Comment by nicce

5 days ago

It is difficult to get people to pay for it. People happily pay for 10€ beer but asked ”friends” about how to bypass WhatsApp’s 0,99 lifetime licenses.

I've heard the same thing about monetising search engines. Kagi didn't get the memo, and last I've heard they're turning a profit.

Sure, only nerds would pay for it, but not all products have to capture 100% market share.

  • But independent browsers need this metric. Good luck convincing website owners to test against your non-chromium browser with 0.3% market share.

    • I'm not tracking what's currently going on with the underwater portion of frontend iceberg. Are things still like it was in late '00s and early '10s, where browsers still had plenty of their unique implementation quirks and non-standard features, and plenty of sites were relying on those?

      Back in the day, it was not entirely unheard of having two significantly different frontend implementations - one for IE, another for Netscape, with quite unhealthy amounts of parser hacks to hide code from the browsers.

      Possibly naively, but I think it's not that bad nowadays? (At least it wasn't so in late '10s.) Some things are Chrome-only, or Apple-only, but I rarely see "not supported in your browser" - the majority of features is generally standards compliant, and all those newcomer engine problems (like in the article) are mostly because there's a lot to implement.

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    • Twitch randomly blocks Chromium.

      (They don't even block the streams, only logins. I can watch, but not spend money. Perfectly reasonable.)

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And it's impossible to get people to pay for it when you give them no way to pay for it.

Some did. Some like me lined up eagerly to pay the $1 yearly license and would have been happy to pay for my family too.

> People happily pay for 10€ beer

I would not be happy to pay that much for a beer