There are almost no startups today that can survive if VC funding did not exist, even more so now that AI and LLMs exists.
Might as well not use any of them if they are funded by VCs or angel investors.
And if not, how should they be funded?
Donations? Not sustainable.
Not sustainable for anyone wanting to charge for software.
Source: In his May 2025 open letter to Arc members and subsequent public statements, CEO Josh Miller reassured users that while active feature development was ending, Arc would be maintained indefinitely.
https://www.theverge.com/news/674603/arc-browser-development...
They picked up a lot of cues from Arc - sidebar tabs, pinned vs generic tabs, global bookmarks, spaces...
I switched to Brave, migrated in a few minutes literally and feel much better.
Just another example of a cancerous VC-backed business.
After a year to cool off, I gave Dia a shot. Despite wanting to hate it, I like the browser a lot. You can turn off the shit AI features, and it's a well designed and thoughtful UX.
As much as Josh is a tool, this is genuinely a great product and the team at TBC has executed really well.
Arc was an alternative web browser with novel UX and AI features built-in. The company was acquired for $610 million by Atlassian and development was halted in favorite of Dia, another browser with AI features and novel UX (which I also had to look up)
I’m still pulling for Atlassian to do Interesting Things with the app. AI can be part of it but I think there’s a ton of opportunity for a browser for the enterprise / organizations and atlassian is well positioned to do that, AI or no. Things like: - shared company file Management accessible directly in app - cross saas–app workflows enabled at the browser level, managed centrally by the org — slack, zoom, screen sharing/recording and other collab tools natively baked into the app
So many people spend all their work day flipping between different apps and docs in the browser and there’s sooo much more we (as humanity) could do to improve that experience. The browser is a natural site for it and I hope someone gives it a shot.
Posting from Ladybird BTW (compiled from git today), which is starting to take shape!
Nobody but me has it and it is great!
It has all the arc features except for the AI ones. It has nested tabs: when you open a tab from a tab it nests it underneath its parent. Infinitely.
I added right click menu items such as copying the urls of multiple selected tabs in one go, copying the urls of downloads, multi-part downloads. I am thinking of making downloading media from visited pages a first class citizen.
I’ve also optimised the memory usage for people like me with hundreds of tabs.
It has ad-blocking and fingerprint evasion built-in.
I am going to build in some markdown extraction features to quickly copy pages for my llms and maybe an mcp server for my local agent to read the web through. I’ll have to see though.
Having a browser work exactly how I want it is great. I have hotkeys that I need for things that weren’t possible for me before without hammerspoon.
I might release it at some point.
ChrisArchitect•52m ago
Letter to Arc Members 2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44102709