Browser Company Abandons Arc for AI-Powered Successor (substack.com) 24
The Browser Company has ceased the active development of its Arc browser to focus on Dia, a new AI-powered browser currently in alpha testing, the company said Tuesday. In a lengthy letter to users, CEO Josh Miller said the startup should have stopped working on Arc "a year earlier," noting data showing the browser suffered from a "novelty tax" problem where users found it too different to adopt widely.
Arc struggled with low feature adoption -- only 5.52% of daily active users regularly used multiple Spaces, while 4.17% used Live Folders. The company will continue maintenance updates for Arc but won't add new features. Arc also won't open-source the browser because it relies on proprietary infrastructure called ADK (Arc Development Kit) that remains core to the company's value.
Arc struggled with low feature adoption -- only 5.52% of daily active users regularly used multiple Spaces, while 4.17% used Live Folders. The company will continue maintenance updates for Arc but won't add new features. Arc also won't open-source the browser because it relies on proprietary infrastructure called ADK (Arc Development Kit) that remains core to the company's value.
Dia is a diagram editor (Score:3)
Well, that's going to going to cause some confusion. At least for me - I am developing some software that works around Dia (the diagram editor), and now I'll have to explain to my customers that it's not using Dia (the AI browser thing).
This is a pattern (Score:3)
Take a long-established product and then just steal its name. They did it with Telegram, Make, and even Kerberos.
And I'm sure this is going to go great like every other "______ but on the Internet, err, but with AI" we have coming out right now. That is, they're going to fail hard and fast.
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Thank you. I came here for this.
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Dia is an old kind of photograph.
Alpha Geeks (Score:4, Interesting)
Tim O'Reilly had a good essay, "Alpha Geeks [archive.org]" that describes how new tech gets adopted.
Arc seemed interesting but how many Alpha Geeks will run a closed-source browser in this decade where vulnerabilities are everywhere and of potentially existential risk?
They're in a tough spot selling a proprietary browser in a world where they have to depend on uptake first by the people who don't care if it's open source or not.
Brave seems to have found a business model that lets them do both. It's not obvious that the proprietary business model is viable for Internet browsing, but marketing can take up a lot of that slack.
Certainly Safari maintains an important market share so it's not completely off the table but those users need to be sold to if the Alpha Geeks aren't interested. I'm not sure if Edge has separate CVE's from Chromium but in both cases vendor-bundling is the supermajority of user acquisition which is quite difficult to compete with.
Sprinkling on a bit of AI seems like the go-to strategy this year - heck maybe it'll work at some point. It's not impossible that somebody will invent a killer-app desktop AI integration. An agent dashboard might be useful when the reliability moves a few more sigmas out.
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Oh, I did not spot that... So, they name all their software after legacy unrelated applications and file formats. ARC then, now Dia (the Diagram Editor)...This is not a coincidence. It must be some marketing ploy for... Something? Maybe? I don't know, I'm not a marketer. What do they gain from this?
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I just use Zmodem and dump the stream to and from the filesystem, you insensitive clod! And then I uuencode it!
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AI-Powered, like Plastics, is the future (Score:2)
I'm looking forward to reading the next "What we got wrong" newsletter from the Browser Company in 6-12 months.
The novelty tax is a real killer (Score:4, Insightful)
I tried ARC and thought it was pretty cool - but boy I'm just too busy to learn a new browser. I probably also am not the target market, since I mostly use a browser to, um, browse the web, and dedicated apps for 75% of my productivity work.
Sometimes "good enough" is too hard to replace.
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Software trying to be everything is gonna fail. Unless it's an Oracle (or IBM,etc) product, and then it just sucks and you're stuck with it because some at your company is being blackmailed by an Oracle sales team.
"But for most people, Arc was simply too different, with too many new things to learn, for too little reward"
Software crammed full of difficult to use features nobody wanted makes it hard to sell, unsurprisingly.
"shortcomings in Arc that were too large to tackle retroactively"
They wrote bad softwa
Need an exporter (Score:2)
Yet another chromium browser (Score:2)
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And that means what, exactly? (Score:2)
OK, can anyone explain to me what an "AI-powered browser" will do for me? Will it help me, uh ... browse ... the, uh ... web?
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In the best case extract the content and ignore the ads.
Re: And that means what, exactly? (Score:2)
Pretty great, huh?!
Impressive (Score:2)
A browser that's too hard to use, has features that nobody wants, *and* is closed source? Sign me up!!
They don't care about use cases (Score:2)