I have tried all the browsers with AI on the market and the one that works best is the one that started the worst: Dia

I started using Arc in the summer of 2024. I was slow to get into it (I had tried it before and found it too capricious, too determined to teach me how to sail when I already knew) but when I arrived, I really arrived. Vertical tabs. The spaces. The way he organized the digital day without me having to think about it too much. Arc to me was not just a browser: it was a work environment.

And then The Browser Company Dia announced.

I remember it with some annoyance. Josh Miller, the company’s CEO, uploaded a video talking about “something new,” and Arc was in “minimal maintenance,” a euphemism for not saying the word “abandonment.” The Arc community complained, rightly so, and I joined the discontent. They had built something great and threw it overboard at the first opportunity to pursue the AI ​​chimera.

Still, I tried Dia as soon as I could and wrote about it: You opened Dia and saw Chrome. Chrome with better typography, Chrome with more careful animations, but Chrome nonetheless. No split tabs, no gaps, no anything that had made Arc great. Just a chatbot in the sidebar.

I closed it and went back to Arc, which continued to work despite the abandonment warnings, until I started trying other AI-based browsers.

Months passed and Dia was updated, week by week, with a striking cadence. And at some point I started to notice something: the things I missed were coming backsometimes even improved.

• First the vertical tabs, which Arc had popularized and which Chrome has just announced that it will also adopt, something that says a lot about who sets the pace in browser design.
• Then the groups of eyelashes, with that aesthetic care that has always been a trademark of the house and now goes further than before. Other browsers already have this feature, but “not like this.”
• Recently, the split viewwhich I have been using for years in Arc and which is one of those functions that, once you have it, you don’t understand how you navigated without it: Simultaneous view of several tabs in a single window.

There is a pattern in The Browser Company that you should have already learned with Arc: they release something that seems incomplete, almost “psché”, and then they improve it until you can’t put it down anymore. It took me two tries to fall in love with Arc. Something similar has happened with Dia, only the process has been longer and the reconciliation more gradual.

And that boss now has to live with a new owner, because since September This company was bought by Atlassianwhich wants to make Dia the reference for working with AI. Nothing has changed at the moment on a day-to-day basis (pun intended) of the browser.

What Dia has done smartly (and differently than Arc) is start almost from scratch and give up all the weirdness. Arc asked you to adapt to it, to learn its logic, to assume its curve. And Dia does exactly the opposite: she is very Chromiumvery familiar, very little foreign to anyone coming from Chrome and not as rigid as Arc.

That takes a toll: some of Arc’s more radical ideas have been lost in the transition, but it also means it doesn’t create as much friction for the average user. You open Dia and browse. There is no twenty-minute tutorial on how to think about tabs, which is something that penalized the growth of Arc: those of us who used it loved it, but many people left when they saw that they did not understand the proposal.

The weight is what catches my attention the most on the negative side: it’s around gigabyte, which is an outrage for a browser. And there is no mobile version yet. That hurts more, because it means the experience is split between devices, and the consistency Arc was trying to offer across platforms doesn’t yet exist on Dia. I hope they don’t take long. In theory it will arrive this year.

Regarding AI, it is not what I use the most. Of course I use Claude or Gemini, I mean Dia’s chatbot sidebar. It’s not something I used on Dia nor have I used much on Neon, Atlas or Comet, the other three that I’ve tested in some depth. The chat in the sidebar is a good complement, I can ask it something about the tab I have open, ask it to summarize several at once, respond with context of what I am reading; but it is not the focus of my browsing experience.

All three browsers conveyed at their launch that AI would change everything, and reality is more modest– It’s useful, sometimes very useful, but it doesn’t transform your workflow in the same way that a good tab design does. At least in my experience.

I have tested more browsers that leverage AI for their value proposition. And they all have their strong points:

• Comet It is very fast and efficient searching for information in real time.
• Atlas is very capable when you need to systematically extract data from multiple pages, but none have the level of care in the experience that Dia has.
• Opera Neon is a browser built from the ground up for the AI ​​era, with much more than a well-placed chatbot.

But it’s not just that they work. Dia feels good. There is something in the design, in the animations, in how the groups of tabs are constructed, that remains the unmistakable trademark of The Browser Company. That aesthetic coddling may be the reason you keep choosing one browser over another when technically they all do the same thing.

I haven’t considered paying the twenty dollars a month payment plan. With what I use chat, it doesn’t make sense to me. The free plan covers what I needwhich are nothing more than a few simple one-off queries at the end of the month. For everything else, chatbots as such.

Arc taught me that browsers could be more than just a window to other people’s content. Dia is learning the same lesson, but from another angle: instead of asking you to change how you think to adapt to him, he tries to be the best navigator possible for someone who already knows how to navigate. There are still things missing (the mobile version, mainly) but the trajectory is clear.

And the journey, with The Browser Company, has always ended in the same place: in a browser that you don’t want to close.

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