Now that the headline is out of the way, we have to admit: it’s an odd experience writing an acquisition announcement. How do you fit five years of sweat, risk, and late nights into a few paragraphs? Especially when we still feel at the beginning of what we set out to do.

In truth, this piece forced us to ask a hard question “What does it mean to win?” It can be uncomfortable to confront your true motivations and your full aspirations. This experience forced us to do just that. Why are we here?

For us, our bet has always been about the web browser as the future of computing — to make the quality of our lives online better. From Arc to Dia, our unwavering belief has been that the browser is the most important — and most neglected — software in modern life. It’s the center of gravity on our computers, and yet it hadn’t evolved in over a decade.

And from the beginning, we chose to tell our story publicly because we want to ask these questions openly. Even when that left us more vulnerable to judgment. For five years, across three products and two brands, we’ve shared the highs and the lows, the good and the ugly. Which is why we feel an obligation to follow through now, at the most important moment in our company’s life so far.

But first, and most importantly, we want to explain what this means for the products so many of you have come to know, love, and help build alongside us:

• Dia will remain our focus, with new resources to bring it to other platforms faster.

• Arc and Arc Search will continue to exist, and we’ll share a long-term plan soon.

• Our largest vision, a cross-platform browser as an OS, is now closer than ever.

And as always, we’ll keep sharing openly with you as we go.

With that, here’s why we decided to enter an agreement to be acquired by Atlassian — to go faster than ever before — and the three questions we asked ourselves in making this decision.

Let’s get into it.

1. What does it mean to win.

At the simplest level: we did this to win.

Anyone building a technology company today knows that building the best product is no longer enough. Being the first to the field isn’t enough. Creativity and craft alone aren’t enough. Making Dia into the category‑winning AI browser demands distribution — not just scale but speed to match it. Atlassian brings both in spades.

Atlassian needs no introduction for their excellence in the workplace. They serve millions of people, millions of teams, and over 80% of the Fortune 500 — the kind of distribution engine that takes decades to build.

For two decades, they’ve built tools trusted by the world’s most important leaders and teams. People we respect and admire. They’re disciplined, profitable, and relentlessly long-term minded.

We chose Atlassian because their strengths complement our gaps.

And most importantly, like us, they believe the browser is becoming the new operating system.

In short, this deal is about winning, together. And we are not ashamed of our unwavering desire to win. That’s why we’re unapologetic about teaming up with a partner who is world-class in the ways we are not. Bringing real advantages to Dia at the exact moment they matter most, just as the AI browser wars begin.

Together, Dia has a real shot at becoming central to the next great platform shift.

Together, we’re taking our seat at the table.

2. What are we sprinting towards.

Rocket fuel doesn’t mean much without direction.

Through this acquisition, Dia remains the future — this deal simply accelerates it. In the coming months, we will bring Dia to every platform faster than we could have previously imagined. Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, enterprise. We’ll invest even more in security, sync, and privacy. We will grow both our team and its ambitions.

And continuity matters, too. I will still be CEO of The Browser Company. Hursh will still be CTO. Our full team remains intact. Arc and Arc Search will continue. We’ll keep pushing the boundaries of building products with creativity and care. We’ll continue running the same kinds of bold storytelling experiments that have defined us. And we’ll keep striving to show, in big and small ways, that it’s possible to build both good and well. That you don’t have to compromise.

But honestly, you should expect more than continuity. You should expect acceleration.

In the immediate term, that means three things:

• More focused. We’ve always believed the best of AI should be accessible to anyone. With Dia’s early learnings and Atlassian’s decades of expertise, we now know AI’s greatest impact will be in the work we do every day. What it has done for developers, it can and should do for everyone — from analysts to filmmakers. Everyone deserves to do their best work. And work starts in the browser.

• More integrated. If you’ve been with us a while, you know we often say our tabs are now our apps. Some of our most impactful features, like Github Live Folders and Calendar Previews, came from simply making those apps better in the browser. Our latest prototypes streamline workflows you repeat dozens of times a day, every day — whether asking Dia about your email or calendar, or building Skills that connect apps with a sentence. Your tabs are your work, and we’ll be deepening integrations with the tools you use every day.

• More protected. One of the most important things to our team: you will never be the product. Atlassian’s mission is in building and selling exceptional software for teams. That means our incentives are aligned with yours: protect your privacy, your time, your trust. Enterprise-grade security. No targeted ads. Ever. We’d rather a business model that bets on being so good your boss will want to foot the bill for more of it — any day of the week.

In short, this is our chance to finally deliver on the idea that brought us together from the start, with even more focus and direction: that the browser can be reimagined for how we work today. And hope to work in 2030.

We (still) believe the browser is the future of computing. And with Atlassian, we have the opportunity to make that vision real, for you and hopefully many millions more.

3. What are our non negotiables.

For us, we had three non negotiables: our team, our vision, and our values.

And while we weighed each one equally — our team remains independent, everyone will have a home at Atlassian, and our vision for Dia remains at the center — a large part of why we chose Atlassian is values. Now more than ever. Not the kind you hang on a wall, but the ones you see in the work itself.

For twenty years they’ve built software trusted by the world’s most important teams — consistently, profitably, and with the long view in mind. They believe in utility over noise, in building things that last. They believe in teams (it’s literally their stock ticker). Their founder, Mike, even offered to help us out during the SVB banking crisis, without us even asking. That’s who they are.

And that matters. Because what we build in these next few years — how we choose to bring AI into the world — will have far-reaching consequences. For our workday. For our jobs. For what our kids get educated to do. The partner we choose here shapes the version of that future we get. Or at least the one that we wake up every day to go build.

The founding idea of The Browser Company was simple: the browser is the future of computing. But underneath that was a deeper conviction: better is possible. We were a group of people who grew up loving the internet — but also felt how much it had let us down. Instead of connection, it gave us noise. Instead of creativity, it gave us endless notifications and busywork. Something had been taken from us, individually and collectively.

So for five years, while we built Arc, then Dia, there was always more at stake than just software. We wanted to prove that you could build tools that put people first again. Tools that gave back freedom, focus, and joy. This deal is fuel for that mission. It’s not about selling out. It’s about scaling up — so the vision we’ve been chasing doesn’t stay small, but reaches many, many millions.

With Atlassian, we get the resources to keep pushing, without compromising who we are or what we stand for.

So now, back to work.

Our job now? To deliver this vision, in a way that only we can.

And that means, more Dia. More useful, for more workflows, on more platforms, sooner. This new energy all starts next month — with our biggest Dia release since our beta.

It also means more Browser Company. More of the team that you’ve grown to know, the values we’ve tried to live up to, the feeling we hope to bring to software — remaining independent while growing alongside our new partners.

And finally, it means hiring aggressively in the coming months — especially in ML, AI engineering, design, GTM, context engineering, security, and PM roles — and looking for trial partners for our Teams offering. Please get in touch if either sounds of interest to you, I’m josh@thebrowser.company.

