Arc is dead

I just watched 2 videos by "The Browser Company of New York" (love their name): What have we been up to? (CEO Update) and An early peek at Dia, our second product | A recruiting video .

I started using Arc a couple weeks before they came out of beta. I stopped using it because I always have multiple windows open and tabs in Arc are synced between windows. Making it barely usable for me. (I still don't understand why anyone would want this. Still feels like a product-breaking bug to me.)

In the first video the CEO says "Arc isn't going anywhere", which is corpo-speak for "we're killing it". They're killing it because they're convinced that they need to make an AI-first browser. To me it feels like most companies are trying to pivot to AI just in case we're not in a bubble. They're trying to shoehorn AI in where they can, but we have yet to see any indication of normal people asking for this.

Some thoughts:

• They've probably invested tons of money in Arc already and they haven't even started to think about being profitable.
• Making people switch browser is very hard. They know this, why do they think this time will be different? Are they convinced that their product is just that good?
• The auto-browsing is a very cool demo. I doubt it will ever work reliably enough that people will actually keep using it.
• The other features/prototypes they showed are again the same ones we see in every AI product: "summarize" and "complete next sentence". I don't think that is going to convince anyone to switch browser.

I have so many other thoughts. I'm just very sceptical that they're going to be successful. I'm so sure that it is going to fail that I'm starting to wonder if in 5-10 years I'll have to eat my hat.