First Impressions of the Dia AI Browser

The Backstory

Digital modernity. An age where we use physical computers that open digital apps called browsers that render the wonders of the internet — for productive work and mindless surfing alike. I’ve used Google Chrome as my default browser for well over a decade. And I didn’t think twice about it. “Google has all my data anyway, why would I switch to DuckDuckGo or Brave?” Anyway, I quite like Chrome — its extensions, integration with Google Workspace apps, password-saving login speediness, all make digital life more pleasant.

But the browser experience has largely remained unchanged for years, even as the digital apps and sites that we access from a browser have changed greatly. That is, until The Browser Company of New York attempted a fresh design.

For those who have not been following, The Browser Company released a “reimagined” browser called Arc in 2022. Its “clean and calm” interface featured a left-hand sidebar for your tabs, some of which disappear each day by default, the ability to set up Spaces for your various digital personas (work, personal, news, etc.), and it came with ad-blocking and strict privacy settings by default. Word spread at Viget about the wonders of the Arc experience. I quickly adopted it in 2024 as my go-to browser for personal use.
 

However, I did not switch from Chrome to Arc for work — it certainly could have replaced my Chrome setup, but I am too deep in the Google Workspace world to have made the switch to Arc for my work life. The design layout was fresh but too much of a departure from my comfortable work configuration in Chrome.

Earlier this year, The Browser Company made a shocking announcement. The beloved Arc browser would not get new features. Instead, a new AI-powered browser called Dia was in development. As a fan of Arc, I was very excited to try Dia upon its release. Could Dia be my Chrome replacement at work?

Dia: an AI-first browser

I started using the beta version of Dia browser this month. I was compelled to try it as I lately began to comprehend the potential for productivity gains I can make by embedding AI processes directly into my workflows.

That is essentially the pitch for Dia: bring an AI sidekick directly into your browser so that it has the on-page context of whatever you’re doing — across all the tabs open in your window and any other document you feed it. Dia also allows you to execute custom pre-saved prompts called “Skills,” which become more and more useful as you figure out how you want the AI sidekick to complement your browsing.

First impressions of Dia for work

Here are my first impressions of Dia after trying a full work setup in the new AI browser.

What I Like:

The “New Tab” Experience

Opening a new tab allows you to either Prompt AI, Google Search, or enter a URL. It is seamless and easy to toggle between the search options after the fact, which made it fun to compare how answers vary between an LLM response versus an LLM with web search versus a traditional Google search.

Tab/Window Context

The stuff of a project manager’s dream: I can finally ask AI to review calendars and offer available times for meetings. With tab context, I open reference tabs alongside my Google Calendar and Gmail, let Dia draft an email with our team’s availability and include meeting context, then click Insert to add the draft directly into Gmail. Insert that into my life! 

I also found tab context useful when I got an email about a client’s Algolia account usage, which was nearing its limit. The problem was that I didn’t understand Algolia’s terminology for calculating billing. So, with the email in question open in my tab, I asked Dia to search Algolia’s documentation and figure out what the email means. Voilà!

Select specific text on a webpage and quickly turn it into a contextual prompt in the sidebar. I have found this useful to examine claims made by authors or to ask for more information on the selected text.

Summarizing long, forwarded email chains. Ever a headache when receiving a forwarded email chain, the context prompting ability of Dia makes digesting these emails much easier.

Skills

At first I wasn’t sure what Dia Skills would be useful for me to set up. I scrolled on Twitter X for inspiration from other early users and found some cool ideas around translating emails to a different language (good for my goal of keeping up with my Spanish!). 
 

Dia recently released a Skills Gallery that should be helpful in crowdsourcing useful skills for any user type. I see how the Skills feature could make specific, repeatable tasks more efficient but I haven’t discovered the right work-applicable Skills for me, yet.

What I Don’t Like:

The tab label and address bar adopting the color of the top nav of the website you’re viewing. It’s an unnecessary flourish that either needs to be refined or ditched. Some website URLs become barely legible as the text does not adapt sufficiently to its background.

Lack of small quality-of-life features:

What frustrates me about the list below is that they are all integrations left out deliberately from Chromium. That also makes them easy to fix (ahem).

• Window/Tab relaunch: I had several Dia windows open, each with a myriad of tabs. I had to restart Dia to enable sharing in a Google Meet and when the browser relaunched, none of my windows or tabs were restored. It was a major pain to lose all of that setup. I suspect this will be fixed promptly.
• Tab Grouping: key to my workflow! I love to organize my tabs using the Tab Grouping feature. Dear Dia, this is a Chromium feature, why leave it out???
• Window Naming: Another quality-of-life feature that I need in my lyf3 as a PM in 2025. Please and thanks.
• Where are my Extensions?? A major advantage of using Chromium for your new browser is Extensions. Why are they hidden in the URL bar two menus deep? Annoying!
• Text-heavy responses instead of link- and media-rich context, like a Perplexity response. (This is a foreshadow!)

Limitations

While the context-specific prompting is super useful, the browser is still unable to perform truly agentic tasks. I like that it can review my existing calendar events, but until it can create a calendar event on my behalf based on my prompt and the context of my tab, Dia will remain an AI-integrated browser, not an agentic browser. This is also a foreshadow… 

Stay tuned for my next article about my impressions of the Perplexity Comet browser.