How People Are Using AI For Browser Productivity

default search on comet browser is perplexity. if comet can convert these many chrome users instantly with just an initial version, the potential for a future version that’s a lot more stable is immense. every omnibox query of every such new user will go to perplexity. 📈 https://t.co/lNfGXQKvNb

Generative UI is the way to go. In Comet - when you try to send emails, an email card is generated on the fly, with ability to customize recipients and refine the email draft. Same happens for calendar invites. You can literally join meetings from the cards generated on the fly on Comet. Now imagine this for all work and personal software you interact with, doable all from your phone. A future that’s arriving faster than you think.

Would you pivot away from a product with millions of users? That’s exactly what @browsercompany did with @arcinternet. The internet backlash was intense, but cofounders Josh (@joshm) and Hursh (@hursh) saw that AI was about to make the web something you talk to, not just click into. The best home for a powerful AI assistant was the thing that's already between you and the internet—the browser. And they realized they couldn’t just duct-tape it on to Arc. One year of heads-down work later, the team launched @diabrowser in beta, and people are raving about it. Dia is a sleek, fast, browser with AI at its core—it gets better with every tab you open, becoming more and more helpful with time. And even though it’s still early, Josh and Hursh’s big pivot looks like one for the ages. This week on @every’s AI & I, Josh and Hursh joined me for their first full-length podcast about their pivot from Arc to Dia. We talk through their decision-making process, the very public backlash the company faced, and the grit it took to stay the course. We get into: The personal toll of their decision to pivot a beloved product like Arc “I think it's safe to say last year sucked. It really did,” Josh admitted. Hursh agreed that “some days you just wake up and you have to play the part of getting through the day.” The challenge of the “novelty tax” limited Arc New products get to “change one thing and have that…be the thing you talk about,” said Josh. Arc was too new on too many fronts for mass adoption. Dia is intentionally simple—it has the same vibes that Arc had but in a much cleaner package. Arc Search was the turning point They built Arc Search as a side project. Josh tweeted it on a Sunday before boarding a flight. It exploded more than anything they'd ever made—and showed them the future wasn't about tabs, it was about AI understanding intent. Dia’s memory feature went from impossible to magical overnight Dia’s core promise is that the browser learns from the way you use it. But after nine months of struggling to build memory into Dia, the team shelved the feature—until six weeks before launch, when Hursh had a hunch that the technology was finally there. They got it working “pretty much overnight.” Skills are the real unlock People are creating their own AI apps inside Dia. Someone made one to learn how to play a guitar from YouTube videos. Josh calls it "handmade software"—letting non-coders build tools for themselves. They shipped Dia expecting to get roasted. Instead, people loved it "People saw what we saw," Josh said, still surprised. A year of hell taught them one thing: When your bones tell you something, listen—even when the world says you're wrong. This is a must-watch for anyone interested in building the future—and what it takes to bet on your instincts, especially when everyone else thinks you're crazy. Watch below! Timestamps: 1. Introduction: 00:01:13 2. The story of how I might’ve been the CEO of The Browser Company: 00:02:47 3. The moment Josh and Hursh knew they had to walk away from Arc: 00:09:42 4. How to handle the weight of the unknown in a pivot: 00:17:08 5. The prototype-driven culture that kept The Browser Company alive: 00:23:31 6. Why having a product loved by millions of users isn’t enough :00:25:42 7. The architectural decisions underlying how Dia was built: 00:33:29 8. How Dia almost shipped without its best feature: 00:47:12 9. The best ways people are using Dia in the wild: 00:51:18 10. How Josh and Hursh think about competing with incumbents: 01:07:55 11. How romanticism informs the product decisions behind Dia: 01:17:04