makers

Dia, the new browser from The Browser Company, is almost nothing like the company’s last product. That app, Arc, was a total rethink of how browsers work: it moved tabs to the side and combined them with bookmarks, it offered endless ways to organize all your stuff, and it had lots of ideas about how to make your web surfing a little more delightful.

Dia will get some of that stuff in time, The Browser Company’s CEO Josh Miller tells me. The app that’s launching today for existing Arc users is very much still a beta (and only available on Mac). But none of that stuff is the point of Dia anyway. The point of Dia, he says, is to bring artificial intelligence to the very center of practically everything you do online. The app’s central feature is a chat tool that is able to look at every website you visit, access every site you’re logged into, and help you find information, get stuff done, and navigate the web a little more easily.

The app itself, which I’ve been testing for a while, is incredibly simple to understand. Imagine Chrome, only with far more design polish and more playful animations. Now imagine a sidebar on the right side that contains a ChatGPT-like chatbot, which you can invoke at any time. You can use the chatbot to talk about the tab you’re looking at, other tabs you have open, and even your browsing history. It can answer questions, find information, compile various things into a single thread, and more.

Chrome with a chatbot. That’s Dia. On purpose. “As much as I personally loved Arc,” Miller says, “I just couldn’t ignore the data that said there was too much novelty for people to try it.” Arc data showed that once people got it, they were hooked, but most people never got it. “When we started building Dia, the fact that it had horizontal tabs was not so much strategic as introspective. It was the right thing to do.”

When I point out to Miller that spending your days nattering away with a chatbot is also a pretty novel thing, he stops me. That’s the thing, he says: it’s not. ChatGPT is the fastest-growing application in the history of the internet, the industry is already reorienting around chat, and talking to AI is already second nature among young people in particular. “You talk to college students or high school students,” Miller says, “and they are talking to this thing like a person.”

Dia’s ability to reference a bunch of tabs at once is its most impressive initial feature. Image: David Pierce / The Verge

Early Dia testers have, largely without guidance from The Browser Company, used its AI helper for meal planning, for study help, and for dating and friend advice. “One of the things we’re seeing is that a lot of people start with chat before they even start a project,” Miller says. “Before they open an application, before they do Google searches, their first instinct is to open their computer and ask AI a question or for a plan.” Over the last year or so, even Miller has found himself leaning on AI chat more often and for more things. You can find this horrifying and dystopian if you want to — a small part of Miller might agree — but the trends don’t lie.

If you believe these AI relationships are both profound and inevitable, building a web browser around them makes perfect sense. This is becoming accepted wisdom: Perplexity is building a browser, OpenAI has long been reported to be doing so, and AI companies all over are lining up to buy Chrome if it ever goes up for sale. Google, meanwhile, is busy integrating Gemini into Chrome while it still can. When The Browser Company started, its big bet was that browsers matter more than we realized. Now, everyone has realized.

You can learn an awful lot about someone just by watching them browse the web

There are three great reasons to build a browser for your AI. The first is simply that you can learn an awful lot about someone just by watching them browse the web. “How does the system understand everything you’re doing throughout the day?” says Hursh Agrawal, The Browser Company’s CTO. “Where you click, where you type — how do you scrape all the pages you’re looking at?” The Dia team found ways to quickly find and store the important bits of a website, as well as to discern which sites are relevant to you and which you’d rather never hear about again. All that data and history then feeds back into every chat interaction. Over time, Agrawal says, personalization has become Dia’s most important feature.

The browser’s second big advantage is the URL bar. “The most valuable thing in this new world,” Agrawal says, “is the fact that the browser owns CMD-T and the omnibox, because that’s the single entry point into your computer where you express intent — it’s the most-used text box on your computer.” This is so true that one way the US government plans to break up Google’s search monopoly is by forcing the company to sell Chrome, thus taking away the omnibox.

Within Dia, every tab and window starts with an omnibox. If you type the name of a website, it should just take you there. If you type something that sounds like web search, you should get web search results. And if you ask for something an AI assistant can handle, it should bring up not just the assistant, but the right version of the assistant with the right data and skills required to help you get stuff done.

