I tried The Browser Company's new browser
Dia lacks the creativity and vision that defined Arc.
Today’s PHONE TIME includes: Arc users (including me!) have thoughts on The Browser Company’s new product, the Media and Social Change Lab at Teachers College hosted its annual MediaFest earlier this month, and some other internet-related news.
This morning, The Browser Company CEO Josh Miller posted on X that it had “just wrapped testing with thousands of college students” for its new browser product, Dia. In a thread, Miller shared other learnings from building Dia and outlined a general roadmap for its future.
Dia’s selling point is its AI integration. When you click the “+” button, you can either type a question to start a chat or enter a URL as you would in any browser. If you enter a URL, Dia opens a parallel tab where you can ask questions, get summaries, or otherwise engage with the website’s content without having to copy and paste.
Miller noted that Dia is built with context in mind. “Context is what makes AI most useful to us. But it’s cumbersome to get into an app,” he wrote in the thread. “Today, our browsers are our context. Tabs reflect our works, studies, projects, questions we’re asking, docs we’re writing.”
He added that Dia’s most popular feature so far is the ability to chat with tabs. He also described a use case where users can “combine the context from multiple tabs at once,” for example, being able to “write a doc informed by one tab but written in the style of another tab.”
I had planned to write about The Browser Company and Dia this week even before Miller put out this thread, as users of Arc, the company’s first browser product, have been less-than-pleased lately.
To quickly recap: Arc was released to the public for macOS in July 2023, following an invite-only period. Versions for Windows, Android, and iOS followed. I’ve been using it as my main browser since it was in beta, although I occasionally switch into Chrome.
The Browser Company website outlines issues with other browsers. Describing its first product, Arc, the company says it’s “imagining a browser that can think as quickly as we do, take work off our plates, and pull our creativity forward.” Arc’s standout features include the ability to create different workspaces for tabs, a streamlined way to organize downloads and media, and a generally beautiful-looking interface. As someone who takes a lot of screenshots, I’ve found Arc’s organization especially helpful.
In October 2024, The Browser Company posted a YouTube update about a new, then-unnamed product. In the video, Miller explains that the team had been working on a redesigned “Arc 2.0,” but ultimately realized a redesign wasn’t necessary. The company would keep Arc as is and start from a blank page on a new browser product, which would incorporate language models.
In December, the company released another video announcing that second browser, Dia. “AI won’t exist as an app. Or a button. It’ll be an entirely new environment—built on top of a web browser,” Dia’s website states. Dia has since provided early access to college students during alpha testing.
The subreddit r/ArcBrowser gives a good temperature check on how Arc users are feeling about the new browser. “It’s just Google Chrome with a chat button. It’s sleek, but at the end of the day, it challenges less norms than Arc does, with less conviction and intent behind their design choices,” one person wrote. “Arc had a concrete opinionated vision of what a better future could look like, but Dia feels like a safer, less ambitious bet on browser fads and fashion.”
From my own, albeit brief, testing of Dia, I generally agree with other Arc users’ critiques. Gone is everything that made Arc special—spaces, vertical tabs—and instead is a product that, sure, is clean, but lacks the vision and spirit that The Browser Company had with Arc.
Granted, Dia is still in its early stages. Miller stressed in a post today that Dia is unfinished. The Browser Company is “dialing-up the craft details to make you feel something when using Dia. Alpha version we tested was rough by design. Brittle, minimal, and stripped down to prove one thing: utility,” he added. “Now that we’re gearing up to ship for real we’re bringing in Browser Co flair.”
But I’m not sure if the lack of flair is the real problem here. Ultimately, Dia might be a great product for college students cramming for finals: so time-pressed they don’t want to take the extra second to copy and paste into ChatGPT. But Arc set a high bar. It made me think about what it could mean to radically reimagine the browser, something I use every day but had never really questioned. It made me excited about the future of the internet. This doesn’t.
Tech around town
The Media and Social Change Lab (MASCLab) at Teachers College, Columbia University hosted its annual MediaFest on May 2. MediaFest is a “celebration of media-making, multimodal scholarship, and community imagination,” and this year’s theme was “Hope and Sustenance.”
An exhibit called “Digital Ecologies of Hope” gave “a natural history of emerging media futures.” It provided “field notes” on “specimens” including pedagogical debates about AI, participatory learning on the subreddit r/3Dprinting, and meaning-making through YouTube video testimonies.
One station provided disposable cameras and colored gels for participants to photograph MediaFest. “Notice the people, moments, and details that often go unseen—and experiment with color to highlight what matters to you,” the instruction slip read. Another provided magazines, markers, and paper for participants to create gifts for their future selves. They could also record a message using a microphone and headphones.
Elsewhere online
New Computer is building Dots. “With Dot, we built a computer that could truly see you—offering emotionally intelligent connection and companionship. But we realized being seen by a machine wasn’t enough,” reads the Typeform to register interest in the closed beta. “We started wondering: what if the technologies that gave Dot its soul could also help us better see and understand each other? What if we designed a new kind of social layer—from first principles—where our most meaningful ideas and authentic selves could find real belonging?”
"Our company is called New Computer because we believe that computers should feel more aware, more proactive, and more human than their current form," its website describes. “If you’ve talked to me at all in the last year, you’ll know that designing a socially intelligent AI has become an obsession that tugs at the juicy intersections of philosophy, psychology, sociology, identity, love, loneliness, and what it means to be human,” cofounder Jason Yuan wrote on X. “We’ve been building divergently but it's now feeling like a convergence. The implications are massive. And the more we build, the more alive it feels.”
Your guess is as good as mine on what this actually entails. I tried New Computer’s Dot—described as “the AI that grows with you”—when it first came out. I found it fun and more user-friendly than ChatGPT for personalized advice, but nothing game-changing. I think Meta has set a pretty terrible example when it comes to mixing generative AI and social networks, and I’m pretty skeptical of the entire premise.
Tech and culture news aggregator Clone, from Dirt and Boys Club, stands out because of its simplicity. Spencer Chang mentioned Yahoo’s “web surfers” as one reference in designing the site.
“Even Audiobooks Aren't Safe From AI Slop”—Frank Landymore, Futurism.
“Pinterest finally admits mass bans were a mistake caused by an ‘internal error’”—Sarah Perez, TechCrunch. “The company didn’t share more details about what caused the error, though many have wondered if the bans were driven by an overreliance on AI-powered moderation. Reached for comment, Pinterest said the error was not due to AI moderation and that it has now reinstated the accounts that were mistakenly deactivated.”