Goodbye Arc

A browser company hosting their newsletter on a Substack should've been the red flag I needed to know that Arc wasn't long for the good side of the internet. But this week's "Letter to Arc members 2025" post is the final nail in the coffin for my favourite browser of the last few years.

The CEO's focus on AI as the only thing that matters:

Second, I would’ve embraced AI fully, sooner and unapologetically. The truth is I was obsessed. I’d stay up late, after my family went to bed, playing with ChatGPT— not for work, but out of sheer curiosity.

...is the real red flag that says to me that The Browser Company doesn't really care about the web. This post I'm writing right now doesn't exist in his vision of an AI browser. It'll just get slurped up into the machine and barfed out as part of an aggregation of "commentary in 2025 on Arc being tossed aside in favour of AI barf" question someone asks in a few years. If I'm lucky it'll be referenced somewhere in fine print, but we've already seen how much these tech dudes fighting to be the next Steve Jobs actually care about creative work on the web:

“I just don’t know how you go around, asking everyone first. I just don’t see how that would work,” Clegg said. “And by the way if you did it in Britain and no one else did it, you would basically kill the AI industry in this country overnight.”
- Nick Clegg being interviewed on The Verge

Why Not Build a Good Browser and Charge for It?

Well that's not good enough for The Browser Company. Remember if you're not changing the world with your software, it's not enough:

So when people ask how venture capital influenced us — or why we didn’t just charge for Arc and run a profitable business — I get it. They’re fair questions. But to me, they miss the forest for the trees. If the goal was to build a small, profitable company with a great team and loyal customers, we wouldn’t have chosen to try and build the successor to the web browser – the most ubiquitous piece of software there is. The point of this was always bigger for us: to build good, cared for software that could have an impact for people at real scale.

Dia is the name of their new "AI browser" and the comparison to selling candles is probably a perfect analogy:

Dia is not really a reaction to Arc and its shortcomings. No. Imagine writing an essay justifying why you were moving on from your candle business at the dawn of electric light.

Candles are pretty important when the electricity gets shut off.

I use AI related tooling for various tasks, as do my kids. But the more I do, the more I feel like an important part of our humanity on the web is being lost. Both on the creative side when blog posts and videos someone worked hard on to create get slurped into the AI slop machine, but also in our own ability to research, learn, and understand how to grow a better lawn, make a breakfast plan, or repair a broken dishwasher.

In many ways, chat interfaces are already acting like browsers: they search, read, generate, respond. They interact with APIs, LLMs, databases. And people are spending hours a day in them. If you’re skeptical, call a cousin in high school or college — natural language interfaces, which abstract away the tedium of old computing paradigms, are here to stay.

I don't want to be a Steve Balmer laughing at the launch of the iPhone, but I also think a lot more skepticism and thought needs to go into the AI development world than most of the current crop of developers and venture capitalist enthusiasts who seem hell bent on repeating the same cycle we had with crypto, VR, and so many other pieces of technology that were going to change the world.

And when a lot of the people at the head of these AI companies have the emotional intelligence of an Elon Musk, I just don't have a lot of hope for it—even if it is actually amazing and could be guided into a healthy version for all of humanity to benefit from.

What Browser Will I Use Now?

In the short term, I'll be using a mix of Safari and Chrome (mainly for Riverside type video / audio apps that require a chromium based browser). The smart folks in the ShopTalk Show Discord are recommending Zen as a possible option, though still quite early in development.