language model (LLM) to answer questions about the current tab — or even multiple tabs at once. You can also upload documents from your computer, which Dia can use to add context to your responses or help you generate new content based on what you're doing.

 

There's also a feature called Skills, which are essentially community-created suggestions you can add to Dia to customize what LLM can do. If you're curious, check out Dia's Skills page for some examples.

It can also detect when you are performing a search, then determine whether your query would be better answered by a traditional search engine or an AI assistant. You will see results from Google or LLM respectively.

There are also ways to tweak the AI's personality: You can tell Dia how you want it to write for you, or what tone and formatting you prefer. If you're writing code in the browser sidebar (for whatever reason), you can set preferences for that, too.

You can feel it - this is a browser built entirely on Generative AI . And that's exactly where things start to fall apart, because other than the AI, there's nothing else that stands out.

Dia offers nothing superior to Arc

For those who have been using Arc since day one and loved it from the start, Dia is disappointing. It completely lacks the magic that made people stick with Arc. It's stripped of almost everything that made Arc the perfect browser. There are so many features of Arc that other browsers should emulate, but Dia doesn't have them.

The biggest downside is the sidebar, because the Arc sidebar is clearly its best feature. You can pin tabs, create folders, organize things neatly, and switch between spaces and profiles with ease. It's the smartest, slickest version of a vertical tab system you've ever used. But Dia has stripped it all away.

Yes, Dia technically has a sidebar if you like vertical tabs, but it's just a list of open tabs. It's not like Arc's thoughtful and flexible layout; it's not unlike Safari , either .

 

And that's just the beginning. Little Arc, the little window that opens when you click links from other apps, is gone. The way Arc let you search without losing your current tab is gone. All the nice, subtle touches that made browsing the web better are gone.

In return, you get Dia's AI suite. But all of these features can be built into Arc. There's no need to build a whole new browser just to introduce them.

The most confusing thing is that Arc already has some great AI features! It automatically organizes your tabs into categories, suggests cleaning actions, and does all sorts of other useful tasks.

But somehow none of that carries over to the new 'AI-first' browser. They've stripped out the AI tools that are actually useful and replaced them with… an LLM wrapper? Generative AI ruined social media , and now it's here to make the entire internet worse.

Many people would rather use Safari (or any other browser)

Unfortunately, as much as I would love to continue using Arc, it just doesn't make sense anymore. It only gets basic maintenance and Chromium updates. It has gotten significantly slower over time. People are having performance issues, so it's time to move on.

But that other thing certainly wouldn't be Dia. Overall, it doesn't offer much in the way of performance. While it's a bit better than Arc, it still lags behind other browsers like Safari or even Google Chrome , which are notorious for being memory hogs.

 

Dia's entire concept and direction seems shaky. The Browser Company is moving away from the productivity browser segment and trying to compete directly with tech giants like Microsoft and Google. That's a tough move. Microsoft has announced Copilot Mode in Edge, which essentially achieves what Dia is aiming for. It wouldn't be surprising if Chrome added a similar feature with Gemini .

The heavy focus on LLMs also raises another concern. These models are expensive to operate, so it wouldn't be surprising if Dia locked down features after signing up.

On top of that, people don't trust The Browser Company anymore. Even if Dia is the perfect browser, it's unlikely the team will stick with it for long. They could just as easily abandon it like Arc as soon as the next tech trend comes along.

If you're in the same boat, you should check out Zen as it's probably the closest alternative to Arc right now, but many people haven't fully switched to it yet as streaming DRM-protected content doesn't always work.

Needless to say, people were pretty disappointed, and it was time to start looking for a new browser. For now, many people plan to stick with Safari, but it still feels inferior to what Arc once offered.