I used Dia’s AI both to find this paper, and to ask questions about it. Image: David Pierce / The Verge

Rather than try to build one all-purpose chatbot like Gemini, or ask you to choose between a million purpose-built models like ChatGPT, The Browser Company has invested a lot in what Agrawal calls “the routing system.” Dia mostly doesn’t run on its own models, and after months of trying, The Browser Company has given up on trying to compete in that space. Instead, the company is building what it calls “skills” on top of existing models, helping combine prompts and models to match your needs to the right tools. “And crucially,” Agrawal says, “we can have custom UI and custom memory systems for each skill.”

When you ask Dia to find you a coat, the assistant might activate a shopping skill, which knows all the stuff you’ve been looking at from Amazon and Anthropologie; when you ask it to draft an email, a writing skill can see both all the emails you’ve written and the authors you love reading.

The Browser Company thinks of the skills system a bit like the iPhone’s App Store, says head of product engineering Tara Feener. “It’s really about how do we unlock really specific value in the tasks and things you’re already doing in the browser?” Right now, most AI systems want to be superapps, able to be all things for all people all the time. By being more specific and focused, Dia could do individual jobs better (and cheaper); by getting the routing system right, it could do all that and still feel seamless.

Dia doesn’t just see every webpage you visit — it can see everything in every site you’re logged into.

The third thing browsers have going for them is slightly less obvious but maybe even more powerful: cookies. Since Dia stores the cookies you get from every website on the web, it is effectively able to interact with all those websites on your behalf. That means Dia doesn’t just see every webpage you visit — it can see everything in every site you’re logged into.

Right now, Agrawal says, Dia mostly uses cookies to grab more information from websites you visit, but it could do much more. Someday, in a future filled with AI agents that can browse the web and do stuff on your behalf, your browser becomes a powerful command center for all the bots. The Browser Company actually built a tool like this, Agrawal says. “We used it extensively to book meetings, make reservations, all kinds of stuff you can do with your cookies.” The problem the team discovered was that the tech wasn’t perfect, and people didn’t like the feeling that their web browser was operating out of their control. For now, there’s not much agency in Dia. But that’ll change.

Dia says it doesn’t know my social security number. But it could if it wanted to! Image: David Pierce / The Verge

With all that power, though, comes plenty of problems. The first is just the feeling that the browser gives you. The first time Dia makes you aware that it knows your social security number, because you typed it in once, is that going to read as helpful or horrifying? Your browser has always known a staggering amount about you, but never before has it reflected what it knows back to you so directly. Agrawal says The Browser Company has done a lot of work on figuring out which data — be it health, financial, or otherwise — is simply too important to be saved. And he hopes it’ll never recite your social security number, even if it knows it.

Agrawal is also careful to note that all your data is stored and encrypted on your computer. “Whenever stuff is sent up to our service for processing,” he says, “it stays up there for milliseconds and then it’s wiped.” Arc has had a few security issues over time, and Agrawal says repeatedly that privacy and security have been core to Dia’s development from the very beginning. Over time, he hopes almost everything in Dia can happen locally.

So what does all this add up to? At first, Dia is a browser that lets you chat with your tabs. That’s more or less Dia’s marketing tagline, and it’s the browser’s main job for now. I’ve seen demos of Dia cross-referencing various job interview materials, across several tabs, to put together an overview of a person’s performance. I’ve seen how you might use Dia to summarize Slack conversations and write replies of your own, or how it could help you examine a pull request in GitHub. Most of this isn’t new stuff — it’s just that the pieces are baked together, so you don’t have to copy and paste, download and upload, or even take screenshots. The bot sees the browser, and vice versa.

But in the long run, if Miller and The Browser Company are right about where AI is headed, your web browser could become much more than just a web browser. It could become the app that is with you everywhere, that knows you best, that can help you with anything. If that’s the future, every company needs to race to be the app you start to build a relationship with, because the switching costs will be painful. Miller compares it to switching music apps, saying, “There’s a reason I’ve never switched to Apple Music, even though it works better in the Apple ecosystem. It just really does not know my music tastes in the way that Spotify has accumulated over time.”

Dia, he hopes, will get better and more personalized every time you open a tab. And you eventually won’t love your browser because of the way it works with tabs — you’ll love it because of the way it works with you.

Source link