In our Internet Computer video, I shared that my personal mission was to realize our “internet computer” vision before my son turns ten. He turns five in a few months. We have our work cut out for us over the next five years, and we promise to never forget why we’re here.

In the meantime, we’re gonna get back to work. There’s a whole lot more to do.

Thank you for being here with us.

And we’ll see you on the internet,

— Josh & Hursh

The working title for this piece was “Why would The Browser Company build a boring browser?”

It’s a question we wrestled with early on in this journey.

How do you pair power with simplicity? How do you reinterpret creativity? What do you reinvent? When? And, maybe most importantly, why?

Nearly a week into Dia’s private beta, our very own Charlie Deets — former design lead on Apple’s Safari and product designer at WhatsApp and Facebook — shares our design team’s journey in familiarity, simplicity, and intentional novelty.

Let’s get in to it.

10am on a Tuesday Morning

For most people, switching browsers is a daunting task. People rely on their browser to get things done. They don't have the time to learn new workflows or risk being slower at their jobs.

Their life is what matters the most. If they don’t have their passwords, bookmarks, or can't find how to do a routine action, they will abandon the browser immediately.

While Dia is fundamentally a browser at heart, one of the things that makes it special is how it offers convenient access to your whole internet life as context for Chat. This is where Dia begins to really shine, deliver significant value, and become a product you can’t live without.

In order to give people the space to explore Dia’s novel value, we needed to get out of the way with the browser. The first objective of Dia’s design is to allow anyone to switch to Dia at 10am on a Tuesday morning.

Familiar, but elevated

We have been calling this “Tuesday morning” technique familiarity, and it is at the core of how we design Dia.

Whereas our first browser, Arc, unapologetically innovates on core browsing mechanics like the tab bar, bookmarks, and tab groups; Dia starts all core browsing features in a place where anyone who has used a browser before would immediately understand.

We take liberties with this principle by adding extra convenience and craft on top of familiar features. But we choose to do this only when it provides value above and beyond what a user is expecting — without diminishing the recognizable patterns that make Dia easy to learn.

We call this concept elevated. You can see examples of these design decisions throughout the browser’s UI.

Craft.

These may be small changes, but in aggregate, they meaningfully shift the experience.

We extend the color of the page up into the active tab UI to help reinforce the relationship between the browser and the tab contents.

We fluidly animate the most commonly used UI like the Assistant Bar.

Convenience.

With all our core browser features, we explore innumerable paths before settling on what often appears to be an obvious solution.

One example: the Bookmarks Bar. While we had many creative takes on a Bookmarks Bar, some of which we truly loved, we wanted to ship something no one would have to learn. Something people could use and feel comfortable with. The nicest version of that UI they had ever used.

Simplicity.

Another way we elevate Dia’s design is by avoiding duplicative UI elements in the interface: we believe there should be a single obvious way to accomplish any task.

This principle helps keep Dia simple and fresh in comparison to some of the more established competitors that support duplicative or legacy workflows.

We tend to err on the side of minimalism in the core UI, even if difficult to achieve:

• We never show the user an update banner. We do this by aggressively updating when the application is backgrounded, not in use, or when the computer is asleep. We avoid user data loss by alerting the user to tabs that have incomplete input fields. This has been a challenging problem that required close collaboration between design and engineering.

• The bookmark button and site settings only appear when you hover over the URL. Rather than displaying these icons full time, we display them when the user is showing the intent to interact with the site. This helps preserve a sense of calmness in the core UI.

• Profile selectors are only shown if you are actively using a profile. Most people don’t use profiles, but people who do desire them to be very prominent. We balance this by leaning into the polarized user needs.

• Our navigation bar uses custom machine learning to route your input to a website, a Google search, a LLM-only result, or a LLM result that also uses and summarizes web data. You get the result you were looking for without thinking: it just works. This feature is critical to Dia’s experience and was again the result of close collaboration between engineering and design.

Finally, where we can, we try to humanize the browser UI and make it feel more approachable.

For example, instead of showing you a long URL string, in Dia’s URL bar we display the page title to help you recognize the page more clearly. The domain remains visible for recognition and security. We retain full URL functionality with this approach; when you hover over the bar, the URL is shown and you can edit it inline. We also provide users a view option who wish to see the full URL at all times.

The novelty budget

Every product has a novelty budget. This is how much effort people will put into learning something new in order to get value out of it.

In Dia we spend our novelty budget on our Chat features. To some degree, these are features where familiarity will not be as successful of a technique, because there are less established patterns for these actions.

One of our goals when designing novelty is to express the power available to you in your actions. We do this through the use of animation and color. While Dia’s overall design is quite restrained, in these moments we also aim to deliver our brand feeling through this UI.

In Dia, your Chats benefit from browser context. So we try to make the act of attaching relevant tabs as fast and obvious as possible. We do this primarily with a ‘mention’ interaction. We lean into the idea of familiarity through this behavior, as it is the same experience as tagging an entity on social media.

You can use the @ symbol in the input to reference tabs, history, bookmarks and more. You can also manually attach any of these references from the menu UI at the bottom left of the composer.

When you mention multiple tabs, we stack them in an animated pile at the beginning of a Chat. You can hover the pile and the attachments playfully animate. You can click to see all tabs revealed. The pile UI is mostly superfluous but aims to reinforce the value of adding context.

When you open the Chat sidebar, our brand animation swells into the view to remind you that you have the power of an assistant at your fingertips. This animation also helps communicate to the user that this is a fully integrated AI product and the page you are looking at will be used as context.

Skills are a feature of Dia that allow you to power up and personalize Chat responses. When we present you information through one of our Skills, we style it appropriately to help reinforce that you are actively using a skill.

In this example the ‘code’ Skill is showing you an answer with your preferences in mind. Skills are automatically invoked in response to your Chat messages, but we also allow you to manually invoke them using a slash command in any composer.

For those who want to personalize Dia further, we have the ability to create Custom Skills which can be accessed using the slash command anywhere in the product. This helps people who really want to customize and push the experience of Dia to the limits.

The future

We are up for some incredible challenges ahead.

One, it will be important in the near term to hold our principles of remaining recognizable and accessible as a web browser, while continuing to innovate and push forward new functionality with our Chat and Skills features. We want people to come to this product and feel comfortable, but also benefit from the innovation and features we are building. There will undoubtedly be tensions that arise because of this duality. Dia is meant to be a mainstream consumer product that anyone can use.

Two, we want to bring more of the functionality people love from Arc to Dia. Concepts like sidebar tabs, tab management and incoming link routing for profiles are high on our priority list. We don’t want to rush or copy and paste these features from Arc because we believe in approaching these problems through the principles of Dia and the new mechanics the technology enables.

Three, in the long run, our product strategy becomes less defined because we will need to adapt to the world and how people are using technology. Will a browser first experience be the right UI? Will the browser be an assistant to your Chat? We are going to pay very close attention to how people are using Dia and be unafraid to adapt quickly to new behaviors. We continue to assume we don’t know.

