Today Josh Miller, CEO of The Browser Company of New York (BCNY), a startup known for building the browser Arc, which has built up quite the cult following announced today that they're recruiting for new people to build their next idea: Dia.

Now, I'm not just going to take their word for it, I've been pretty openly skeptical about this new direction for BCNY on this blog already, but I think there's something here that I'm interested to see come to fruition.

What the Hell is Dia?

So Dia is really just a series of tech demos from BCNY but they're meant to show a new direction for the web browser—one with AI built into the core, as opposed to being something that works on top of or alongside the browser. What this should enable is an Apple Intelligence kind of personal context to the web, not just to your Apple devices, which sounds interesting.

What Will It Do?

We don't know yet, and I don't think they know yet either. This is in the earliest of early stages, it's not even in a real functional prototype stage. Right now they've got a series of tech demos that they strung together for the video, which was positioned as a recruiting video. They're not trying to sell you on this product, they're trying to sell people who will come build it on the concept and, conceptually, I'm interested to see what they come up with. And if I'm being honest, if I weren't just starting a new job (and my first full time job at that) I would actually consider interviewing, but I'll get more into my thoughts later.

How Would All of This Work?

Again, there's not much to go off here, but BCNY talked about how they've built particular tooling on top of Chromium they call the "Arc Development Kit" or "ADK", which allows them to prototype features really quickly. The Chromium project can be rather difficult to iterate on quickly, so this tooling allegedly helps them do that faster, they didn't really go into much more detail about that.

Now, on top of the ADK, they've added a few different tools that allow them to tap into things like personal context and even manipulate the screen for you. These are largely features that exist in disparate products, but they're attempting to combine them into a browser that's built from the ground up around this set of tools. Again, if this all sounds rather abstract, that's because it is. This is nothing but an idea.

The interesting thing here is that they plan to have all of this personal context stuff run locally, so your data stays on your devices. This isn't the direction I thought they would go in, as it would definitely be easier to hoard all of your data on their servers, but I think it's good that they're trying to run this all locally. That ultimately means that it will run faster, cheaper, and safer.

My Thoughts

As a Product

First and foremost, I think it's interesting. I can kind of see why they're trying to make this a separate product, but I'm not entirely sold on the fact that it has to be that way. Ideally these features would just become a part of Arc, but that's not what they're planning to do. I don't know enough about how they built Arc to be able to say whether or not this is just easier to do this way, so I'll just take their word for it.

Skepticism

While I'm interested in this project, I'm not going to say I'm entirely sold on it. I've been using Arc since it was just a macOS beta, I saw the mobile companion come out, I saw Arc Search come to fruition, and I watched as they built the tooling to make Arc on Windows a real thing. I've seen that product grow and I think it's got a lot of good ideas, it's a very different kind of browser already and I have yet to see another browser really catch the spirit of it. I've used Zen, which is probably the closest you're going to get and I really like that browser too, it's just not as polished as Arc is in my opinion. There's a big element of that being the Firefox add-ons that I use aren't as polished as the Chrome extensions, but that's not the whole story.

This is all to say that I really believe in the product they've built so far. Earlier they said that they're not building Arc 2.0, which has caused a lot of people to worry about the future of Arc. I would like to live in a world where BCNY maintains both Arc and Dia, but I don't really see that being the future path for the company, I don't think a startup like this really has the capacity to maintain two separate browsers.

Closing Thoughts

Ultimately I'm coming into this with the same skepticism that I did Threads: I will hear you out. I didn't come into Threads with any assumptions, I just wanted to evaluate the product for what it was. Sure, that ultimately ended in disappointment and Instagram hasn't done a whole lot to ameliorate it, but we'll see how this one goes. For now, I'm not coming into Dia with any assumptions. Will I miss Arc? We'll see. This is definitely a better concept than they had in their last update, and I'm interested to see where it goes, but for now we can't really make any assumptions about how it's going to go. All we can really do is wait and see. What do you think about this video? Let me know down below, on Mastodon, Bluesky, or on Threads. Hell, if you're so inclined you can even email me.