Comment by wongarsu
6 days ago
Netscape used to cost the equivalent of $100 inflation-adjusted dollars and was only forced to go free to compete with Internet Explorer. Now the genie can't be put back in the bottle, and anyone trying to sell you a browser would become irrelevant the same way Delphi's paid compiler lost out to free C compilers.
Maybe you could carve out a niche that's willing to pay, the same way C# did before dotnet core. But for a mass product the best-case scenario would be something similar to today's Opera.
However what it would do is open up the market to competition. Right now Google is spending a lot on Chrome development and Chrome advertisement. Opera and Edge both have given up on their own engines because they couldn't keep pace with Chrome development, and Firefox kept its engine but can't compete with Chrome's ad spend. If Chrome had to compete on a more even playing field there would be more room for diversity and competition. That could be a net positive, even if it makes Chrome worse.
Windows is a paid-for product; either enterprise licenses or via the manufacturer. Yet few people (mainly those who build PCs themselves) realise this.
What if the browser had a similar model? The manufacturer pays a certain 'browser development fee' into escrow, then on first boot, the copmuter shows a browser ballot, which gets set as the default, and the fee goes to the chosen browser developer? There's probably a bunch of problems with this approach, and, at least initially, wouldn't break the monoculture, but it might be a good starting point for how to fund browser development.
There was never a time that you as individual couldn’t use an ftp client back in the day and download a free version of Netscape.
So who would buy “Chrome” when they can get Chromium for free and fork it?
I am confused by this comment too. I don't recall ever being asked to pay for Netscape. (not that I would have, at 12ish)
I clearly remember it being boxed and on a shelf along side Internet Explorer for like $40 at CompUSA. Nearly an entire isle for browsers.
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I remember it was originally paid for (i vaguely remember seeing an ad in a pc mag) but by 1996 I got it for free
It was never required to pay for it. As was common with software back then, the free download was a fully featured "evaluation" version denoted by an "N" appended to the version number. That didn't last long though and it just stayed free.
There was a "Gold" version they sold at retail for some time that had a WYSIWYG editor in it, until they made it standard as part of the Communicator suite.