From the team that designed Dia and the entirety of The Browser Company, thank you for reading. We hope you will enjoy Dia and find it truly useful. We are always listening for feedback, so send it our way!

-Charlie

P.S. If you would like to try Dia, here is an invite link!

Dear Arc members,

You’re probably wondering what happened. One day we were all-in on Arc. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, we started building something new: Dia.

From the outside, this pivot might look abrupt. Arc had real momentum. People loved it. But inside, the decision was slower and more deliberate than it may seem. So I want to walk you through it all and answer your questions — why we started this company, what Arc taught us, what happens to it now, and why we believe Dia is the next step.

1. What we got wrong

2. Why we built Arc

3. Where Arc fell short

4. Why we didn’t integrate Dia into Arc

5. Will we open source Arc

6. Building Dia

What we got wrong

To start, what would we do differently if we could do it all over again? Too many things to name. But I’ll keep it to three.

First, I would’ve stopped working on Arc a year earlier. Everything we ended up concluding — about growth, retention, how people actually used it — we had already seen in the data. We just didn’t want to admit it. We knew. We were just in denial.

Second, I would’ve embraced AI fully, sooner and unapologetically. The truth is I was obsessed. I’d stay up late, after my family went to bed, playing with ChatGPT— not for work, but out of sheer curiosity.

But I also felt embarrassed. I hated so much of the industry hype (and how I was contributing to it). The buzzwords. The self-importance. It made me pull back from my own curiosity, even though it was real and deep. You can see this in how cautious our Arc Max rollout was. I should have embraced my inspiration sooner and more boldly.

If you go back to our Act II video — when we announced we were going to bring AI to the heart of Arc — it ends with a demo of a prototype we called Arc Explore. That idea is basically where Dia and a lot of other AI-native products are headed now. That’s not to say we were ahead of our time, or anything like that. It’s just to say our instincts were there long before our hearts caught up.

Third, I would’ve communicated very differently. We care so much about the people we build for. Always have. Saying it “pains me” to have made people mad doesn’t really do it justice. In some moments, we were too transparent — like announcing Dia before we had the details to share. In others, not transparent enough — like taking too long to answer questions we knew people were asking.

A few years ago, a mentor told me to put a sticky note on my desk that said: “The truth will set you free.” I know. It sounds like a fortune cookie. But it’s served me well, again and again. If I regret anything most, it’s not using it more. This essay is our truth. It’s uncomfortable to share. But we hope you can feel it was written with care and good intent.

Why we built Arc

In order to answer your real questions — why we pivoted to Dia, whether we can open source Arc, and more — I need to share a bit of background from the past. It informs what is possible (and not) today.

At its core, we started The Browser Company with a simple belief: the browser is the most important software in your life — and it wasn’t getting the attention it deserved.

Back in 2019, it was already clear to us that everything was moving into the browser. My wife, who doesn’t work in tech, was living in desktop Chrome all day. My six year old niece was doing school entirely in web apps. The macro trends all pointed the same direction too: cloud revenue was surging, breakout startups were browser-based (writing blog posts like “Meet us in the browser”), crypto ran through browser extensions, WebAssembly was enabling novel experiences, and so on.

Even back then, it felt like the dominant operating system on desktop wasn’t Windows or macOS anymore — it was the browser. But Chrome and Safari still felt like the browsers we grew up with. They hadn’t evolved with the shift. And both of these trends have only accelerated since. Some companies only issue enterprise versions of Chrome with new employee laptops (their companies fully run on SaaS apps), and Chrome and Safari remain essentially unchanged.

So that’s why we made Arc. We wanted to build something that felt like “your home on the internet” — for work projects, personal life, all the hours you spent in your browser every single day. Something that felt more like a product from Nintendo or Disney than from a browser vendor. Something with taste, care, feeling.

We wanted you to open Arc every morning and think, “This is mine, my space.” And we called this north star vision the “Internet Computer.”

But it increasingly became clear that Arc was falling short of that aspiration.

Where Arc fell short

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.

On top of that, Arc lacked cohesion — in both its core features and core value. It was experimental, that was part of its charm, but also its complexity. And the revealed preferences of our members show this. 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.

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.

But these are the details. These are things you can toil over, measure, sculpt, remove.

The part that was hard to admit, is that Arc — and even Arc Search — were too incremental. They were meaningful, yes. But ultimately not at the scale of improvements that we aspired to. Or that could breakout as a mass-market product. If we were serious about our original mission, we needed a technological unlock to build something truly new.

In 2023, we started seeing it happen, across categories that felt just as old and cemented as browsers. ChatGPT and Perplexity were actually threatening Google. Cursor was reshaping the IDE. What’s fascinating about both — search engines and IDEs — is that their users had been doing things the same way for decades. And yet, they were suddenly open to change.

This was the moment we were waiting for. This was a fundamental shift that could challenge user behavior and maybe lead to a true reimagining of the browser. Hopefully you can now see why Dia felt like a no-brainer. At least for us and our original aspirations.

So when people ask how venture capital influenced us — or why we didn’t just charge for Arc and run a profitable business — I get it. They’re fair questions. But to me, they miss the forest for the trees. If the goal was to build a small, profitable company with a great team and loyal customers, we wouldn’t have chosen to try and build the successor to the web browser – the most ubiquitous piece of software there is. The point of this was always bigger for us: to build good, cared for software that could have an impact for people at real scale.

So if Arc fell short, why build something new versus evolve it?

Why we didn’t integrate Dia into Arc

It’s a great question. And for those who followed our podcast last year, you’ll know that it’s one we spent the entire summer grappling with before understanding that Dia and Arc were two separate products.

For starters, in many ways, we have approached Dia as an opportunity to fix what we got wrong with Arc.

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. This is now the idea behind Dia: hide complexity behind familiar interfaces.

Second, speed isn’t a tradeoff anymore — it’s the foundation. Dia’s architecture is fast. Really fast. Arc was bloated. We built too much, too quickly. With Dia, we started fresh from an architecture perspective and prioritized performance from the start. Specifically, sunsetting our use of TCA and SwiftUI to make Dia lightweight, snappy, and responsive.

Third, security is at the forefront. Dia is a different kind of product – to meet it, we grew our security engineering team from one to five. We’re invested in red teaming, bug bounties, and internal audits. Our goal is to set the standard for small startups. Which is even more important in a world of AI, especially as more AI agents come online. We want to get out in front.

These are all things that need to be part of a product’s foundation. Not afterthoughts. As we pushed the boundaries of whether this truly was Arc 2.0 last summer, we found that there were shortcomings in Arc that were too large to tackle retroactively, and that building a new type of software (and fast) required a new type of foundation.

Will we open source Arc

Which brings us to the present.

As we started exploring what might come next, we never stopped maintaining Arc. We do regular Chromium upgrades, fix security vulnerabilities, related bugs, and more. Honestly, most people haven’t even noticed that we stopped actively building new features — which says something about what most people want from Arc (stability not more stuff to learn).

