Arc and Dia

Josh Miller, co-founder of The Browser Company, has posted a thoughtful writeup about the decisions he and his team made to move on from the Arc browser.

After a couple of years of building and shipping Arc, we started running into something we called the “novelty tax” problem. A lot of people loved Arc — if you’re here you might just be one of them — and we’d benefitted from consistent, organic growth since basically Day One. But for most people, Arc was simply too different, with too many new things to learn, for too little reward.

To get specific: D1 retention was strong — those who stuck around after a few days were fanatics — but our metrics were more like a highly specialized professional tool (like a video editor) than a mass-market consumer product, which we aspired to be closer to.

I wouldn’t call myself a “fanatic” but I do really like the Arc browser model and have been using it as my daily driver for several years now. It’s definitely a “highly specialized professional tool”, and I can completely understand why it’s too complicated and different for the mass market.

Switching browsers is a big ask. And the small things we loved about Arc — features you and other members appreciated — either weren’t enough on their own or were too hard for most people to pick up. By contrast, core features in Dia, like chatting with tabs and personalization features, are used by 40% and 37% of DAUs respectively. This is the kind of clarity and immediate value we’re working toward.

Good on the team for properly measuring the usage of these features and understanding what the market is using, rather than what they are asking for.

Miller concludes with some notes about Dia, the new product the company is working on:

I want to end by being frank with you: Dia is not really a reaction to Arc and its shortcomings. No. Imagine writing an essay justifying why you were moving on from your candle business at the dawn of electric light. Electric intelligence is here — and it would be naive of us to pretend it doesn’t fundamentally change the kind of product we need to build to meet the moment. […]

Dia may not be your style. It may not land right away. But this is still us. Being ourselves. Building the kind of thing we’d want to use. Fully aware that we might be wrong. But doing it anyway.

I’m excited to give Dia a spin. I wish I had an .edu email account but, alas, I’ll wait for my turn.