Arc's arc is done. But, there's dia at the end of the tunnel...

Josh Miller penned a long post on why The Browser Company's icing one browser - Arc - to focus on building another - Dia. You should read the whole post. In my humble opinion, it's at least a worthy stream of consciousness, and I appreciate the attempt to rationalize in public.

As someone who's spent quite a lot of digital pen and paper thinking through various different things, I naturally empathize with a post like this - it's an explainer for decisions that seem arbitrary to someone who's not following along the reasoning.

However, the thing that jumped out at me were some contradictory thoughts within the prose. Here's an example:

“Arc was simply too different, with too many new things to learn, for too little reward.”

“Make it a piano… hide complexity behind familiar interfaces.”

“Webpages won’t be the primary interface anymore… chat interfaces are already acting like browsers.”

If Arc was too novel to learn and hence would never be mass market, a paradigm shift-ing UX change might be a conceptual lift too big for the "mass market" no? And in this world, wouldn't users just rely on existing browsers that can adopt the right UX to accommodate that paradigm shift?

They are a startup and it's their job to dream. I applaud that. However, there is a potential false cause here that Josh might not be seeing clearly.

“We’re getting out of the candle business.”

“Traditional browsers, as we know them, will die.”

“You better believe we are [still making browsers]!”

There's an equivocation here where the definition of "the browser" shifts to suit the context and the message being tried to send.

None of this is a ding on Dia. Any company, especially a startup should be able to pivot. Personally, I thought Arc was trying some really innovative UX paradigms that personally appealed to me as a power browser user. Let's see what they come up with Dia. However, given these contradictions, I will be far more skeptical about their motives, because I suspect their designs are likely going to still be novel.