But it is true: we are not actively developing the core product experience like we used to. Naturally, people have asked: will we open source it? Will we sell it? We’ve considered both extensively.

But the truth is it’s complicated.

Arc isn’t just a Chromium fork. It runs on custom infrastructure we call ADK — the Arc Development Kit. Think of it as an internal SDK for building browsers (especially those with imaginative interfaces). That’s our secret sauce. It lets ex-iOS engineers prototype native browser UI quickly, without touching C++. That’s why most browsers don’t dare to try new things. It’s too costly. Too complex to break from Chrome.

ADK is also the foundation of Dia. So while we’d love to open source Arc someday, we can’t do that meaningfully without also open-sourcing ADK. And ADK is still core to our company’s value. That doesn’t mean it’ll never happen. If the day comes where it no longer puts our team or shareholders at risk, we’d be excited to share what we’ve built with the world. But we’re not there yet.

In the meantime, please know this: we’re not trying to shut Arc down. We know you use it and rely on it. Many of our family and friends do, too. We still love it, spent years of our life on it — and whether it’s through us or the community, our hope and intention is that Arc finds a future that’s just as considered as its past. If you have ideas, I’d love to hear from you. I’m josh@thebrowser.company.

Building Dia

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.

Let me be even more clear: traditional browsers, as we know them, will die. Much in the same way that search engines and IDEs are being reimagined. That doesn’t mean we’ll stop searching or coding. It just means the environments we do it in will look very different, in a way that makes traditional browsers, search engines, and IDEs feel like candles — however thoughtfully crafted. We’re getting out of the candle business. You should too.

“Wait, so The Browser Company isn’t making browsers anymore?” You better believe we are! But an AI browser is going to be different than a Web browser — as it should be. I believe this more than ever, and we’re already seeing it in three ways:

1. Webpages won’t be the primary interface anymore. Traditional browsers were built to load webpages. But increasingly, webpages — apps, articles, and files — will become tool calls with AI chat interfaces. In many ways, chat interfaces are already acting like browsers: they search, read, generate, respond. They interact with APIs, LLMs, databases. And people are spending hours a day in them. If you’re skeptical, call a cousin in high school or college — natural language interfaces, which abstract away the tedium of old computing paradigms, are here to stay.

2. But the Web isn’t going anywhere — at least not anytime soon. Figma and The New York Times aren’t becoming less important. Your boss isn’t ditching your team’s SaaS tools. Quite the opposite. We’ll still need to edit documents, watch videos, read weekend articles from our favorite publishers. Said more directly: webpages won’t be replaced — they’ll remain essential. Our tabs aren’t expendable, they are our core context. That is why we think the most powerful interface to AI on desktop won’t be a web browser or an AI chat interface — it’ll be both. Like peanut butter and jelly. Just as the iPhone combined old categories into something radically new, so too will AI browsers. Even if it’s not ours that wins.

3. New interfaces start from familiar ones. In this new world, two opposing forces are simultaneously true. How we all use computers is changing much faster (due to AI) than most people acknowledge. Yet at the same time, we’re much farther from completely abandoning our old ways than AI insiders give credit for. Cursor proved this thesis in the coding space: the breakthrough AI app of the past year was an (old) IDE — designed to be AI-native. OpenAI confirmed this theory when they bought Windsurf (another AI IDE), despite having Codex working quietly in the background. We believe AI browsers are next.

This is why we’re building Dia. It is the opportunity to chase the product of our original ambition: a true successor to the browser — maybe even the “Internet Computer” we’ve been building toward all along — only in ways we couldn’t have predicted.

To be clear, we might fail. Or we might partially succeed but not win. We still assume we don’t know. But we’re confident about this: five years from now, the most-used AI interfaces on desktop will replace the default browsers of yesteryear. Like today, there will probably be a few of them (Chrome, Safari, Edge). But the point is this, the next Chrome is being built right now. Whether it’s Dia or not.

Your home on the internet

The Browser Company is a team that assembled for the chance — however slim — to build something that rewired how we use our computers. Something that might, just might, be used by hundreds of millions. A piece of software that actually shapes how people live and work. Not just an app, but an Internet Computer. That’s what drew us in. And that’s why we’re proud of the decisions we made.

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. Because we think the intent matters. And we think that’s what got us this far.

This is our truth, and we sincerely hope that you’ll like what comes next.

– Josh

P.S. For those of you who do want to try Dia, we’re excited to open access for Arc members next, as the first expansion of our alpha beyond students.

On June 1st, we removed one of Arc’s most unique features.

As much love as we felt toward Arc’s “one window to rule them all” philosophy, we simply got so much feedback about the confusion that could result from having the same Today tabs across different Arc windows. So we changed it.

Two and a half months later, on August 24th, we changed it back — a total 180 on something we thought we had figured out.

Why? Probably better to show you than tell you.

Below is an internal memo from designer Peter Vidani, presented in its entirety.

On Syncing Today Tabs

June 30th, 2023

Hi everyone!

I want to give an update to the Today tabs syncing project we launched in Okra.

After much consideration, we have decided to reverse this change. That is, we’ve decided to go back to the Arc where Today tabs sync across windows and machines.

How did we get here?

The decision to sync Today tabs was made fairly early in the company. And while it was made with at least as much consideration as today, the low membership count made it difficult to validate.

As time went on, this differentiation in Arc became one of our top membership complaints. Especially from new members who expected tabs in windows to behave like other browsers and were fairly confused as to why we did it this way.

Over time, this feedback became particularly hard to hear as it contributed to Day-1 churn. Personally I believed this was, “a dumb reason for someone to not use Arc,” and that we should no longer sync Today tabs this way. When we were about to make the change, I told Ellis we could frame it as a “finally” launch, as in, “we finally did what you all wanted.”

But at launch and in the weeks that passed, a new top membership complaint emerged — that we had dropped an important, even critical, feature of Arc. Members point out that this change reduced the value of other core Arc features like Spaces and Pins. In our own language, the change violated an important value of ours: Never lose a tab.

Issues with syncing tabs

The previous model of syncing tabs was not perfect. Membership heard from new members about its confusing differentiation, but it also had some of its own inherent flaws.

• If you are used to the way other browsers work, you were likely to close a tab by accident now and then. You may have opened a new window, saw the tab was available in the other window, and felt safe to close it only to see both were now gone.

• Two instances of the same tab could diverge. If both had a form, video, call, or any dynamic state, the progression of one could wind up completely different from the other. Without much effort, data loss was likely.

• Lastly, it did contribute to churn. For new members, it’s one of the first things they notice. And if they feel that strain before understanding spaces, boosts, renaming, or copying a URL without trackers, we just end up looking odd.

Going back to this model will not be a slam dunk. There are real areas to improve — Arc-specific problems that we introduced and need to close out for the system to work as expected. In some ways that will be education, and in some ways new features.

Issues with not syncing tabs

But the current, un-synced model has its own issues. While it appears to match the model of other browsers, Spaces and similar features introduce new ways of getting lost in the app.

