Yeah advertising is a failure mode of what I said.
But if Firefox ever decided to make a lot of money by selling good browsers at a high price to paying users, well I think the result would be quite interesting.
The reason that doesn’t happen is that that business model is not viable in the presence of alternatives. The “quite interesting result” would be that there wouldn’t be a Firefox anymore.
I pay for my mail client (MailMate). I pay for my search(FoxTrot Search). I pay for my spam filter (Spamsieve). I pay for my notetaking/archival (Eagle Filer).
I pay for my network monitoring (Little Snitch). There are alternatives to a lot of these they just aren't very good, in some cases astonishingly bad.
And I would pay an enormous amount of money for a browser that worked well that had features I've always imagined a browser should have. And I don't expect anyone to make that for me without the reward of getting nice stuff for doing so.
No one would bat an eye if Firefox were no more since there are other browsers more or less just as good, more or less just as bad. It's an immemorable product, the consumer surplus of which compared to the best alternative is very low.
akho|2 years ago
Selling software is not a novel idea.
pexabit|2 years ago
And I would pay an enormous amount of money for a browser that worked well that had features I've always imagined a browser should have. And I don't expect anyone to make that for me without the reward of getting nice stuff for doing so.
No one would bat an eye if Firefox were no more since there are other browsers more or less just as good, more or less just as bad. It's an immemorable product, the consumer surplus of which compared to the best alternative is very low.