Why We're Still Using Arc Browser
If I had to boil the essence of what made Arc Browser excel for power users down to just two things (which is hard when there were many good features), I’d pick:
Chromium-based for broad compatibility and extension support
Keyboard shortcuts
And the reason so many of us power users haven’t abandoned Arc, or switched to Dia, is that no other browser (that I’m aware of) has both.
There are Arc replicas that utilize WebKit, but that limits users to a more limited extension library.
Or, there’s Dia itself, which is slowly bringing back Arc features, like vertical tabs, but sleeping on keyboard shortcuts.
I’m also not yet convinced AI agents will live at the browser level. To be sure, agents are the future, and they will be ubiquitous. But my money is on agents operating from a combination of MCP support, the system level and within apps. Or perhaps a third party tool like Superhuman Go.
For this, and because I don’t see how Dia competes on the AI front with whatever Google and OpenAI have cooking up for their own browsers, I suspect Dia is not long for this world…unless it can pivot back to being a browser for power users, and charging them a monthly subscrip
tion for that power.
Of course, succeeding or failing may no longer matter to The Browser Company’s new corporate parent. In which case, I do hope someone picks up the true torch from where Arc left off, because I do believe there’s a business model in what Arc was building, even if The Browser Company couldn’t see it.