What was the Browser Company even doing? First they had a successful consumer product with Arc as a Chrome clone, then they decided to shut it down for...a whole new browser called Dia that essentially acted as a browser extension that so many vibe coded clones were made of?
What was even the point of all this roundabout engineering and the time and manpower to do so? What a waste. This seems more like an acquihire than actually about IP.
> What was the Browser Company even doing?
Probably something like this all along.
If you have investors, and give away for free a product that costs a lot of money to develop, there is surely a strategy for those investors to get their money back, plus a lot more.
It doesn't always work, of course. But it seems to have worked well in this case.
I think the play was something along the lines of being "the new iOS". Lots of new apps (see: LLMs) are browser-first, forgoing building platform-targeting apps entirely. When they couldn't see any app devs lining up to build Arc-specific extensions, apps, or such, they pivoted. Dia was more of an LLM-host browser, with the play being they're hoping for OpenAI or Perplexity or one of the big foundation-players to "pay" to be the "exclusive" AI provider, like old-Google pays to be the default on Safari. But ... both plays didn't find any audience or customer, rightly so, as they didn't try to "fix" anything anyone actually considered a problem, just tried to build a niche their own. :(
Why would anyone acquire a company that made a successful VSCode fork or a wrapped Chromium browser? I expect these people making such decisions to be far from understanding tech behind it.
Cursor is a VSCode fork, generating reported $500M+ in revenue and is only a couple years old.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/05/cursors-anysphere-nabs-9-9...
Yes, and the person you are replying to is clearly referencing Windsurf which was another vscode fork...
Arc I think graduated from wrapper status, it was a really interesting and unique browser while it lasted.
In The Browser Company’s case, they have a lot of engineers who work on Chromium. Not sure about the other wrapper companies!
Because those companies own the customers.
There was an interview with the founders not long ago on Every's podcast: https://every.to/podcast/inside-the-browser-company-why-they...
I never really got where the innovation was in Arc, and never got a chance to see or try Dia, but the interview at least gave me some empathy for what they were going for.
From my perspective, as a user, the big thing is compartmentalization.
Arc breaks the traditional paradigm of "bookmarks", using "Spaces" and "Pins" instead.
"Pins" are the closest to bookmarks. They appear at the top of the sidebar, and can be organized into folders. They differ from bookmarks in that they are pretty much native tabs that are unloaded until you open them.
"Spaces" are sets of tabs, both pinned and normal. You can associate a space with a specific profile, and each profile has separate cookies and such - but you don't have to.
From a usage perspective, pinned tabs instead of bookmarks mean that I can press Cmd+t and enter a URL, a search query, or the name of a pinned tab. It's smart enough to choose the correct one which means I don't have to think about it. That's handy, and was unique when I adopted it, but I'm sure it's either been implemented in other browsers or can be easily enough.
Spaces are _very_ handy, though. Right now, I have eight spaces. One "default" that I use normally, five for various projects I'm actively working on, one for a long-running project that requires me to log into a different Zoom account (so that one has its own profile, to prevent my accidentally being logged into the wrong Zoom account when joining a meeting), and one for personal stuff.
I have it on my list to look for an alternative and migrate, but it's still working for my needs. I'm going to miss it, though.
Zen browser is basically a Firefox-based reimplementation of Arc's main features.
Zen browser has spaces
And more importantly Edge.
> I never really got where the innovation was in Arc
I worked with a PM that absolutely loved it and insisted on using it. When he showed me it, all I could think of was "this is what my Firefox looked like before they killed XUL extensions".
> I never really got where the innovation was in Arc
Arc on Windows was build in Swift. And they built Swift WinRT.
pivoting to AI to get the bag while getting acquired