The Browser Company Keeps Proving Me Wrong — And I Love It

I can’t seem to stop talking about this company. It’s a sickness that I’m rather fond of because the team keeps impressing me in a way that’s genuinely exciting to me as a product person and as a developer.

I’m not one to just blindly love every single thing a company does, and that’s especially the case of The Browser Company. In fact, I think I’ve been louder about the things about Arc and Dia that I didn’t like than the parts that I do like, but that’s really because I want the company to do well.

At first I didn’t like Arc, I thought it was too much and not solving a problem that I had. Turns out I was just a little behind the curve in the productivity tools that I was using. As more and more of what I was doing was ending up in the browser, suddenly Arc became more relevant. As a student, the combination of Arc and Notion was incredibly powerful and I regret the moments I wasn’t using it.

Then Dia came around and I was disappointed that something I had finally started to enjoy was going to be left to languish. This was wrong too. While Arc hasn’t had a ton of new features in this time, iCloud Passkey and Apple Pay support (which also came to Dia) are huge for me since all of my passkeys are in iCloud and that was such a big source of friction with using non-Safari browsers.

Then The Browser Company got acquired and I said that it was going to likely be the end for them, but they’ve picked up some velocity recently and it’s starting to show. Dia is great now and I’ve completely replaced Arc on my Mac with Dia and I don’t miss Arc here. Dia feels more refined at this point and with the latest addition of pinned tab groups, brings the best of Arc with none of the cruft.

Dia adapts to what you want it to be, whether that’s a traditional browser with your tabs at the top to an insane productivity browser for the tab lovers out there. With the click of a button the tabs are there, then they’re gone, you can trivially swap them between locations to fit whatever mood you’re in. It feels cohesive in a way that’s genuinely refreshing and I can’t wait for it to come to more platforms throughout the year.

There are still some things that I would like to see from The Browser Company, though and I think it’s something they can accomplish.

First, I would love for a more comprehensive AI product. Dia as an AI product feels largely behind the likes of ChatGPT and its browser harness of Atlas. More integrations, more search modes with the model, a companion on your phone, these are all things that I would like to see.

Another addition to the AI product I’d like to see are more cues taken from Browse For Me from Arc Search. When this originally came out, I wasn’t a huge fan and I barely used it, but over the past few months I find myself using it all the time. It feels like the best AI search product out there right now and it’s not even close. The way it brings in sources and links out to other sites generally makes it feel like it’s doing the work, not just making everything up or just giving you an answer.

Importantly, this is the thing that would get me onto the Dia Pro subscription without any hesitation. Right now I’m still using ChatGPT for a lot of my AI use because it’s generally a more comprehensive product available in more places. If Dia were to step up its AI game to compete on that level from a product standpoint, I’d ditch that subscription and be all in on Dia Pro with no hesitation (even at $40–50/month…but don’t tell Josh I said that).

The last thing I would like to see from The Browser Company is just to build louder and with more velocity. There’s an element of them fighting an uphill battle, there was a lot of bad blood with the world with the miscommunication and mishandling of the Arc transition, but they’ve come out of it strong and they need people to see what they’re doing (because a lot of it is much nicer than what even the biggest names in the AI space are doing).

Dia is a great product and what I believe to be the best browser out there right now. But I think that there’s more The Browser Company can be doing to really take it over the top and I can’t wait to see what they do this year and into the future.