• We use a “Restore” button to help with the times you accidentally close a window full of tabs, but we hear from members and internally that this created a new feeling of friction, with a new decision to make.

• Members are likely to lose tabs in a new way: closing a window not knowing they also closed another space’s tabs. Or closing a window thinking they were in sync because Top Apps and Pinned make them look so alike.

• Finding tabs across windows is hard enough, but with multiple spaces it gets way harder.

• The value of spaces goes down. Should I make a space, or a new window? Another way to feel like you’re using Arc wrong.

Put simply: synced tabs was not perfect, but it was easy to understand. It made Arc feel smaller.

Lastly, there’s the higher-level idea of product differentiation.

While not as important as truly improving the browser, there is long-term risk in following Chrome’s lead. Surely some of our growth can be attributed to Arc being a cool, hyped product. To some members, we can do no wrong. But once that inevitability fades, we’re left only with the product we built. And if in three years that product is “Chrome but used to be cool,” we’ll have no foundation to stand on.

Arc isn’t for everyone — we know this. But I think a more accurate framing is, “Arc isn’t for everyone today.” We’ve seen some members take over a year to finally come around. We can get them sooner if it’s 100% familiar on Day 1, but familiarity isn’t that interesting if we’re not solving anything new.

Next steps

The next steps will be to get an internal build of tabs syncing across windows, which we’ll be kicking off in Cycle 2 of Potato. During that time we will also consider improvements we can make to the experience — fix things that were broken about the last model. We’ll consider these changes, their scope, and whether or not it makes sense to revert the change with or without them.

Some possible improvements:

• Solve the issue of Window 1’s instance of a tab trailing off from Window 2’s instance of a tab.

• Commit to a more Arc-like ⌘N

  • E.g. Little Arc, or new temporary space

  • Have a strong point-of-view on why a member should need a blank slate and what form that takes

• More restore options in the Archive: restore spaces, days, folders, and other smart groupings.

Thanks to everyone who supported this project going in either direction over the last few months. Frankly it feels weird to me to make this change given I was so recently a champion of the current version! But we’re early as a company, and changes like this will eventually be almost impossible, so I’m grateful for the advice and encouragement.

I want to specifically thank Sherry who put an incredible amount of work into building this top Membership ask. The project was challenging not just technically, but to wrap our heads around and test against all the different ways it could go wrong.

By Josh Miller. Watch him narrate the piece here.

I cried the first time I saw the sun set in a James Turrell Skyspace.

Believe it or not, this is a normal reaction. Most people tear up at least a little bit when they literally come face to face with the age-old question…

Why is the sky blue?

I sat, as you do, in a small stone room with a large, square cutout in the ceiling… surrounded on all sides by colored light. Through this cutout you can see the sky, but this sky isn’t exactly as it seems.

The 40 minute “exhibit” lasts from dusk until dark. As the sun begins to go down, the color of the sky changes along with the lights in the room — slowly but vibrantly.

Dictated by the changing light on the ceiling, it was like the sky lost all agency, turning every color imaginable. Colors I never thought possible!

“This thing I’m looking at… is it still the sky?” I asked myself more than once.

It wasn’t long before other perceptions were called into question. Depth, time, space. The little stone room, it inverted them all. 

And I guess that’s the whole point — what Turrell was trying to say without having to say it. How easily our perceptions and preconceived notions of what is and what isn’t can be called into question…

…by something as simple as the act of manipulating light. 

This week, we introduced what we like to think of as a similar ability. But instead of manipulating light, you’re manipulating the fabric of the internet itself.

Its color, texture, typography, and even what parts appear (or disappear) completely.

To change the way the internet looks changes your relationship to everything in it, and reveals the truth — or mystery — behind every site you visit.

And if you change the internet to better reflect you — your personality, preferences, and aesthetic — something even more magical happens.

Our traditional relationship with the web, as viewers, is inverted. For many of us, for the first time, we become the creator.

Why do this?

Not because it’s particularly useful. A purple Twitter written in Comic Sans is not a more practical Twitter, necessarily. But it is yours.

It allows you to frame the digital world using the same light Turrell did. To wrestle back power from the seemingly irrevocable nature of the sky, or of the services we inhabit each day online.

To make a statement. Not political, or even artistic. Just personal, and deeply felt.

We think our world only works in a certain way. But maybe it doesn’t?

What is a phone? What is a president? What is fashion? What is a webpage?

And then something comes along that challenges our perception of what is possible.

What is a phone? What is a president? What is fashion? What is a webpage?

What is a webpage?

When we change our perception of what is possible, we change the future by introducing something that wasn’t there before. Like an internet that can and should be molded by you, not by corporations.

Our digital rectangles — where we spend hours and hours every single day, week over week. Shouldn’t we have a say about how they feel to us?

Now, we do. 

But more than anything, I hope this serves as a reminder that it’s all just made up.

All of it. And a reminder that it can be made and remade over and over again. Always.

That “different” is always possible. That better is always possible. 

A reminder of what could be.

And finally… that your internet, your way, is right there for the taking…

All by the simple act of manipulating light.

When you wake up each morning, do you think: what apps do I want to use?

Or do you wonder instead: what goals do I want to achieve?

For the last decade, our smartphones — the most important computers in our lives — have forced us to think about life in a pretty specific way. “There’s an app for that!” Apple proclaimed, as they laid out the very first home screen in a way anyone could understand.

This was comforting at first, as we built our tool belt of utilities — a million little apps that did just one thing. But today, our digital lives are far more complex. Instead of working inside one app at a time, we work across them, pulling together bits and pieces of each to accomplish the task at hand.

A chat room from one app. A style guide from another. A how-to, and a bug report. And an empty email, to write out what we learned. In our minds, these apps bleed together like watercolors to help us achieve one goal, but on our phones, they’re confined to their own tiny boxes laid out on a perfect grid.

Each of the things we need is but a page inside the apps we use, but we can’t tear them out to create a system that works for us. You can only tap that big brand logo on your home screen and dive in from the top down, each and every time.

As we begun work on Arc for Mobile, we came face to face with truths like these. Things we’d never questioned! And we realized that our lives don’t revolve around apps — they revolve around people. Projects. Goals. Tools. And the space you’ve created to bring it all together, and get something done.

We wondered: how can we better design the computer of the future around this truth?

And we asked: what if our home screens felt more like home?

We initially designed Arc for iPhone to be a mirror for your Spaces on desktop — a place to look for things you’ve saved.

But the more we used it, the more we discovered that it was the missing home screen we didn’t know we needed. It allowed us to pull out just the parts of apps we wanted, whether it was a document, a photo album, a playlist, or a chat room, and organize it inside Spaces for different parts of our lives. Thanks to deep-linking, tapping one of these pinned tabs bounced you right over to that exact place inside another app.

We grew more excited as we realized the same principles underpinned how we organize our homes in real life. Is a home cozy? Spartan? Or cluttered?

No, a home is only what you make it — with all your habits, character, and idiosyncrasies.

