What Dia is
Dia opened as an invite-only beta in June 2025, the month after The Browser Company said Arc would get no new features. It is built on Chromium like Arc, but its centre is an AI assistant: you can ask it about the page you are on or several tabs at once, and since March 2026 it can reach into Slack, Notion, Gmail and Google Calendar.
It started out looking like Chrome, with tabs across the top. In late 2025 The Browser Company brought vertical tabs, a sidebar and pinned tabs back, and tab groups soon after. So Dia is closer to Arc than it was at launch. It is still not Arc.
What Arc users still miss
- Spaces. Arc kept work, side projects and personal browsing as separate spaces in one sidebar. Dia uses profiles instead, each in its own window.
- Easels. Arc’s whiteboard for clipping live pieces of pages onto one board has no equivalent in Dia.
- Their Mac. Dia needs Apple Silicon and macOS 14. An Intel MacBook that ran Arc fine cannot run Dia at all.
- A browser without an assistant in it. Some people simply do not want AI between them and the page.
Where Tabula fits
Easels were Arc’s most ambitious idea: a board where pieces of the web sit next to each other. Tabula takes that idea all the way. The board is the browser — every site you open is a live tile on an infinite canvas, running for real, and you arrange them however you think. Next to that sits a sidebar Arc users will recognise: pinned favourites, a list of everything open, and zones in place of Spaces.
It runs on Intel and Apple Silicon Macs from macOS 12, and it has no assistant. Whether that last part is a feature depends entirely on you. The full Arc comparison is here.
Where Dia is the better pick
- You want AI in your browser. Asking about several tabs at once, drafting from what is on screen, pulling in Slack or your calendar — Dia is built for that and Tabula does none of it.
- You need an extension toolbar. Both install Chrome extensions from the Web Store, but Tabula has no toolbar yet — a popup opens from Settings.
- You want continuity with Arc’s makers. Dia is where The Browser Company’s work goes now, with Atlassian behind it.
And if you are on Windows, or want the most of Arc’s feature list in one place, the table above already says it: Zen keeps the most.
Questions
- Is Dia the replacement for Arc?
- It is what The Browser Company built instead. In May 2025 it stopped adding features to Arc to focus on Dia, and Atlassian agreed to buy the company that September. Arc still works and gets security updates, but new work goes into Dia.
- Does Dia have Spaces like Arc?
- Not in the Arc sense. Dia has profiles, and each profile opens in its own window, rather than named spaces you switch between inside one sidebar.
- Does Dia work on Intel Macs?
- No. Dia needs an Apple Silicon Mac running macOS 14 or later. Tabula has a separate Intel build and runs on macOS 12 or later.
- Does Tabula have AI features like Dia?
- No. Tabula has no built-in chat assistant. If asking an AI about your open tabs is what you want from a browser, Dia does that better than anything else here.
- Is Tabula made by The Browser Company?
- No. Tabula is an independent browser with no connection to The Browser Company, Atlassian, Arc or Dia.