Switched to Zen last week over a bug that prevented me from opening my favs. Good timing to jump ship.

I never knew the Browser Company had such an awesome logo!

Anyway, the idea of making Dia into the knowledge worker's browser sounds good.

For me, this new browser would be successful the day I prefer to run Linear and Notion in Dia rather than using the companies' own Electron desktop apps (which are pretty terrible on Mac at least, so the bar is not necessarily very high).

I’m really curious to see how Dia will evolve toward being enterprise-ready. The Arc vision was sadly killed, and I assume the same might happen with Dia. Rather than competing with Claude for Chrome or Gemini in Chrome, it seems more likely it will become a conservative, secure AI browser tightly integrated into the Atlassian ecosystem.

Maybe finally Jira will be fast?

Imagine, a browser with the polished experience and performance of Jira

When I git Arc, I thought "how are they going to monetize this?" Red flag I just didn't take seriously. Then I saw remains of the chromium branding, they hadn't even changed the icon. I thought this isn't time consuming, why they haven't done such a thing? And honestly it felt like one of those ADHD brains that go to many ideas and never finish any, Arc was exactly one in every sense. I knew this was huge red flag but then the beautiful interface (which till this day is—after Apple's—the most crafted and beautiful one) made me break my lines. I knew this could not keep going. Arc Search is a horrible browse, and I actually always used it because it was syncing with the desktop, the desktop was broken in so many different places that I cannot name (just try to open the downloads and you see). And well Arc is just another browser with some ideas borrowed from here and there. I mean it's still some sandboxed web frames, nothing integrated, no special new feature and infrastructure to make the browser an OS. My whole point with this is that it astonishes me how they never finish anything (Arc, Arc Sync, Arc Search, Arc Windows, Easels...) and they actually sell big time and have all of this hype around them

If the AI browser can use Jira for us, then this is a step forward for humanity.

I’ll never understand why they didn’t even bother to experiment with monetization for Arc.

Normally, I’d scoff at the idea. But they genuinely made the browser useful again in ways for which I’d happily shill $30/mo. Superhuman proved you can do it for email, which was also previously laughable. I guess that ended in a buyout, too, but at least they tried.

Arc also had a solid wedge into team space, especially if going AI-native was their little dream.

You own the browser. Just build a capable browser-first agent that helps teams do work. Make it a shared space (separate from personal ofc) and start charging for teams.

As I write this, it’s pretty clear that’s what Atlassian wants to do with this. The only real loss is: - They decided to roundtrip the entire product story of Arc with Dia, and drag users through 0->1 again - It’s Atlassian, and you know they’re gonna suffocate anything that isn’t related to Atlassian

All in all, this looks like a fear-based sellout. They could have done it on their own but didn’t have the chops to scale into a company of that size. So instead they took the guaranteed payoff and tucked themselves inside this big ** kangaroo’s pouch for safety while they get to play with AI indefinitely.

“We coulda been something real.”

————

EDIT: unironically, they now offer the option to pay $20/mo for Dia Pro… it’s basically comedy at this point.

WELP..... that was a fun run. Probably switch back to chrome at some point.