The reading corner of your couch, with the slightly frayed cushion beside an always-messy pile of books, still to read. Your desk on a Monday morning, most papers cleared off, except your notebook and planner. Your studio one evening, with your inspiration, materials, and tools all splayed out to every corner.

These spaces are messy and wonderful, and can’t be confined to one grid or system. Because it’s your system.

So why then, when we boot up our computers and smartphones, are we forced to organize everything under a system designed for everyone? Just imagine if all of your furniture was bolted down to a neat grid, or the different rooms in your home were organized by brand instead of purpose!

And so, how might we create a new framework for computing that feels more like home?

We still believe that "if our hope is to create software with feeling, it means inviting people in to craft it for themselves — to mold it to the contours of their unique lives and taste.” And we have a few thoughts on how to make that happen, but if you know us, you know that the prompt is almost always more interesting than the answer.

1. What if you had one mental model for how to find things? For example, one search bar to search all your apps, instead of needing to remember exactly where the search box lives in each of them. You deserve the ability to pull out parts of those apps to form projects — your own little library of things you need.

2. What if you had the right to build your own structure to organize your life? Whether you’re a minimalist with just one Space, everything splayed out, or a productivity pro with a dozen Spaces — one for each and every project — there’s no right or wrong. There’s just what works for you, and you should have the ability to execute it.

3. What if you had the ability to express yourself in your space? While Arc is still limited in how much you can customize your Spaces and Sidebar, we look forward to offering many more ways in the future. Because one wallpaper is not enough to make you feel at home. It’s a soundtrack. A texture. And so much more.

While we can’t fully say we’re now using Arc as our main home screen on iPhone, we do fully believe that the era of computing revolving around apps is nearing its close. It’s just a matter of when.

Apps are incredible tools to get things done, but maybe they aren’t the best filing cabinets, desks, and spaces we need to manage our disparate worlds — and to inspire us to be our best selves.

So, whether you’re an app-maker or just an app-lover, dream with us: how would you design a digital space to help you be your best self?

Our instinct is that dragging apps around a grid is not the only way.

We can dream of something better.

At The Browser Company, we have a belief that says assume you don’t know. It underpins a lot of how and why we started building Arc, and is the starting point to some of the largest decisions we’ve made. A steady mix of intuition, experimentation — and endurance.

Sometimes it’s thrilling.

Other times, much like running, software building can be meandering.

And hard to talk about.

Truthfully, we weren’t quite sure if we should share a true behind the scenes of what product discussions actually look like for our team — but we’re learning to do the things that make us most uncomfortable.

So, here we are! Grab a tea and settle into your corner of the sofa, as our Head of Design, Dustin, and CEO Josh share a glimpse into What We Talk About When We Talk About Product.

Some days it’s about the question behind the question.

Most times, we don’t have a clue.

From us to you —

Your neighborhood Browser Company

by Darin Fisher

When I told my 14-year-old son that I’d be joining The Browser Company, he said “which one?”

It’s hard to think of a better summary of the last 20+ years of web browsers — where most of the innovation could best be labeled as incremental.

And I would know. I’ve been building them.

In 2000, I joined Netscape eager to help make a better browser. Netscape 6 was not that, but from that foundation we created Firefox. In 2005, I joined Google as part of a small team working on Firefox, with a simple focus: improve the web. But a year and half in, it became clear that the best way to do that was to start fresh.

One weekend, I built an initial prototype for “Chrome” — a browser that glued together WebKit in a multi-process embedding. It sounds complicated, but what it did was simple: allow new, more complex apps like Gmail, Maps, and YouTube to run independently. So if a site broke, you wouldn’t lose your whole browser! It was a step function improvement for browsers.

Even with that early prototype, it was clear that the user experience was going to be significantly faster than the status quo, and far more resilient to poorly written web pages. With a lot of work by an amazing team, Chrome was born, and enabled an entire generation of richer and more complex web apps to be created.

Chrome grew to be used by far more people than anyone ever imagined, and I was now running the Chrome engineering org as VP of engineering. But the job didn’t feel remotely done — not to me. What started out as a vision of a better computing experience, in hindsight only partially delivered.

Yes, we could now have more complex apps in our browsers, and, thanks to Chrome’s web computing model, we were no longer as tethered to a specific device. But the core user experience of browsers hadn’t really changed that much from the Netscape days — not as much as people working on these browsers like to tell themselves.

Over time, I came to believe that the web computing model could extend beyond the browser as we knew it — and become the entire computing experience. A few years later, I was also overseeing engineering for Chrome OS, which embodies this idea. And along the way, I helped kickstart Fuchsia OS: web-like computing taken to a much greater extreme.

But, my hopes for web computing always felt limited by both the inertia of what Chrome already was (it’s hard to move the cheese on people), and by Google itself. A company that once oozed innovation now stood in its way. At some point, so much of our focus became navigating a sea of reasons not to innovate, for fear of causing users to see fewer ads. The ads model is an addictive one! And despite my lofty position at the company, this wasn’t something I could change.

As a result, it became clear that it was time for me to leave Google and find another way to realize the better web of my dreams. At the end of 2020, I decided to join some like minded ex-Googlers at Neeva, who shared in the vision of a better user experience on the web, and knew first hand of the ways the ads model is an obstacle to that. So at Neeva, we built a new kind of search engine that’s ad-free, private, and designed only for its customers — the people who actually use the product — not advertisers. What a novel idea!

My focus since then has been building out Neeva’s mobile apps, across iOS and Android. I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to re-think browsing the web on mobile, focusing on features that help you bypass the need to search or get back to the things you were doing before more easily. Things that were near impossible to prioritize on Chrome. And I’m proud of the experience we’ve created, but for me, a better search experience is just part of what’s needed. As you can probably tell, my dream goes beyond search alone.

When I first heard about The Browser Company, it seemed almost too good to be true. Who are these folks, anyway? And what do they know about building a browser?

Earlier this year, I started meeting regularly with Josh and Hursh from The Browser Company in an advisory role. I started using Arc regularly, and it quickly became my default browser. I was kind of surprised at how much better it was than Chrome. Then, over the summer, I came to better understand the larger vision of what The Browser Company is about — and how indeed that name is even a bit tongue in cheek.

The vision of an internet computer strikes so many chords with me, and connects back to what I’ve wanted to create since forever. It’s not enough to just be the browser that most people choose. We need to make the web computing model work better, and it’s going to take another step function or two to get there.

To me, that’s about evolving the browser into a home for all that I do on the internet that I can access from anywhere, feels like it has been tailored especially for me, and where it’s seamless to use apps in concert with one another.

I imagine a browser that is more than just a browser — that makes it easier for me to create on the web, and easier for me to discover what others have created. I dream of the browser fueling a virtuous cycle between creator and consumer, and ultimately growing the web ecosystem.

These are not easy things to do, but I believe they are within reach. How could I not want to roll up my sleeves and help?

So that’s exactly what I’m going to do next — and not as a manager of managers, but as a software engineer. Because if I’m helping build the browser of the future again, I want to be back in the code doing it.

