It’s never a good thing when your favorite app comes under the eye of your employer’s security department.

I’ve been using Dia as my browser for the last few years (and Arc before it went on life support). I’ve liked it because it has a lot of great tab management features that worked with my browsing flow — vertical tabs, renaming tabs, persistent tab groups, cycling through tabs based on recent usage, and a shortcut to copy the current URL without needing to click on the address bar.

Dia also has a lot of AI features, but I never used them. Ironically, those AI features were the reason that I had to stop using Dia. Whatever way Dia’s AI features were implemented didn’t pass when reviewed by my company’s security department. Thus, I had to get a new browser.

I’ve tried a few other browsers in the past, but nothing really grabbed me. Or, they had some of their own quirks that I didn’t love. So I ended up just going back to Chrome.

I missed the tab management features in Dia, but I found that with a few tweaks and plugins I could make Chrome work similarly so the transition wasn’t so painful. Hopefully this is helpful to anyone else who needs to make the switch.

These are the built-in tweaks I made to Chrome’s settings:

  1. Enable “Show Tabs Vertically”. It was great timing that Chrome enabled vertical tabs in the stable release this year. I’ve become so used to vertical tabs in Dia I don’t think I can ever go back to horizontal tabs again.
  2. Remap “Collapse Vertical Tabs” to ⌘+⌥+S. The best part about vertical tabs is being able to quickly reclaim the space when you want to. This key combo was Dia’s and I couldn’t get rid of the muscle memory.

Then I had to use a couple of extensions to replicate other capabilities:

  1. Copy Current URL. Dia made it super easy to copy the URL of your current tab with the ⌘+⇧+C shortcut. Once I switched to Chrome I kept attempting to use it out of muscle memory.
  2. Cycle Last Used Tabs. This was probably one of Dia’s more controversial changes: Pressing ⌃+tab would cycle through your tabs in order of when they were last used, instead of the order of the tabs in your browser. I got used to this and really enjoyed it. Unfortunately you can’t override ⌃+tab in Chrome, but this extension gives you the ability to map it to another keystroke.
  3. Tab Renamer. Turns out the title of a webpage is not always a helpful tab title. Dia did it natively and this extension enables it in Chrome.

I’ll admit: the switch hasn’t all been bad. I’ve been struck by just how fast Chrome is; I’m not sure if that’s purely relative to Dia, but it feels so much more snappy. And I’ve realized that while I am glad that Dia tried new things, there are some features, like Spaces, that don’t have as much benefit as I thought compared to Chrome’s vanilla window management.

Ultimately, I decided to switch to Chrome on my personal devices for consistency, even though our household security department is much more lenient.