Dia Browser Released — With AI That ‘Knows You Like A Friend'

Forbes

3 days ago

The Browser Company has released Dia, arguably the first web browser to fully embrace AI.
Dia is the successor to the short-lived Arc browser, which The Browser company has sidelined to focus on Dia. It's released in beta form today and will be made available to all Arc members, with others having to join a waitlist.
While Arc made significant use of AI – building in features such as webpage summaries and previews of links before you've clicked them – Dia is described as an 'AI browser' with an almost exclusive focus on generative AI.
Dia can answer questions on open browser tabs
The Browser Company
Dia's standout feature has similarities to the controversial Recall that is being built into Windows 11. The browser will remember your previous activity, allowing you to ask the AI to give you a summary of what you've been doing that week or even learn your writing style.
'With every tab that you open, it should feel like this AI model is getting more and more personalized to you, such that at the end of a week of browsing, a month of browsing, let alone a year, it's going to know you as well as your closest friends and colleagues," said Josh Miller, CEO of The Browser Company in a video introducing the browser.
What's not immediately clear is how The Browser Company will secure that information. Microsoft's Recall became the subject of a security scandal when an early beta was found to be taking screenshots of personal information that could be accessed by hackers or malware. Microsoft fixed the problem before Recall was made available for general release.
The Browser Company has released little detail about how it plans to secure the information stored by Dia, other than to say the feature is opt-in.
Dia's AI assistant will also be able to read information open in any of your browser tabs. The company claims this solves one of the biggest problems of current AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Gemini, where you must constantly cut and paste information back and forth from the browser. Instead, you'll be able to get the AI to instantly summarize a page or, say, write a response to a Gmail directly in the browser, without having to switch focus.
The AI can even scan information stored in multiple tabs. Say, for example, you're buying a new car and have several tabs open with different models you're shortlisting. You'll be able to ask the AI to compare the features of the various cars by asking it to look at all the relevant tabs.
The browser is also shipping with what the company calls 'skills'. Default skills included with the browser include Write (which helps you draft passages of text in your own voice) and Code (for help with programming).
Skills can also be created to run bespoke tasks. For example, if you didn't want any of the sidebars to show on Facebook, just the main feed, you could ask the AI to make them disappear (this is similar to a feature that was already included in Arc). Skills can also be used to fill web forms with your personal information, for example filling out a job application by pointing the AI to a CV that is published online.
While Dia is absolutely betting the farm on AI, other browser makers are certainly embracing it too. Microsoft has built its Copilot assistant into the Edge browser, while Opera has integrated ChatGPT and its own Aria AI into its software.
Others remain more skeptical of AI. Vivaldi, for example, has eschewed built-in AI in favor of user privacy, while Firefox maker Mozilla has spoken out against Google's plans to build Gemini into its Chrome browser, arguing that it could harm browser competition.
The Browser Company will simply be hoping that the Dia browser makes more of an impact than Arc, which was well received by reviewers, but didn't come close to disrupting the big beasts of the browser business.