Ask HN: What Arc/Dia features should we prioritize? (github.com)

If it support plantuml and mermaid that would be awesome

I want the vertical tabs and custom webpage scheme (I created a dark scheme for HN). After learning that they discontinued Arc for Dia, I even started my own https://github.com/shi-yan/shrome.

Recent and related:

Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45126358 - Sept 2025 (484 comments)

From their readme

> You probably have 70+ tabs open right now. You're constantly fighting your browser instead of it helping you. Simple tasks like "order Tide Pods from my Amazon order history" should just work with AI agents.

What does automation have to do with the number of tabs? Also _should_ it _just_ work? Do we really need to automate consumption behavior now?

> We believe AI agents should automate your work locally and securely, not send your data to some search or ad company.

Ordering tide pods locally? It won’t change how much ad companies learn about you. It’s just someone else clicking for you.

What am I missing here, has anyone asked for this? Is anyone actually finding these AI browsers useful? Personally I want Arc, not Dia.

Honestly, Zen has done a good job of replicating most of the best parts of Arc; the big missing piece, IMO, is Little Arc, which was pretty workflow-changing. I'd love to see Little Arc / temporary browser windows become more common.

Zen scratches most of my Arc itches, really, so take a look at its feature set. If AI agents must be a part of the product, it should be possible to turn them off entirely, not leaving the slightest trace anywhere in the UI. The only place I personally want AI in my browser might be for searching history and bookmarks, but a lightweight local model would be perfectly fine for that use case; no need to rope in third parties.

I want a browser to let me do more things, not fewer. I barely trust myself to press the right buttons on a page, I certainly don't trust an AI to buy shit for me. I don't have a million tabs open because I close them when I'm done, and I don't pretend to be good at multitasking.

AI browser integration offers no value to me. I find GitHub Copilot and similar coding agents to be useful only because they can index the codebase and documentation faster than I can. There is no analogous problem AI can solve for me in the browser unless websites dramatically change how they interact with requests from AI.

I like Zen. I'm sticking with Zen.

One thing that I do think AI would genuinely be useful at, is a smarter “reader mode”.

I don’t want it to summarize the page. I don’t want it to do the reading for me.

But if it use visual analysis to remove ads, that can work even when they are served from the same domain as content.

A reader mode could identify the text of a page and remove all of the headers remove the footer and just give me the main article.

Various add-ons and browser modes do this to an extent, but they don’t always work reliably and this does seem like something we’re using AI could genuinely improve the experience.

Multiple profiles with different sets of cookies in the same window. Hope you mean that under "workspaces".

Using a consistent design language. Don't use 4 sets of UI fonts and 7 color schemes in the same browser window.

I'd like to see it use something other than chromium.

The Firefox fork Zen is what I use now and it really covers everything I want, which is a nice looking browser with ublock origin, container tabs, and no extra features like AI or Pocket or whatever other annoying addon seems to be crammed into everything else.

Reliable and encrypted sync is important. One frustration I do have with Firefox is sync doesn't sync everything, certain settings don't sync, and about:config tweaks don't either.

Zero telemetry is also important, as is having a home tab that doesn't connect to anything externally by default. Ideally other than checking for updates on addons and sync, there should be 0 connections made until a website is visited.

Overall I just want a solid browser that lets me read web pages.

Full tree style tabs or even a tree history. Not just one level, infinite depth

Honestly, I'd go a different direction entirely. The web has become too frenetic. I want a browser that helps me FOCUS.

If I were to go build something—and maybe I should—it would be something like this:

1. Named workspace tab groups that you can focus on and hide everything except what you're doing right now. Arc did something interesting here. I don't know that it has to be the way Arc did it, but the idea is good.

2. Make the world's best bookmark manager. If AI can help organize it for you, that's neat. Bookmarks are a great idea and they've been neglected for too long.

3. Builtin RSS reader.

And uBlock Origin, of course.

What is Arc? Dia is a diagramming tool... what does it have to do with ai?

The main main feature that had me itching to move away from basic chromium shell (I use brave though) was split view, command palette and tab search keyboard driven start to finish. Now chromium has both. So I'm fairly happy. Next thing I want is a command palette and I'll be completely satisfied.

Arc's fluid transition between tabs, bookmarks, and favorites was excellent UX. It finally helped me tame 100s of open tabs by helping me treat "apps" as distinct from "pages".

Every new browser should be doing something to recognize the fact that browsers are an application platform, and they should be absorbing more desktop OS features in the direction of native-feeling applications.

One of the things I want from a browser is to fade to the background and to expose those applications as natively as possible at the OS level (e.g. I want to be able to put browser-based applications into my dock without having to download special electron wrappers for them.)

I was a huge user of Arc until it became obvious it was no longer being supported. For me, it was all about the tab "model". The key things that made Arc work for me:

- Vertical tabs

- Drag & Drop between "sticky" and "ephemeral" sections

- Hiearchically nested folders

- Command palette with fuzzy match to open/recent tabs

- Meeting integration

There were some other nice features ("Smart" folders with GH PRs come to mind), but really 95% of my usage was due to the above. The tab model was so good it actually allowed me to replace "to do list" type tools with just folders of tabs.

For me, I think they had their target market all wrong. They built a bunch of design features nobody used and cared about (custom theming?), when the core pitch was very simple: People LIVE in their web browsers, but everyone just seems to accept that having 100 impossible-to-read chrome tabs open at the same time is somehow acceptable. There are so many browser "power users" out there in white collar roles that don't even realize a better world is possible. These people are not going to be downloading (and likely can't download) a sketchy sounding "firefox fork" named "Zen", but they will absolutely download a professional-looking Chrome fork with security guarantees that allows them to organize their work better.

To be honest, I don't want a browser. Browsers fundamentally suck, because they never fit the bill perfectly. I want a collection of loosely coupled programs that functionally compose into a user agent application.

I'd wish someone with sufficient resources would someday look at the current behemoths, decompose them into independent subsystems (as small as physically feasible and rationally possible), clearly define the interfaces between those, and release it all with an opinionated glue that makes the whole thing "just work" out of the box. So if one wants to tweak something, they're not in for forking the whole unholy mess, but just the relevant piece.

Basically, I want an user agent built out of Lego-like blocks, in spirit of the original UNIX way (I don't mean pipes as a method of communication though, of course). If I don't like some piece, I can pull in an alternative, or splice in a filter/router/adapter in front of the existing implementation to tweak the behavior. This is fundamentally different to current approach to extensions that merely sit aside and are consulted by the monolith. E.g. if I want an alternative cookie storage with own ideas on site isolation and cross-site interactions, I can realistically have it. Or e.g. if I want a reader-mode decluttering solution - it can be a filter spliced in somewhere appropriate - heck, a smart enough filter can replace the whole website with a different frontend. Consider that we had alternative IM clients piggybacking on the official backend APIs back in '00s and that was really good for the users.

Then automation (AI or not) becomes a matter of having pieces small enough.

(Making it tolerably performant is most likely going to be a giant issue bordering on impossible, but - hey - a man can dream, right?)

I would love for it to feel as polished and performant as Jira, please.

The only feature chaining me to Arc is the automated PIP. That is when you switch between tabs or spaces PIP automatically activates. It is so useful.

Arc style profiles, one profile per space.

Super practical for pseudonymity, and for separating work from personal life. Or avoid mixing data and confusion when working different jobs.

Nightly version of Chromium with maintained manifest v2 support.