Yesterday, The Browser Company of New York announced it would sunset its Arc web browser on December 22, 2026, in favor of its newer, generative AI-focused browser, Dia. In a letter posted to the Arc website, social media, and sent by email to all Arc users, Josh Miller, co-founder and CEO of The Browser Company, wrote, "We spent years building Arc and celebrating each and every release along the way: we have so much pride and love for what we made alongside the Arc community." He continued, "Our priority is to deliver best-in-class security for our members. Keeping a browser secure takes constant, dedicated work that is only increasing in the age of AI. Dia was built from the ground up to meet today's security standards, so that's where our engineering and security teams will focus moving forward."
The email to Arc users continued by explaining that all their data is easily transferable to Dia until December 22, and that it now surpasses Arc in stability, speed, and security benchmarks. Come December 22, 2026, it states they will deactivate all Arc accounts, preventing sign-ins to the browser, which is required to use Arc, that all personal information related to a deactivated account is deleted within thirty days, and that, as of December 22, they will no longer be able to identify or retrieve Arc user data for data requests.
Arc launched on macOS in 2023 to great reception for its various innovative features over other web browsers, like a vertical sidebar for your browser tabs, alongside many other helpful organizational features, such as persistently open favorited tabs, entirely siloed spaces that separate your logins, bookmarks, tabs, and other content, and auto-closing unused tabs after a set amount of time to reduce clutter, as well as for its focus on performance and efficiency. A version of Arc would also later arrive on Windows. In October 2024, Miller announced the company was working on a prototype for a new web browser focused on large language models and generative AI after putting a planned Arc redesign on hold due to community feedback. At the time, Miller said the version of Arc users knew and had come to love was not going anywhere; it would just no longer receive new feature updates, but it would remain stable, secure, and performant while the company focused on developing this prototype, which would become Dia. However, several Arc users, including software developer and online video creator Theo Browne, have said that since this change, the web browser's performance has continued to deteriorate as it receives few security patches, pushing them to switch to alternative web browsers.