The Browser Company has announced that the Arc browser will stop working on December 22, 2026. New sign-ups closed on October 22, and existing users are being asked to move to Dia, the company's other browser. The stated reason is practical: the team wants to put its effort into supporting and securing one product instead of two.

The move has upset plenty of people. Back in spring 2025 CEO Josh Miller publicly promised not to shut Arc down, and now Reddit threads are full of users discussing where to go next and complaining that Dia lacks features they rely on.

What made Arc different

Arc ran on Chromium like Chrome and Edge, so under the hood it was not very different. Its value was the interface: tabs in a sidebar, separate spaces for work and personal browsing, pinned pages and split views. The idea was to turn the browser into a workspace for people who spend all day in email, documents and chat apps.

It never went mainstream. By the company's own numbers, only about 5.5% of daily users regularly worked with more than one space.

What replaces it

Dia is also built on Chromium, but it bets on AI. It can analyze open pages, search connected work services, compare documents and write summaries. Instead of rereading chat threads and a dozen tabs yourself, you ask the browser to pull together what you need.

In 2025 The Browser Company was bought by Atlassian, the maker of Jira and Confluence, for about $610 million. Atlassian is mostly interested in the enterprise angle: a browser that sees the context of several work apps at once.

Timeline and moving your data

Passwords, bookmarks, history and extensions can be moved to Dia before the shutdown. From November 23 the mobile Arc Search app loses its AI features and sync, and on December 22 desktop Arc stops launching, even though the engine underneath is open source. Arc Search for iOS will stay in a stripped-down form, while the Android version will be switched off entirely.

Our take

For people who build websites the lesson is simple: more and more often a page is read not just by a person but by an AI that summarizes it for them. Clean markup, clear headings and plain text without clutter now matter for these assistants as much as for search engines. Users, meanwhile, should remember that an AI inside the browser sees what is in their work tabs and decide whether they are fine with that. Source: Habr.