Web Browsers/Web Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 21, 2025

• Matt Birchler ☛ Dia killed Arc, but it's not clear why

  What I will say is that I don't understand their business logic at all here. They had a quite large, die-hard fan base in Arc, but they didn't think they could grow that audience into the hundreds of millions of users. They want to do that with Dia, but they also say they want to make money. Nobody makes a mainstream browser and makes money on it, so I wish them luck. I just think they had a better chance monetizing enthusiasts who adored and relied on Arc paying up than your mom or students (the only users they seem to care about now).

• Manton Reece ☛ Dia after a week

  Using Dia is a nice reminder that there is very little lock-in with web browsers. Switching to a new browser is easy. If The Browser Company can’t make their business work, then I’ll switch to something else.

• Parker Ortolani ☛ On Dia, Arc, and "People Don't Know What They Want Until You Show it to Them" | Parker Ortolani

  I was absolutely captivated by the Arc web browser from the moment I started using it a few years ago and quickly became an evangelist. It really felt like an entirely new idea for how to use the internet, it was more organized while also somehow being more fun. It became an essential part of my workflow on the Mac and when it first came to iPhone, it became a cross platform obsession. The introduction of Arc Search and Arc Max signaled however, that The Browser Company was thinking bigger. With the advent of AI tools around the same time as Arc was taking off, it was becoming clearer and clearer that the internet was about to change dramatically. Arc continued to improve between 2022 and 2024, but at the end of the year they decided to pivot. Instead of building on Arc, they chose to build an entirely new browser. I suppose apt for a company literally called “The Browser Company."

• University of Toronto ☛ Quick numbers on how common HTTP/2 is on our departmental web server

  Given even this cursory log analysis, I suspect that for our web server, HTTP/1.1 requests are significantly correlated with access from non-browsers, including crawlers (both overt and covert). Again this isn't really a surprise if modern browsers are trying to use HTTP/2 as much as possible, since most people are running modern browsers (especially Chrome).

• Ruben Schade ☛ Updates to the Retro Corner

  For those of you who haven’t seen it, I maintain a Retro Corner. It started as a one-pager written by hand in HTML3 to list some old parts, but has become a full site itself. It broadly uses the same “theme” I had on my first GeoCities site I wrote in primary school, and later moved to Tripod. It’s very silly.

• The New Stack ☛ HTTP/3 in the Wild: Why It Beats HTTP/2 Where It Matters Most

  Despite the promises of HTTP/2, the web still struggles with latency, jitter and real-world network volatility. Enter HTTP/3 — not just an upgrade, but a ground-up redesign over User Datagram Protocol (UDP). Based on thousands of real-user simulations and extensive internet performance monitoring conducted by Catchpoint across six continents, here’s what we’ve learned.