Letter to Arc members 2025

Josh Miller, from the browser company, on a post on their substack:

You’re probably wondering what happened. One day we were all-in on Arc. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, we started building something new: Dia.
From the outside, this pivot might look abrupt. Arc had real momentum. People loved it. But inside, the decision was slower and more deliberate than it may seem. So I want to walk you through it all and answer your questions — why we started this company, what Arc taught us, what happens to it now, and why we believe Dia is the next step.

A nice roundup of questions you often read about Arc. Nothing to note here other that focus shifted and TBC wanted a clean slate instead of dealing with the complexities of refactoring Arc.

The most important thing is this:

Imagine writing an essay justifying why you were moving on from your candle business at the dawn of electric light. Electric intelligence is here — and it would be naive of us to pretend it doesn’t fundamentally change the kind of product we need to build to meet the moment.
Let me be even more clear: traditional browsers, as we know them, will die. Much in the same way that search engines and IDEs are being reimagined. That doesn’t mean we’ll stop searching or coding. It just means the environments we do it in will look very different, in a way that makes traditional browsers, search engines, and IDEs feel like candles — however thoughtfully crafted. We’re getting out of the candle business. You should too.

Miller notes that the internet, or better said, the web as we know it is going to fundamentally change and the web page won’t be the primary way to interact with services anymore. I believe this is true, and makes sense to try to move where the target is going to be, not where it is now.

My primary use case for Arc was having one browser window for both my personal and professional profiles.

During the day, I shift between both profiles for different purposes and managing this on chrome was a nightmare.

While I was able to more or less find my way to manage it, Arc is so much more convenient with Spaces and shortcuts which all work trough the same window.

And with flight control I don’t even need to think what space I must have open before clicking on a link somewhere else.

The chromeless chrome is very nice, and also the sidebar, which mixes bookmarks with tabs. That’s what caught my eye in the first place, having an apps browser rather than a web browser where I open apps. That’s a mixture I’ve never liked, and fundamentally why I never really stopped using Safari – other than, of course, bookmarks and password synchronization between apple devices.

But that’s it. All the AI integrations, the whiteboards –easels– and many other features are just not for me. I’m checking and I even have some of them disabled.

And that’s what Miller also says in his essay: most of the things they loved about the browser where niche, so little people used them or cared about them. They could as well be extensions.

Let’s see what happens with Dia when it comes out.