Arc and Dia
The Browser Company has said repeatedly that it’s not getting rid of the Arc browser as it moves onto its new AI-centric Dia browser. But what the company also not going to do is develop new features for it.
Back in 2019, it was already clear to us that everything was moving into the browser. My wife, who doesn’t work in tech, was living in desktop Chrome all day. My six year old niece was doing school entirely in web apps. The macro trends all pointed the same direction too: cloud revenue was surging, breakout startups were browser-based (writing blog posts like “Meet us in the browser”), crypto ran through browser extensions, WebAssembly was enabling novel experiences, and so on.
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After a couple of years of building and shipping Arc, we started running into something we called the “novelty tax” problem. A lot of people loved Arc — if you’re here you might just be one of them — and we’d benefitted from consistent, organic growth since basically Day One. But for most people, Arc was simply too different, with too many new things to learn, for too little reward.
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So when people ask how venture capital influenced us — or why we didn’t just charge for Arc and run a profitable business — I get it. They’re fair questions. But to me, they miss the forest for the trees. If the goal was to build a small, profitable company with a great team and loyal customers, we wouldn’t have chosen to try and build the successor to the web browser – the most ubiquitous piece of software there is. The point of this was always bigger for us: to build good, cared for software that could have an impact for people at real scale.
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Early on, Scott Forstall told us Arc felt like a saxophone — powerful but hard to learn. Then he challenged us: make it a piano. Something anyone can sit down at and play. This is now the idea behind Dia: hide complexity behind familiar interfaces.
If this sounds familiar it’s because Miller did a similar post – a video, actually – seven months ago. While they weren’t quite ready to talk about the direction of Dia yet, it was pretty clear what it was going to be. And it was also pretty obvious what the ultimate outcome would be, even if Miller didn’t want to admit it at the time: the end of Arc.
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If there’s a problem with Miller’s post today, it’s that he’s still equivocating. He won’t just outright kill Arc even though that’s what they clearly want to do. So instead, he’s trying to crowdsource ideas for how best to keep it going, just not under the management of The Browser Company.
ARC is a harsh reminder not to get excited about VC-funded products, however nice they may be.
The free money fountain dries up eventually, and sooner or later they’ll either enshittify or pull the plug.
Like the old “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me” adage, how do you commit to a new browser from the same people who just pulled the rug out from under you on their last one?
We use a modified version of MVVM that retains many ideas from unidirectional data flow architectures, but avoids state diffing for performance reasons.
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This new architecture is optimized for cross-platform code sharing, making it easier to port Dia to Windows.
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On Mac, we now use AppKit exclusively. We found that any use of SwiftUI (on Mac specifically) consistently regressed performance.
Same with UIKit and SwiftUI on iOS.
🤏 this close to rewrite this beautiful view from SwiftUI to AppKit, just because the SwiftUI focus system continues to be utterly broken
tfw you find out that the start menu in windows 11 is literally a react native application that causes a spike in cpu usage every time you press the start button
Previously:
Update (2025-06-03): See also: TidBITS-Talk.
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"how do you commit to a new browser from the same people who just pulled the rug out from under you on their last one?"
Realistically, browser switching costs are so low that if Dia is good, people will use it. Drop in floccus and you're good to go.
Meanwhile, the people who loved Arc can move to Zen, which is already way better than Arc ever was.
Every dev going hard with SwiftUI eventually drops it due to bugs or performance. Everyone who cheerleads it hasn't tried pushing it.
React model in-general is too much voodoo and riddled with performance issues.
ObjC GC lasted 2 years before it was canceled. It was the right move. It sucked.
SwiftUI is going on 6 years of suck. It persists purely on Swiftluencer SEO spam and the ego of Josh Shaffer.
SwiftUI is not the future. Get on board or get left behind.
Devs really need to stop kissing ass and start telling Apple the truth. Eventually management will turn over and an adult in the room is going to walk in and say enough. How many more fucking years we gonna give Schaef? Way worse than the apple maps debacle they are POLLUTING all Apple platforms with this shit….it’s getting very very bad!
Whenever I see a person talking about how Browser apps are everything, and how Browsers are the best place for everything, be it Milller or Doctorow, all I can see is a person who thinks their narrow set of text based tasks in a single window is the sum total of computing, as I sprawl my photo editor over three displays, with more visible controls and settings I can scan at a glance than an airliner's flight deck.
The biggest problem with software now, is it's being directed by technology people who have an inherent belief that their particular knowledge is the only valid knowledge. They don't know about anything else, and so they assume there is nothing else to know, and recreate the wheel they way they think it should be made, while never learning how it was made in the past, because they don't respect anyone else's knowledge or experience.
This is how to get cars from Tesla that empty water off the boot lit into the boot, because they assume all other car makers are dinosaurs, and have no institutional knowledge as an industry worth knowing.
The reason the Mac was revolutionary, was that most everyone involved in it was a software person *second*. They were all skilled practitioners in other, often manual arts fields before they got into software.
Now, it's all recursive, software is becoming inbred as it only looks to itself for ideas and practices.
"The point of this was always bigger for us: to build good, cared for software that could have an impact for people at real scale."
Cared for software, until we stop caring for it and care for other software.
And yes software is getting incredibly inbred. An entire generation of programmers who clearly never used Windows re-wrote the Start Menu and Taskbar and absolutely ruined them. The entire purpose of the re-write was to get dynamic ads into the start menu, functionality be damned.
If I thought it were still possible to find a career where I could just forget computers exist, I would. But they've polluted everything. At least by being in the tech sector we can be crew rather than passengers on this doomed ship.
The only reason I use (and still use) Arc is because it's been the most palatable Chrome browser I have found. I actually, honestly, use Safari for most everything other than web development.
Just watched A Better Computers rundown of where Dia is at the moment. They better have some stellar ideas they're holding back because that was very underwhelming PLUS it could just have been a feature in Arc.
