AI Browsers Are Dead | ✉️ #94

Illustrated person holding a cat with a paper airplane, next to a title that reads "MKDEV DISPATCH #94" and a text saying "AI BROWSERS ARE DEAD" on an orange and grey background with paper airplane patterns.

Last updated: 06/06/26 | Published: 06/06/26

Hey! 👋

I’ve been a fan of Arc browser since couple of years now, so I was happy when they decided to make a brand new browser for AI age, called Dia. Atlas from OpenAI and Comet from Perplexity followed the lead, all with the same idea - modern Internet browser should be build around AI and with AI-first in mind.

It seemed to me, that The Browser Company tried really hard to re-imagine what AI-first browser would look like, but, after all this months, didn’t manage to go beyond “chat sidebar with AI”. I love Arc for all the little things it does around the pre-AI browsing experience - the Spaces are the best Profiles implementation I ever seen, automatic tab groups and pinned tabs, together with vertical tabs list (most requested feature in Dia at some point, till it was added eventually) and dozens of small quality of life improvements. I hoped to see a similar level of design decisions, but with AI in mind, for Dia.

Somehow, it didn’t happen. What’s worse, Atlas and Comet, as well as Claude browser extension, gave a bit more of this AI feel from day one - as all of them are able to completely take over the control and do things for you. Dia, in the meantime, ended up just slowly and painfully getting one Arc feature after another, while failing to do anything truly useful with the AI part. The fact that it just destroys my MacBook Pro M3 Max battery in couple of hours ever since MacOS Tahoe got released didn’t help.

And it’s not just The Browser Company (who is now part of Atlassian) that seemingly gave up on doing anything interesting and useful with AI Browser. You don’t see any new releases in Atlas or Comet either - the last Comet update happened back in February, which is all you need to know in a world where AI companies release new things on a daily business.

So I removed Dia and came back to Arc. I have a feeling that Arc might be the peak of The Browser, till the Internet dies and we all just talk to AI agents. And for now, I declare AI-First Browsers dead.

The 95th mkdev dispatch will arrive on Friday, June 12th. See you next time!