Dia – An Early Review

Summary

Dia – an early reviewPublished May 11, 2025⋅Updated May 13, 2025⋅3 minutes readThe Browser Company of New York (BCNY), known for Arc, has just launched Dia through their alpha program – their latest take on the web browser. Just as some background, BCNY created Arc in 2021, but late last year they put Arc on maintenance mode. At the core of this decision was that even though Arc had great traction, they needed something that would put it solidly ahead of Chrome – having a better UI wasn't enough to create a long term business. They decided to make an AI native browser – the result of which is Dia. As an early Arc adopter and daily user, I was keen to take it for a spin. This is a picture of what the UI looks like: You have a sidebar on the right which can be triggered via cmd + shift + e, and the default new tab view is a search engine box that doubles as a chat interface. The base model that you chat with is GPT 4.1, and the inline chat has the current page's content as context. Features Dia introduces several interesting ideas: The URL bar is neat: it pulls the query string for searches or displays the URL base and page title, rather than the full link. It intelligently routes queries. For example, if your query is phrased as a question (i.e. it begins with where, what, who, etc.), Dia routes it directly to its chat interface. This is a smart move, as making chat the default for all searches (an issue I've found with trying to set Perplexity as a default search engine) would introduce unwelcome latency for basic searches. It's got some small issues though: if you search 'werewolves', it still thinks it's a chat query. if you paste in a link, weirdly it tries to search it up instead of navigating to the site directly. The ability to toggle between the two modes is clever. Issues The spacing of the screen is a big issue: Fullsize on a display (Macbook Pro) - the sidebar for Arc is roughly 1/5 of the screen. While the AI chat sidebar takes up 3/10 of the screen real ...