Dia – An Early Review

First thing that come to my mind

Dia Diagram Editor (http://dia-installer.de/)

With Chrome deprecating Manifest V3 and removing it, I'm still perplexed why BCNY chooses Blink/Chromium as their base for both Arc and Dia. Since they were Mac-first, it would make more sense to choose Webkit and it would play nicer with battery life.

Additionally, a Webkit-based browser on Windows would be a breath of fresh air for the virtual-monopoly that is Chromium/Blink.

> BCNY gives up on building Dia and instead figures out how to continue with Arc

They have already given up on Arc, haven't they? I believe Arc isn't under active development anymore.

Always seemed weird to me that they decided to abandon existing browser to create a ... browser? Maybe there were some technical issues with Arc that they couldn't build on or maybe just marketing play

Thought this was Dia, an awesome open source conversational TTS model (similar to NotebookLM) that came out less than a month ago: https://github.com/nari-labs/dia.

I have no affiliation with them, but an early review: it sounds really good and its Apache 2.0 licensed.

Related The company behind Arc is now building a second, much simpler browser (30 points, 6 months ago, 17 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41942007

I really enjoy ARC, too bad they are not working on it anymore.

They should put the sources online to let others continue with the initiative.

Seems an interesting take on a browser. I personally don't like Arc and haven't tried it yet (but have seen a few colleagues try it), but I'd love to give Dia a spin if anyone has an invite.

Arc was cool, although it had some quirks that made me not use it as my daily browser. This just feels like a feature

Watching "BCNY" (why they aren't called Arc I shall never understand) looking for product-market fit has been a fascinating study in startups.

Arc got immediate traction, but the traction was for features that could never be a business model.

They pivoted, seeing AI as the future, and started adding a bunch of AI features, but they were throwing things at the wall to see what stuck, and my personal feeling was that none of it did (the features were fine, but nothing transformational). It felt like increasingly they were just trying whatever and not really focusing on one thing and trying to do it well.

Arc for Mobile was interesting, because again it started out with a "wow" feature and traction – instantly dropping you into a search on every launch/foregrounding. I loved this. But again, there was no business model there.

They started throwing everything at the mobile app to see what stuck, but between holding your phone to your ear to talk to search (Boomer Search?), and growth hacks like overlaying their own search on top of Google search results, the product started to feel weird.

Now on to Dia. From reading this it feels like they're experimenting in a much more bare-bones environment, and I wouldn't be surprised if the Arc -> Dia transition came with layoffs and was a more fundamental business pivot. Perhaps it'll crack it, but so far it looks again like a feature not a product, maybe a feature that will get initial traction, but probably not one that will turn into a business.

I'm not a particularly anti-VC person, but it seems like a BCNY that carried on as they were in 2022 and sold Arc as a browser for professionals for $50 a year would probably be making reasonable money for a small business right now. The reason they're not doing that would probably be VC funding and the need to be a big business.

> if you search 'werewolves', it still thinks it's a chat query

... and the answer obviously is 'there wolves'!