In former jobs, colleagues recoiled in horror upon seeing my screen. IT sent gentle reminders that I should now really close my laptop for those mandated updates from weeks ago. My laptop fan often sounds like a jet engine. And yet, I persist. Because tabs are possibility, tabs are hope, tabs are my digital comfort blanket.
The Switch I Swore I’d Never Make
Enter Dia. I read about this new browser a few times but the thought of changing something so embedded in my ways of working as well as personal life felt like a chore too big to even consider. Until we started this site. Working as part of a small team requires you to look at everything you’re doing and find ways to optimize yourself and your productivity - I guess the same is true nowadays for every marketer or those working at creative agencies. We have to be able to do it all and do it quickly. So, thinking about how I worked I figured my surfing habits needed a do-over.
When looking into Dia and requesting access (they’re still in Beta at the moment, though you’d never know), I did so with the same skepticism reserved for “life-changing” productivity hacks, any mention of “good gut bacteria” in food products or the words “proven results” in cosmetics. Their offer is simple, a browser that’s familiar, easy to use, and actually designed for humans (and their tab hoarding tendencies). And like Arc, also designed by The Browser Company, the branding is a delight. It just exudes the feeling of calmness.
The first step was switching browsers, and though I expected to have an existential crisis through its design, Dia made it as smooth as putting on your shoes in the morning, if those shoes were also velcro. It recognized my passwords, preferences and history. Looking into this, Dia passes what its creators call the Tuesday morning test – it’s so instantly recognizable and reassuring that you could switch over mid-week, mid-coffee, mid-chaos, and not miss a beat. The design team, led by Charlie Deets (ex-Safari, WhatsApp, Facebook), have somehow made a new product, with new capabilities that feels like the browser we’re accustomed to.
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Design That Gets Out of the Way
The UI is the digital equivalent of a tidy desk with just enough personality – the ones you see in X posts from tech founders based in San Francisco. Familiar elements such as tabs, bookmarks, navigation are all accounted for and where you expect them to be, but all made just that little bit nicer. Buttons and settings appear only when you need them, keeping the interface clean. My favourite features are pulling in multiple tabs for comparisons as I did when doing the dreaded task for looking for a new phone contract and referencing tabs in my queries with ease. You can also split screen two or more tabs just by pulling one into another.
There’s no clutter apart from my own and the URL bar provides one of many nice little touches: instead of a cryptic string, you get a clear page title with the full URL just a hover away. When searching, it directs you to your preferred place, an LLM result, a website or Google page. As Charlie puts it in this post: “You get the result you were looking for without thinking: it just works,” and I wholeheartedly agree, it just works.
Chat, Skills, and Playful Power
But Dia isn’t just a pretty face, it has “Skills”. Rather than reinventing the wheel for the sake of it, Dia saves its real power for its Chat and Skills features. In Chat, when I want to add a LinkedIn page, a previous article and a YouTube video as a reference I can just @ them or pick them from my list of open tabs. It’s quick, convenient and feels quite playfully designed.
Skills are like custom shortcuts, designed by yourself or other people within the community which you can then adapt for your use case. There are Skills tailored to marketers, to creatives, to writers. Honestly, there are tons of them. Each one is a modular add-on that fits the way you move through the web, accessible at the click of a button.
The browser’s AI feels less like a tacked-on feature, more like a co-pilot who actually knows the route. It’s like having a sparring partner with me at all times, a sparring partner who can write and writes well. All day long I ask it questions, ask it to check things, to do research or to refer back to something I read. I ask it to quickly summarize the videos I couldn’t watch in full, to check the draft of an email while staying on the page, I ask and it delivers.
My only niggle so far has been that if you normally open mailto links in another tab then it struggles. But even the process of highlighting this small bug was a pleasant experience with a nicely designed process for feedback available. Having said this, there is one more thing the team will have to figure out soon, currently Dia is only available on Macs – if they want to compete with the best and the rest, accessibility for all is needed.
Still, even with this limitation, Dia has managed to weave itself into my daily routine. Living with Dia, as that is how it’s felt, I’ve found myself less anxious about my tab mountain, felt better supported in my role and had more time actually getting things done.
Would I recommend Dia? For anyone who’s ever felt personally victimized by their own browser, absolutely. For the rest: prepare to be converted. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have seventeen tabs to revisit – and for once, I’m not dreading it.
