I would pay for a browser that was fast, extendable and catered to power users over casual users. $5-$10/mo would be the sweet spot. I would have paid for Firefox except they now fall into the bucket of “cater to average users” even though they do have the developer edition but it’s still basically the same browser. Give me a browser with equivalent of postman/insomnia built in, better bookmarks, keybindings, unrestricted plugins and more please.
Id pay for most mozilla stuff if i could get -just- the base functionality.
Just be a browser for fuck sake. I'd pay 20 bucks a month for a firefox that just did www and a thunderbird that just did email really well. Let me install extensions if I want extra stuff.
People were paying for browsers. It was the norm before Microsoft gave away Internet Explorer for free, which sort of killed that business model. Even so, well into the 2000s there were still browsers that you paid for (like Opera)
Personal use was free. Netscape intended for businesses to pay for the browser. Both the older Mosaic browser and Netscape Navigator were free for non-commercial use in 1994. Free browsers were the norm before the Browser Wars of 1995 kicked off with MS releasing Internet Explorer 1.0.
I don't see how that follows. In fact Opera existed as a paid product for years after IE started being bundled with Windows, Netscape open-sourcing and even after Google released Chrome. It's now been bought by a Chinese conglomerate and is apparently "freeware", but the fact that it lasted so long against free or OSS browsers suggests they probably would've survived just fine.
A close pitch from recent times is Zoom. Yes, people will still video-communicate for as long as humanity exists. Doesn't mean the share price (down over 80% from its highs) will go up.
Same post says this person was also long Amazon. Up 3600% or so since Jan 1999. Reminder that the purpose of making lots of bets is you know you're not going to be right on all of them.
They weren't wrong.