The Browser Company doesn’t understand what made Arc special
Arc was a power user's dream. The team that built it still doesn't understand why.
18 months ago, The Browser Company inexplicably blew up one of the best browsers that had ever been made. In the process, they alienated their loyal user base and shat the bed on a business model staring them right in the face.
In its wake, the browser company created Dia, a browser that remains dead on arrival.
According to Josh Miller, The Browser Company’s CEO, Dia will be getting Arc’s greatest hits.
Josh promised that here in May of 2025, again that September, and once more in October.
And yet, the greatest hits have yet to appear.
I suspect Josh thinks Arc’s greatest hits started and ended with vertical tabs. Ship the vertical tabs, and Arc’s users will flock to Dia.
But Arc had other, quirkier features that truly made it special. Features that, to this day, can’t be found together in any other Chromium-based browser.
Arc let users open new profiles within the same window, drive the entire browser from the keyboard via a Command-K palette, and shift pages between cookie profiles on the fly. You could even default specific sites to always open in the correct profile.
Arc figured out three things:
Power users want to drive the browser entirely with the keyboard.
Users want to stay in one open window, even across profiles. Opening a new window should be the exception not the rule.
Cookies matter, and being able to easily shift pages between cookies is a feature.
Yes, these are power features, but you know who pays for power features? Power users.
The business model they missed wasn’t complicated. Power users pay. They pay for Superhuman, for Claude Max, for Raycast. They would have paid for Arc. A browser that makes serious people genuinely faster at their jobs, with keyboard-driven navigation, intelligent profile switching and air traffic control is exactly the kind of tool that commands $10 or $15 a month without much argument. That market was sitting right there.
Eighteen months later, I’m more convinced than ever that Miller and the team never really understood what they had. If they had, they wouldn’t have blown it up. And they certainly wouldn’t still be promising that Dia will eventually get Arc’s greatest hits, as if vertical tabs were the whole story.