from Hacker News

Letter to Arc Members 2025

by Philpax on 5/26/25, 11:48 PM with 25 comments

• by Pfhortune on 5/27/25, 4:58 PM

  Killing off their one active product in order to copy everyone else in chasing AI... In "doing something new and different!" they are doing the same thing as the herd, and losing all loyalty and good will they built over the years in the process. Wow.

  Why would anyone trust The Browser Company after this? Who's to say Dia won't be dead in a few years in favor of the next trend?

  And they won't even open-source Arc because of some "secret sauce" libraries they think are special. Shameful.

• by ko_pivot on 5/27/25, 2:33 PM

  > Only 5.52% of DAUs use more than one Space regularly.

  Wow! That's the main feature for me.

• by twohaibei on 5/27/25, 8:39 AM

  Arc died to me when they updated to manifest v3 and my uBlock Origin stopped working. Instantly uninstalled and switched to Zen Browser.

• by WoodenChair on 5/27/25, 4:14 AM

  "With Dia, we started fresh from an architecture perspective and prioritized performance from the start. Specifically, sunsetting our use of TCA and SwiftUI to make Dia lightweight, snappy, and responsive."

  What is TCA?

• by castillar76 on 5/28/25, 5:58 PM

  I'm aware this is old-man-shakes-fist-at-cloud territory, but I don't want an AI-based AI browser with AI integration to AI the AI in all the AIs. I want a freaking browser. If I want to leverage AI features, I'll use a site for them. I don't want to chat with my browser — I want to tell it what site to open and it opens that site. I don't understand the use case for AI in the browser itself at all, and I'm really frustrated to lose a useful tool to another finance-bro-driven relentless drive to AI all the things with AI.

• by kaushalvivek on 5/28/25, 7:02 AM

  The controversy of the decision aside, I think this is a very well written piece of honest, unfiltered, uncomfortable communication to customers.

  As a DAU of Arc, I understand and respect the decision.

• by Ram10- on 5/31/25, 7:51 PM

  How will this remain competitive now that Google has added Gemini to Chrome?

• by nsonha on 5/27/25, 6:33 AM

  I don't have access to Dia but I have tried Deta Surf, which is a browser very similar to Arc. Their AI integration is better. You can refer to tabs and other things you save in the same workspace, when you chat with the AI.

• by rado on 5/27/25, 1:57 PM

  Loved the vertical tabs and I hope they land in Safari soon, why not Chrome too

• by tolerance on 5/27/25, 1:35 PM

  Dude behind this takes web browsers a little too seriously without the swagger to lend him credibility.

• by pjmlp on 5/30/25, 7:19 AM

  I guess it will no longer be the flagship example for using Swift on Windows with WinUI then.

• by al_borland on 5/27/25, 1:05 AM

  There is a lot of talk on wanting to be transparent, but where was the transparency on stopping development of new features and going into support only mode? I saw Arc pick up popularity a lot after they stopped feature development, and pointed out the lack of new features to many people who were pushing others to use Arc, while they had no idea that it was effectively a dead browser. All I had to point to was a single tweet, which was a reply to someone, not even out to all the followers. It's like they didn't want to lie, but also didn't want people to know. The article mentioning that most users didn't notice points to this as well. They didn't notice, because it didn't seem like it was ever really announced in a way that made it to the masses.

  The article talks about a goal of making well cared for software. Leaving Arc to just get security updates and bug fixes, in a space as dynamic as the web doesn't seem well cared for. The article itself talks about how old browsers are going to die.

  I stopped using Arc when I heard they weren't going to keep adding features. I didn't want to further invest in dead software. While I wouldn't expect development in year 5 to be as fast as year 1, once current feature completeness and stability is reached, I think the message they put out in that tweet of there being nothing left to do hit me with a sour note. The web will evolve, there will be more to do. Browsers have been evolving for 30+ years, and Dia is proof that the browser isn't done evolving.

  I'm finding this experience with Arc to make it hard to get excited about Dia. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

  I expect AI will cause browsers to evolve, but I also expect the likes of Safari and Chrome to continue to evolve, rather than throwing out their app and starting over, even if it involves a radical rewrite at some point. As the article points out, the web and web pages will still be important, the core feature of the browser still needs to exist.

  While I agree that it seemed like Arc was developed in an almost haphazard way, adding whatever feature came to their mind... maybe it did get to bloated and hard to manage, but it's really that lack of transparency, coupled with the article talking about how much they value transparency, that is really leaving me so negative here. In several areas, the words don't seem to match the actions, which is eroding trust with me.

  Ultimately, experimental browsers are good to have in the market, as they act as a test bed for new ideas, which ultimately get picked up by the bigger players. Opera was good at this 20 years ago. Maybe The Browser Company can fill that niche, but it doesn't seem like they want to be a niche browser, even though they are reliant on Chrome for their engine.

  Sorry this comes off so negative, but just like they say they should have killed Arc a year sooner, this article should have come out a year sooner. I'd like to think maybe I just missed it, but judging by how many people I pointed it out to, who were shocked, and how when I went looking for proof to show them, all I came back with was a single tweet reply, I don't think I did, but would be happy to hear I missed something.

• by HacklesRaised on 5/27/25, 6:36 PM

  Chasing relevance?

  Hopefully they will arrive at a fully fleshed out product just as the world wakes up to the grift.