The Browser Company announced on October 22 that Arc will stop operating on December 22, 2026, two months from now. From here on, the team will maintain only its AI browser, Dia.
The company's explanation centers on security:
"Keeping a browser secure takes constant, dedicated work that is only increasing in the age of AI."
The announcement says the company's top priority is giving members best-in-class security, that Dia was designed from the start around current security standards, and that engineering and security staff will now be concentrated on Dia.
What the migration promises
The announcement lists four commitments. Passwords, bookmarks, extensions and history can be imported into Dia without friction. Arc's signature Spaces, Folders and Tab Groups all exist in Dia, and imported data stays as it was. Dia's benchmarks for stability, speed and security already surpass Arc's. And the browser features Arc users commonly rely on are free in Dia, with AI as an opt-in extra.
That last point is aimed squarely at longtime users. Plenty of Arc's devoted fans like its sidebar and its way of organizing spaces but have little interest in an AI assistant. Calling out "AI is optional" as its own item looks like a direct response to that worry.
The announcement leaves several questions open: whether an Arc install already on a machine will still launch after December 22, whether security patches will keep shipping until then, and whether the Windows and Mac versions shut down on the same day. Those details will have to wait for the official help pages to be updated.
Arc's three years
Arc opened for download on the Mac in 2023 and followed with a Windows version the next year. Vertical tabs, Spaces and a large set of gesture shortcuts earned it a reputation among designers and developers.
The turning point came in May 2025, when CEO Josh Miller published an open letter saying Arc would get no new features, only security and maintenance updates, while the team moved on to Dia. In September of that year, Atlassian announced it would acquire The Browser Company for about $610 million.
About a year and a half passed between the end of feature development and this shutdown notice. The line that security work is "only increasing" is worth reading against how often browser vulnerabilities have surfaced over that period: a Chromium-based browser that is maintained but no longer developed still has to merge, test and ship a release every time upstream fixes a high-severity flaw, which spreads the team's attention across two products at once.
How other AI browsers are faring
Arc making way for Dia is part of a broader reshuffle in the AI browser field.
OpenAI's standalone browser, ChatGPT Atlas, launched last year and was shut down this August, less than a year later; its features were folded back into the ChatGPT desktop app, a Chrome extension and Codex's browser capabilities. Perplexity's Comet is still running, while Google has built Gemini directly into Chrome.
Side by side, the three approaches differ: OpenAI gave up on the standalone browser shell, Google added AI to a browser that already holds the largest share, and The Browser Company is retiring its older product to consolidate users on a single AI browser. Dia has an enterprise software company, Atlassian, behind it, which gives it more room to move toward workplace collaboration than it would have going it alone. Whether it can hold on to Arc's longtime users will depend on the migration rate after December, and the company has not published user numbers for either Arc or Dia.
Sources: The Browser Company official announcement, The Verge, CocoLoop, Engadget; used to check the shutdown date, migration items and acquisition price.