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.
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:
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