Arc Browser

Arc is a desktop browser built by The Browser Company that reworked the basic layout of a browser: tabs live as "Spaces" you organize by project or context, navigation moves into a collapsible sidebar instead of a top tab bar, and features like Split View and Easel let you arrange pages and notes side by side. It also introduced AI tools such as Ask on Page, which lets you query the content of whatever site you're reading, and Arc Search's Browse for Me, which auto-generates a summary page from multiple sources for a given query. It built a genuinely devoted following among developers, designers, and other people who live in their browser and wanted something less rigid than Chrome or Safari.

That development has since stopped. The Browser Company put Arc into maintenance mode in May 2025, meaning it still gets Chromium security updates but no new features, and shifted its entire team to a new AI-first browser called Dia. In September 2025, Atlassian acquired The Browser Company for roughly $610 million, and Dia now sits under Atlassian's ownership with the same team behind it. Arc remains downloadable and usable on Mac and Windows, and its ideas (Spaces, sidebar tabs, AI-on-page querying) are gradually reappearing in Dia, but anyone picking a browser to invest in going forward is effectively being pointed toward Dia instead.

Arc is best understood now as a frozen, still-functional product rather than an active one. It's a reasonable choice for someone who wants its specific workflow and doesn't mind no further updates, but it's no longer where the company's engineering effort or new AI features are going.