The latest from The Browser Company. At this point, I’ll believe more when I see an app.
Thank you for posting this…
Mid-read I found this line “Arc was simply too different, with too many new things to learn, for too little reward.” If that was not so bad, they kept removing the things I was using & liked…
I’ll check out https://www.diabrowser.com in the future & see how things turned out.
For me, the key phrase in that essay was “ask your cousin in high school or college”. I think most TidBITS readers, like me, skew older. It’s been decades since I had a cousin in high school or college. They aren’t building this for us. We’re the dinosaurs. Granted a lot of the dinosaurs around here are more technologically adaptable than most people our age, but my impression is that many of us aren’t adaptable enough (or willing) to embrace the AI-first future. I know I definitely have no interest. It’s being foisted on me at every turn but I will never fully live there. We’ve been talking about “digital natives” for a while. The next generation will be “AI natives”.
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My immediate response, independent of the tech stuff, is why would I bother committing to this when you’ll bail on it soon anyway?
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Yeah, I’m struggling with that a lot, since I’ve gone all-in on Arc, and I find it to be a tremendous productivity (and enjoyment) boost. It’s really hard to hear that an app that was so transformative to my everyday usage is being put in maintenance mode (and realistically, has already been there for some time). Arc’s value proposition was pretty obvious to me right away, whereas I can’t figure out what problems Dia will be solving for me.
That said, life is change, and while I don’t always like being forced to change, I’m willing to reassess what I’m using if I think the end result will be worthwhile. It doesn’t always happen immediately, but I always learn something in the effort.
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Yep, OmniWeb broke my heart at one point…
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I have no objection to Arc being in maintenance mode. Many tools in the UNIX world have remained unchanged since I began learning to work in the terminal. Much software has declined from good to bad. It is better to remain at good in maintenance mode. I see no reason to switch to another web browser until I am forced.
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There’s no reason a product needs to constantly get new features if it does everything you need.
The big deal (especially for an Internet-connectivity app like Arc) is that someone needs to keep providing security updates. And secondarily, someone needs to be able to keep it compatible with new OS releases as the various platforms add and remove APIs.
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I don’t think Arc had reached that stasis point.
From the user perspective, certainly. But from a developer perspective, there will be a need to build a sufficiently large customer base to generate enough sustainable revenue. Even if the initial versions of an app are popular, getting to sustainable will probably require adding features that the early adopters may not consider essential. For instance:
What people actually used, loved, and valued differs from what the average tweet or Reddit comment assumes. Only 5.52% of DAUs use more than one Space regularly. Only 4.17% use Live Folders (including GitHub Live Folders). It’s 0.4% for one of our favorite features, Calendar Preview on Hover.
I use three Spaces constantly, but the Live Folders feature does nothing for me—I don’t use GitHub enough to care. And Calendar Preview is worthless if you use iCloud Calendar, so while it may be cool, it will never capture a lot of Apple users.
The problem with The Browser Company is that they want to have a mass-market product—they’re not satisfied with a power-user tool that a much smaller number of people would be willing to pay for. It’s entirely unclear what their eventual business model will be, but their VC funders are presumably pushing for the big market and figuring out how to monetize that in some fashion.
No doubt about that. But it does mean that putting an app into “maintenance mode” is not necessarily a bad thing. As long as security and compatibility updates continue to happen.
That read a bit like the Jony Ive / Sam Altman video without the tech bro cringe fest part.
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From the “letter”:
First, simplicity over novelty. Early on, Scott Forstall told us Arc felt like a saxophone — powerful but hard to learn. Then he challenged us: make it a piano. Something anyone can sit down at and play.
The ignorant stupidity behind that analogy is staggering.
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They’ve taken a page out of Google’s book and are getting into abandonware. It’s going to be interesting to see how Dia works out for them, but I’ll be watching from the sidelines. Like many of us, I imagine.
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I have played sax, piano, and oboe (the latter professionally). Staggering stupidity was my reaction as well.
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Whoa! Fellow oboist here. I dabbled in a lot of instruments in school. To me, sax is easier than piano so I agree with “dumb comment”
That aside, are there any other browsers that will do anything like the spaces ARC uses? I am so dependent on them.
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I agree about sax. I used Arc for a long time, but then stopped and moved on. There was a lot I liked about it. I won’t be trying Dia. I tried Vivaldi. I’m back to using Safari and Brave Browser.
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I was staggered by that comment as well. Maybe he meant “anyone can get musical notes out of a piano keyboard but it takes a few minutes to learn how a saxophone mouthpiece and reed work”?
I’ve seen posts elsewhere (including the 9to5Mac entry) that are saying Arc is “discontinued.” It is receiving weekly maintenance updates, but not discontinued (yet).
What I don’t understand is the comment early in Arc’s release (which remember, was not all that long ago) in the FAQs. One made-up question was about “people asking how we were going to make money on Arc.” And the response was on the lines of “oh, we plan to make plenty of money” but essentially not the way you’d think.
The other weird comment in the “letter” concerned people “not even noticing we’d stopped adding features.” I think that may be a kind of feedback that they overlooked: when AI started permeating Arc, not that many users were interested in the AI features they were bundling.
I’ve got Arc set up to do useful organizing for me, and I’ll keep using it for a while. Since I never really figured out what Arc Search was doing for me on iOS and iPadOS, I’ve been using Safari there, and I may revert to it and its “new” sidebar tabs once Arc breaks.
VC gets some worthy projects off the ground; but I think it’s noteworthy that the Browser Company folks are using relatively large chunks of that capital to finance off-site retreats in exotic international locations. I don’t begrudge them that as they seem to be a decentralized crew, but reading and viewing some of their weekly posts feels like watching episodes of Silicon Valley.
(And addressing the actual question…) They seemed to be on a roll until they chose to do a flip and develop a Windows version in Swift. Once that released (and I admit I have NO data on the Windows experience), the features started to trickle out more slowly until they stopped.
They really may have no choice but to pivot to something else to keep their funders happy.
I think that’s exactly what he meant. Yes…you need to learn to play the piano but the finder of a toddler hitting a key makes exactly the same note as a world famous soloist. Most other instruments require learning embouchure or whatever and an amateur won’t get the same sound as an accomplished musician.
I downloaded and tried Arc for a day or so but to me it was essentially just another browser so it never got used again…I didn’t understand Adam’s fascination/interest/whatever you want to call it in it and that’s just fine as long as he or other Arc users understand it.