alt Hacker NewsI had to look Arc up because I forgot what it was. For others confused like me:
Arc was an alternative web browser with novel UX and AI features built-in. The company was acquired for $610 million by Atlassian and development was halted in favorite of Dia, another browser with AI features and novel UX (which I also had to look up)
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I was confused because the programming language that Hacker News is written in is also called Arc and I was like "Wait, did PG turn over maintenance to an independent foundation? Are they giving up now? What does this mean for HN?"
If Arc has AI features then I never saw them. Arc was a superb browser, far superior to any of the others due to the care they took over the UX.
There is no AI in it so far as I can tell, and I'm using it right now to type this comment. It's a chromium skin really, of course, but it's great.
the privacy of this one doesn't look so good tbh https://www.diabrowser.com/privacy
Note that Arc had no or minimal AI when it launched; its appeal for so many of us was its refreshing opinionated stance on the browser UX. The AI hype train hit them hard and they tried to pivot to Dia, which leaned fully into AI but did none of the fancy UX things that Arc did. From what I could see online most of the fans they attracted with Arc were turned off by the pivot. It was peak early AI hype, which didn’t help: so much more smoke and so much less fire than there is now.
Dia now does appear now to have many of the Arc UX features. Plus AI.
Damn 610m for something they never used, just like the sapphire company Apple acquired.
Something is super, super fucked up with valuation of companies and the profiteering of late stage capitalism for stuff like that to be able to happen.
No wonder lots of people are saying the world feels worse than ever, everything's expensive and it seems in many ways we've regressed rather than "made things better for our children".
Sometimes I wish I had the gall to bolt AI on to something and sell it for _half a billion dollars_ only to sunset it a year later.
Also it was YACB (yet another chromium browser), as is the successor browser Dia.
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I think development was halted on Arc, and Dia was announced before the acquisition.
Arc Development stopped (May 2025) - https://www.engadget.com/ai/the-browser-company-stops-active...
Acquisition (Sep 2025) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45126358