It’s a New Dia: The Browser Company Will Launch New AI Browser in Early 2025

The small company behind Arc browser revealed that its next product is an AI web browser called Dia that launches in early 2025.

“AI won’t exist as an app. Or a button,” The Browser Company claims on its new (and mostly empty) Dia website. “We believe it’ll be an entirely new environment — built on top of a web browser.”

The Browser Company revealed in October that it would “radically reinvent” its Arc web browser, not by redesigning it but by starting over. Arc is “great as it is,” the company claims, but too many people find it to be too complex to use, and too different from other browsers. And so The Browser Company co-founder and CEO Josh Miller hit the reset button.

Today, we’re seeing our first hints at what the company plans. There isn’t a lot of information yet, but Miller describes the work in a new video that doubles as a recruitment

“We’re building this new web browser, this new smart browser called Dia,” he says. “The next era of computing is going to revolve around AI. That’s not a big secret. But our belief specifically is that AI is not going to exist as an app, it’s not going to exist as a button, AI is going to be an entirely new environment built on top of a web browser.”

A voice-over notes that “maybe” this web browser will be “personal, deeply integrated into your tools and workflows,” and that it will “maybe even be an environment that can do work for you because it understands your context now.” The company claims that it is “building at the browser layer” and “reimagining fundamental computing interfaces” like the mouse cursor, the text insertion cursor, and the browser address bar (which the company previously reimagined with Arc) to be “more personal and powerful.” It will be, in effect, “an iPhone for the AI era.”

Miller demonstrates how Dia might improve the text insertion cursor, noting that “this little blinking line” is sitting there in every text box in every app we use. He appears to click the cursor, which triggers an elegant pop-up menu with “How can I help…”, “Write next line”, “Give me an idea”, and “Summarize a tab” choices. “I can just ask my cursor,” he says. This is, the voice-over adds, “a new computing environment,” “built at the browser layer.”

In the second demo, Miller is researching presents for a family member and has multiple tabs open to various products. He starts a new email message to his wife, clicks the insertion cursor, and types “write an email to [his wife] asking about these Amazon products with links,” and it creates the email for him.

According to Miller, The Browser Company started working on its Arc Development Kit, or ADK, five years ago as a “totally new way” to build a web browser on top of Chromium that lets them prototype new features much more quickly. It also built four components on top of the ADK–Memory, Actions, LLMs, and Self driving–that can be mixed and matched in end user features in different ways. The text insertion feature uses Memory and LLMs, apparently, while a second new feature–the Personal URL bar–also uses Actions so it do things on your behalf.

“One of the things you can do in Dia is, you can say, ‘What was that doc that Cyrus sent me about Heidegger’,” Miller says as he types into a text field. “It’s going to go out, and it’s going to search through all of the memories, which are just local on my computer, it never leaves my device, and it found the exact Notion doc even though I didn’t remember the title.” He then directs it to email the doc to a co-worker, noting that it knows which email he uses–Gmail–and doesn’t need to ask. Creating a calendar event works similarly.

Then there’s the mouse cursor, which Miller describes as “the ultimate idea.” The Dia browser has a mouse cursor-shaped icon you can click to automate processes–this is the Self driving bit–using contextual information that’s available in the tab you’re viewing. In a demo, there’s a list of items to buy in an email, and he selects the icon, types “add these items to my shopping cart”, and Dia opens the Amazon website, finds each item, and adds each to his cart. It uses a feature identified as “Auto Browsing” in the demo. A more complex demo creates customized, personalized emails for several different people, each specific to their schedules.

The Browser Company says that the winning AI interface of the future will be “a holistic environment,” and it cites history as the rationale: Inventions alone never change the world.

“We’ve invented groundbreaking language models but all we’ve managed to do is scatter AI buttons across our interfaces,” the voice-over explains. “The real transformation will come when we weave AI throughout our computing environment. And that’s what we want to build toward with Dia.”

Given its name, it’s not surprising that The Browser Company believes this “has to be on top of a browser.” Though to be fair, web browsers are more important, and more frequently used, than all other app types combined. “This is so obviously where the world’s going,” Miller says.

On the flip side, the video also claims that Dia will be the company’s “second product.” But it’s at least its third product after Arc and Arc Search, so I’m not sure where to go with that one.

Still. This is very interesting, even in the form of a sneak peek. I remain eager to see what they come up with.