The Browser Company has stopped active development of the popular Arc web browser, according to a blog post from CEO Josh Miller. There will still be updates to fix security issues and the like, but there will likely be no new features added to the product.
Miller says that “for most people, Arc was simply too different, with too many new things to learn, for too little reward.” He also said that the browser “lacked cohesion, in both its core features and core value.”
Instead, the company has shifted focus to a new product called Dia, which is an AI-powered browser of some kind. Dia was first announced at the tail-end of last year and has been described as “an entirely new environment — built on top of a web browser.”
Demos have shown Dia helping users write the next sentence in a paragraph, all while retrieving facts about a subject from the wider internet. It was also shown automatically grabbing Amazon links to insert in an email from a simple description and completing relatively complex actions based on user prompts. Some of this feels like an extension of what the company has already been doing with the mobile version of the Arc browser.
Dia is currently being tested via an alpha build, but will open up to current Arc members in the near future. Miller says that the company has “approached Dia as an opportunity to fix what we got wrong with Arc.”
The Browser Company has considered selling or open-sourcing Arc, but won’t be doing anything so drastic at this moment. An open-source version of the browser would make a lot of current users happy, but Miller says it’ll be a challenge because it’s built on top of an internal SDK which is also the core component of Dia. Open-sourcing one would basically open-source the other. “That doesn’t mean it’ll never happen,” Miller said.
