{"id":47898,"date":"2025-05-30T15:53:12","date_gmt":"2025-05-30T19:53:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=47898"},"modified":"2026-01-01T20:38:35","modified_gmt":"2026-01-02T01:38:35","slug":"arc-and-dia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/30\/arc-and-dia\/","title":{"rendered":"Arc and Dia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wes Davis<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. But what the company also not going to do is develop new features for it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Josh Miller<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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<\/a>”), crypto ran through browser extensions, WebAssembly was enabling novel experiences, and so on.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

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.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

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.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

M.G. Siegler<\/a>:<\/p>\n

If this sounds familiar it’s because Miller did a similar post – a video, actually<\/a> – seven months ago<\/em>. While they weren’t quite ready to talk about<\/a> 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.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Nick Lockwood<\/a>:<\/p>\n

ARC is a harsh reminder not to get excited about VC-funded products, however nice they may be.<\/p>

The free money fountain dries up eventually, and sooner or later they’ll either enshittify or pull the plug.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

John Gruber<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

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?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Josh Miller<\/a>:<\/p>\n

We use a modified version of MVVM that retains many ideas from unidirectional data flow architectures, but avoids state diffing for performance reasons.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

This new architecture is optimized for cross-platform code sharing, making it easier to port Dia to Windows.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

On Mac, we now use AppKit exclusively. We found that any use of SwiftUI (on Mac specifically) consistently regressed performance.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Kyle Howells<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Same with UIKit and SwiftUI on iOS.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Marcin Krzyzanowski<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

🤏 this close to rewrite this beautiful view from SwiftUI to AppKit, just because the SwiftUI focus system continues to be utterly broken<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

alex fazio<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

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<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n