Half a year after The Browser Company from New York announced it would stop developing Arc, its unique browser, I went back to see what it now has to offer – and this time: Dia, a new browser centered around artificial intelligence. The company, which also developed Arc that I previously reviewed – with its sidebar, customization options, and unconventional usability – announced in December 2024 that it was abandoning Arc in favor of fully focusing on its next browser. And although it's the same developers, Dia is a completely different story. If Arc felt like a mini operating system inside the browser, Dia surprises with its simplicity: No sidebar, no revolutionary interface – a clean and familiar design, reminiscent of Chrome, but with a lot more polish, and one very significant addition: Artificial intelligence that accompanies almost every action.
A beta browser, but with a very well-formed concept
Currently, Dia is only available in beta, and only to invited users with a Mac computer running on an Apple Silicon chip. But even in its current state – early, limited, and even a bit “unfinished” – the core idea behind it feels sharp, focused, and goal-oriented: To make AI the first point of interaction with the browser, and sometimes even with the computer.
I started feeling it from the very first moment – when the browser launched an onboarding process that asked me not only technical questions, but also almost personal ones: How do I want it to phrase answers for me? What writing style do I prefer? Which people inspire me? And even – how I like to write code. It wasn’t a regular settings process; it felt more like a conversation with a personal assistant trying to understand me – not just what I do, but how I think.
And that’s exactly the point: Unlike regular browsers that give you a “search engine,” Dia aims to be your starting point for everything. And it’s not just theory – the browser’s developers reported that in early tests, users began using the chat not as a response to what was happening in the browser, but as the beginning of a process. Before searching on Google, before opening an app, even before planning a project – they simply typed into Dia’s chat: “Help me build a plan,” “What should I cook?”, “How do I approach someone I like?” I also found myself opening the browser not to “surf,” but to talk to the AI. And the truth? It worked pretty well.
The feeling is that behind Dia stands a new concept: Not a browser with an AI assistant on the side, but a single interface where artificial intelligence is at the heart of everything. On every page I enter, the chat is waiting for me on the side – not intrusive, not aggressive, but always ready to jump in and help. Highlight text? It sees it. Switch between tabs? It remembers. Shut down the computer and come back tomorrow? Dia still remembers what I searched for, what I read, and what interested me. These are the seeds of deep memory, the kind you can’t find today in a regular browser, not even in one with AI extensions.
In addition, on every page you browse, Dia reads the content in the background – every headline, every paragraph, every element. The chat on the side is always open, and always connected to what’s currently happening on screen. You can ask questions about the page, request explanations, summarize texts, or even link between different websites – all through the AI model that understands the context. This is a feature that provides a sense of continuity and real-time intelligence.
One of the features that impressed me most is the ability to group a set of tabs and request a summary of the content across all of them – with one simple question. Instead of jumping between dozens of pages and trying to organize the information myself, Dia takes on the work and returns a concentrated answer, in the context of what I was searching for. It might sound like magic, but in practice – it’s mostly a very smart use of chatbot capabilities we already know, only this time wrapped in a new and polished browser.
The Browser Company is not alone. We’re already seeing the AI browser trend developing: Perplexity is working on a browser, OpenAI has similar rumors, and everyone is trying to bring artificial intelligence to the core of the browsing experience. Dia simply offers it now, in a very honest and clear way – and it feels like the future, even if it’s still a bit in beta.