I was so close to saying something nice about Dia

Oh man, what remarkable timing. I had a blog post scheduled to go up later today, in which I said some nice things about Dia, the Arc replacement from The Browser Company. I've been pretty salty towards The Browser Company for the past 18 months or so, but I was going to write something generally nice about how, while it is a bit funny to see them replicating all of the Arc features they said 0.4% of people used into Dia, I thought Dia was at a place where I could make it my everyday browser and be happy. I even gave them the benefit of the doubt and suggested that a reason for the shift could have been tech debt that just made it impossible to add the traditional tabs and AI features that they wanted to add. And while it led to some short-term pain, gave them a platform that was easier to build on going forward. I have no idea if that's true, but it seems plausible.

But as I signed on to my computer for the morning to get to work, I quickly saw that Cloudflare was having a major outage. This has led to quite a few websites that I use on a regular basis simply refusing to work. Some of the notable ones are ChatGPT, Claude, and Letterboxd. One you may not expect, and hat tip to my friend Niléane for showing this to me first, Dia won't even launch if Cloudflare goes down.

What.

The.

Fuck?

Now, you might know that I happen to have a couple browsers installed on my computer, and my immediate reaction was to launch all of them and see what happened. You probably won't be surprised to hear that literally every other browser launches and functions just fine, but Dia straight up refuses to launch. Even other AI-powered browsers like ChatGPT Atlas and Perplexity's Comet launch and function as perfectly capable web browsers. It's just that if you try to use one of their AI features, they'll throw an error.

Dia. Bruv. Get it together.