Arc might soon be abandoned as Atlassian pushes users towards Dia

A year and a half. That’s how long it has been since The Browser Company actually added any new meaningful feature to the Arc browser. Despite that, it maintains a respectable number of users because of its existing features that work excellently and its aesthetics. I’m one of them.

While I was browsing through Reddit, I came across a post on r/ArcBrowser that showed a screenshot of someone receiving an email from The Browser Company. The email tries to make Arc users switch over to Dia, while making the argument that it was built by the “same team.”

“Everything you love about Arc is now in Dia,” the email says. However, this isn’t true. Dia still misses out on some important features of Arc, such as the “Little Arc” floating windows, which you can either expand into any workspace or purge when you don’t want it cluttering your tabs. The company also promises “more speed” and “more security” with Dia, and they’ve made switching over easier.

So, what is going on here? On one hand, Arc continues to receive security updates every week or so. If there are major bugs that break the experience (like the YouTube full-screen bug we previously reported on), they get swift fixes as well. On the other hand, The Browser Company doesn’t really want you to use Arc. They are directly asking people to move over to Dia, emphasizing how it’s “similar” to Arc.

Putting two and two together, could they abandon the browser entirely? We can’t say for sure. Don’t treat this as official confirmation from The Browser Company that Arc will stop getting the regular Chromium/security updates or major fixes. It’s not that. The major point I’m trying to make here is that nudging users to move away from a browser doesn’t give me much hope about its future.

Even if they don’t exactly “announce” a complete abandonment of Arc, I don’t see the brightest future for it. I’d want the company to continue issuing the bare-minimum patches to keep it afloat, and for now they’re doing that. How long this will go on is what’s uncertain, especially after those emails.

Mentioning this once again: The Browser Company hasn’t formally announced any changes to how they handle the browser. This is just a speculative article that’s collecting some info together. For once, I actually want to be wrong, and I don’t want anything to change.

It’s not like I haven’t tried any replacement browsers. Recently, I tried the “Crest” browser, which came remarkably close. I don’t think it’s ready to replace Arc just yet, though. More on that here.

Want to know why I still cling to Arc? I wrote a complete explainer here.

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