-Darin

P.S. Want to join? We’re hiring for Product Infrastructure, Chromium eng, and more.

To be honest, we weren’t quite sure that Company Values™️ were for us at The Browser Company, until we found a medium that fit the message.

We won’t say much more, as many words have already been written — but we will say that much like the best journeys, it starts somewhere on the road, with no particular destination.

Read Notes on Roadtrips

And for the curious ones — some thoughts on why writing these down felt worthwhile to us, at this point in time, through the words of our very own Abby.

I.

Why are we here?

It’s a question we often ask. And while it’s not our style to dwell on the past, there’s simply no way around the fact that we’re pretty fed up with a certain philosophical framework in Silicon Valley.

It has many names: the growth mindset. OKRs. KPIs. Even Minimalism — the predominant aesthetic of our era. But at its core, it all comes down to one thing: the relentless optimization of everything in our world.

We believe this mindset has led us to a very specific place: one of efficiency, productivity, and profit… but not a place of humanity. Soul. Or feeling.

And when we take a step back, we think feeling is kind of what matters most in this world.

Humor us for a moment and picture your favorite neighborhood restaurant. Ours is a corner spot in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. It has overflowing natural light, handmade textile seat cushions, a caramel wood grain throughout, and colorful ornaments dangling from the ceilings. Can you picture yours? Do you feel the warmth and spirit of the place?

A Silicon Valley optimizer might say, “Well, they don’t brew their coffee at exactly 200 degrees. And the seats look a little ratty. And the ceiling ornaments don’t serve any function.”

But we think that’s exactly the point. That these little, hand-crafted touches give our environment its humanity and spirit. In their absence, we’re left with something universal but utterly sterile — a space that may “perfectly” serve our functional needs, but leave our emotional needs in the lurch.

So why are we here?

To bring humanity back into the software we use every day.

Writing manifestos about the state of the industry has never really been our thing. But as software “eats the world” at an ever-increasing pace, we believe that now is high time for a new approach.

We’d love to tell you about it.

II.

First, let’s get one thing out of the way: there’s no such thing as a neutral algorithm.

At Facebook, this was abundantly clear. The company would put up pie charts of how the average American spends the twenty-four hours in their day. Sleeping, eating, bathroom breaks — it was all accounted for. And the call to action was that Facebook’s software capture as much of this “time spent” as possible. That was the mission. And that’s what the algorithm was designed for.

Time spent. Engagement. Impressions. Today’s most popular software all choose to optimize for one thing or another. And we believe this choice says a whole lot about the companies behind these products. Because what you choose to optimize for impacts the daily lives of millions — if not billions — of people, and not always for the better.

We tested 50 shades of blue to see which one made people buy more things. We ranked life by the amount of likes it received, turning each day into a popularity contest. We optimized our news by what was most engaging, driving the loudest voices to the top. We pivoted our video until every video was… exactly ten minutes long. And numbers went up.

If you try hard, you can remember a time when our tools and platforms were designed by people, for people. Operating systems were bubbly and evanescent, like nature. Apps were customizable, in every shape and size. And interfaces drew on real-life metaphors to help you understand them, integrating them effortlessly into your life.

But as our everyday software tools and media became global for the first time, the hand of the artist gave way to the whims of the algorithm. And our software became one-size-fits-all in a world full of so many different people. All our opinions, beliefs, and ideas got averaged out — producing the least common denominator: endless sequels that everyone enjoys but no one truly loves.

When our software optimizes for numbers alone — no matter the number — it appears doomed to lack a certain spirit, and a certain humanity.

III.

So, if not numbers, what might we optimize for when crafting software?

If we’ve learned anything, it’s that all numerical metrics will be gamed, and that by default these numbers lack soul. After all, a life well-lived means something a little different to almost everyone. So it seems a little funny that the software we use almost every waking hour has the same predetermined goals for all of us in mind.

In the end, we decided that we didn’t want to optimize for numbers at all. We wanted to optimize for feelings.

While this may seem idealistic at best or naive at worst, the truth is that we already know how to do this. The most profound craftsmanship in our world across art, design, and media has long revolved around feelings.

But as makers of software, how might we do it?

First, look inward.

When Olmstead crafted Central Park, what do you think he was optimizing for? Which metric led to Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight? What data brought the iPhone into this world? The answer is not numerical. It’s all about the feelings, opinions, experiences, and ideas of the maker themself. The great Georgia O’Keefe put it this way: "I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me... so I decided to start anew."

And anything new is by nature without precedent — meaning, without data to know whether it will work or not. So when we approach building new things, we don’t optimize for metrics. We optimize for feelings. Our own, and of those we serve. Because our most treasured, human creations are far from neutral… In fact, they are full of opinions, taste, and subjectivity! That is what gives them their spirit and vitality, so own what moves you and let it run wild in your software!

Second, look away from your screen.

The technology industry has a tendency to think it is unique. In reality, it is but more of the same — a new craft for a new time. But this should feel empowering! What can we learn from what came before us, and what is next to us? The ways in which other crafts, industries, and iconic creations make us feel something can inspire our software all the same.

James Turrell took inspiration from astronomy and perceptual psychology. Coco Chanel was most influenced by nuns and religious symbols. David Adjaye drew from Yoruban sculpture, and Steve Jobs from Zen Buddhism and calligraphy. We could continue this list forever, but that’s not the point. The point is to look outside the confines of our industry toward what makes us feel in the world around us, and ask ourselves why. Borrow. Remix. Let it shape your work!

Third, cede control to the individual.

How do you feel when you finally step foot in your own living room, after weeks away from home? When you plop down on your own bed, or whip up a meal in your own kitchen? It conjures up a specific feeling, doesn’t it? That’s because these spaces are a reflection of you — created by you, for you. Software can feel the same way if individuals have agency and sovereignty over what is on their screens.

And yet, in so much modern software today, you’re placed in a drab gray cubicle — anonymized and aggregated until you’re just a daily active user. For minimalism. For simplicity. For scale! But if our hope is to create software with feeling, it means inviting people in to craft it for themselves — to mold it to the contours of their unique lives and taste.

IV.

And so we return to our favorite neighborhood restaurant.

It’s 7:30pm on a weekday evening not too far from now. You’re sitting and staring up at the ceiling, observing the fan that tilts a little to the left. You’re waiting for your beloved dish that never fails, and which just doesn’t taste the same anywhere else.

How would this place differ if the soulful humans behind it were optimizing purely for profits? Or scalability? Or time spent? You might not love those versions of the restaurant before you.

You see — if software is to have soul, it must feel more like the world around it. Which is the biggest clue of all that feeling is what’s missing from today’s software. Because the value of the tools, objects, and artworks that we as humans have surrounded ourselves with for thousands of years goes so far beyond their functionality. In many ways, their primary value might often come from how they make us feel by triggering a memory, helping us carry on a tradition, stimulating our senses, or just creating a moment of peace.

