Why Can the Arc Browser Try a Different Design?

Nicholas Jitkoff says the Arc browser can try a different design because it starts with a smaller user base and already has the learnings of earlier browsers built in.

A lot of the work becomes refinement once people expect the product to be a certain thing. A designer can argue that the job is to tear down the walls and make the hard choices of refactoring the experience. Hundreds of millions of people use the product every day, and they are not delighted when a gaping hole appears where they expected a key bit of functionality. They bump into muscle memory that had become invisible from using a browser day in and day out. The fight is almost like fighting the design of a car.

A smaller user base is what lets Arc try a different approach to a similar problem, with the learnings of the browsers that came before already built in.