This is not to say that metrics should not play a role in what we do. The age of metrics has undeniably led us to some pretty remarkable things! And numbers are a useful measuring stick to keep ourselves honest.

But if the religion of technology preaches anything, it celebrates progress and evolution. And so we ask, what comes next? What do we optimize for beyond numbers? How do we bring more of the world around us back into the software in front of us?

At The Browser Company, we’ve chosen to optimize for feelings — to bring the quirks and edges of life back into software. To create something with soul. But this is, of course, just one approach. This essay is simply how we feel, and the approach that we have chosen.

More than anything, we ask these questions because the prompt is almost always more interesting than the answer itself.

There is an entire garden of possibilities ahead of us, and we cannot wait to see the approaches you’ll dream up as well.

We just raised $13 million from the founders of Zoom, Stripe and Instagram, and one of our favorite journalists wrote a behind-the-scenes account of what we’ve been up to this past year.

But more than big names and big ideas, Victoria’s personal letter (below) best captures the spirit of what we are building and why. We hope you read on…

I know it’s been a while since Apple Pay started being a thing, but I still find it so pleasing.

Every time I press my phone to a reader to pay for something, I feel like my consciousness splits for a second and a phantom-me goes through the transaction in an alternate timeline. In that timeline, I’m fishing through my too-full tote bag and feel around for something wallet-shaped. Is this it? No, those are my keys… no, that’s a tampon. OK, uhh...did I forget my wallet? I start pulling things out of my bag and do some mental calculus on how to keep that tampon in the bag while I’m prying things out of it.

But that’s a phantom, and it vanishes in a second. 

In this timeline, I just press my thumb on a circle on my phone, hold for a second, and I complete the payment.

Every time this happens, I think, Isn’t it nice that this is life now?

This is what draws me to technology. Sometimes, technology improving can feel like life itself is improving.

* * *

When we tell people we’re working on a browser, the first thing everyone asks is “Why? Does the world really need a new browser?”

About 15 years ago, the web already had Too Many Web Frameworks. People would grumble, “Ugh we already have MooTools, YUI, Ext JS, Prototype, Dojo … do we really need yet another?” And then jQuery took off, changed the internet forever, and became the de facto standard for web development. 

“OK great, we’ve crowned the winner! We’re done! No more web libraries needed!”

...Except people kept making them. The groans followed. “Ugh do we need another WhateverJs? All of you are over-engineering!” Then React came along and changed the internet forever.

Then there was that really weird era, do you remember? Where some of the big tech companies thought that maybe we should have an entirely new programming language for the web? People were really rolling their eyes now. “This is so academic and out of touch. Why do we need a whole new programming language? JavaScript is fine!” Then TypeScript came along and it’s changing the internet forever.

So whenever someone asks, “Do we really need another such-and-such?” The answer is almost always “probably.”This is because technology improves and improvement means change.

My colleague Ryan has a great way of describing it: When he gets a package, he has a habit of opening it and leaving the box on the floor for weeks. If he doesn't do something about it immediately, he'll just step around it for weeks like it's another piece of furniture, until one day he kicks it and realizes "oh wait, that's not supposed to be there." Technology is similar. When people get used to something, it becomes invisible.

“Why are there so many APIs and libraries and frameworks? Why do you keep making more of them?”

These are the questions you ask when you can’t see the boxes on the floor. 

* * *

In the great tradition of the web, we too are building Yet Another, though not a UI library. (There are a lot.) Instead we’re building the browser itself.

Some folks think it’s so odd that we’re making a browser of all things, as opposed to literally anything else. “Sure, everything can be improved upon, but is there really that much you can change in a browser? Tabs I guess? What else?”

If you think we’re “playing around with tabs,” you probably don’t get what a browser is and you shouldn’t feel bad about that. To people who haven’t built a browser, it’s not obvious how vast and weird and exciting the browser really is.

It’s a little hard to explain, though. Every analogy we’ve tried to come up with to describe the browser hasn’t been quite right. Building blocks? Nah. Tools? Not exactly. A blank sheet of paper? A ship sailing through the internet?

The best analogy we’ve got is actually not about a browser at all — it’s about recreational drugs. An engineer I knew in San Francisco, the “goes to Burning Man” type, was trying to explain to me why he liked drugs.

Before drugs, my friend assumed his eyes would always work like… well, eyes! Everyone’s eyes are different of course, some people can see better than others, some people are blind or visually impaired in some way, but he had assumed that eyes generally acted within the bounds of some laws set by the universe. Eyes were a thing that absorbed the world to the best of their ability and reported back to the brain as honestly as they could.

Then he did acid and entered another dimension for a bit.

When he came back, his understanding of reality had been toppled. He was like, “Wait, how did my body even do that? What is reality?! What are eyes?!” 

He hadn’t realized he had been living under assumptions about the axioms of the universe, but these false pillars became visible in their acid-induced shattering. If all it took was some chemical cajoling for his eyes and senses to transport him to another planet, what were the actual rules? Are there rules, or are there only defaults? What other invisible false pillars was he living his life by? 

And this is why he liked recreational drugs — because he could explore and challenge and unlock a new relationship with reality.

Though my friend didn’t quite put it that way. The way he phrased it to me was, “When I do acid, it’s like messing with the operating system for humans.”

This is why we’re so breathlessly excited to be building a browser. If the human body is the vessel to the universe, the browser is the vessel to the internet. It comprises so much of what we consider “using a computer.” It shapes so much of our perception of what is technologically possible. When you start changing the browser, you have the ability to fundamentally change humanity’s relationship with technology itself.

* * *

This week as we announce our Series A, we wanted to introduce ourselves. We’re The Browser Company and, as you might expect, we’re creating a browser! But we’re also not just creating a browser, we are picking up the invisible boxes off the floor and turning the phantoms of a better future into reality.  

In all of our endeavors — be it our APIs, our design system, our infrastructure, our community, our browser, or whatever comes after next — we want to build things that make people think, Gosh, isn’t it nice that this is life now?

- Victoria 

PS: We’re creating a Platform team. Join us!

This year, we actually built five separate browsers. They spanned multiple codebases and programming languages. Each tested a unique hypothesis. Each failed in some way. But there were also glimmers of the future. Moments where we collectively gasped, “Of course it’s supposed to work this way!” We’re almost ready to show you what we’ve stumbled across, in the form of a single, cohesive product.

First, we’d love your input. At a recent team meeting, someone proclaimed: “We are not building a web browser!” They are right. While our product will help you search the web, multi-task across apps, and visit webpages, it will need to do so much more to be worthy of your time.

Become an early tester

So, tell us, what do you hope the future of using the internet looks like? Please fill out this survey and let us know. In a couple of months, we will begin onboarding folks who completed the questionnaire. We promise to take your feedback to heart.

In 2021, we will also send you monthly progress reports from members of our team. We are tremendously grateful for your interest in The Browser Company, and feel like we owe you a peek behind the curtains at the very least.

Thank you for the time – and see you on the internet!

Josh

P.S. Here we are in all our zoom glory!