I switched to the free Chrome because it was a better browser. Just because I was paying for software doesn't mean it's a good situation for me.
>Who do you think should pay for it? [...] Do their incentives align well with yours?
Even if I (the customer) directly pay for software instead of ads indirectly paying, it still doesn't mean it's the optimal solution.
I paid $80 for a text editor but after being frustrated with bugs in the latest version, I took a serious look at the free VS Code. I realized that the editor I was paying for had really stagnated and lacking modern features. I should have quit funding them a long time ago.
Another example is Quicken home finance software. Kept paying $60+ annual renewal fee every year and yet the software keeps getting worse. Downloads of credit-card and bank transactions randomly quit working. The ledger balances on my desktop don't match the balances shown online. I had used the software for almost 30 years since the DOS floppy disk days and just finally gave up. I look at the 1-star reviews of Quicken on Amazon and browse the Quicken help forums and everybody complains about the same defects.
Often, what happens is companies don't respect their paying customers because they know they're locked in because of inertia or sunk costs. They just treat their repeat customers as ATM machines and barely improve the software. (E.g. They make superficial cosmetic changes to UI instead of fixing core engine bugs.)
I'm not convinced paying a subscription for a web browser will give me a better browser. Maybe it will. But I doubt it.
I’m convinced subscription software actively makes this problem worse: with the old model, the developer had to include enough new features and improvements to convince you to open your wallet for a large purchase. With subscription the developer has no incentive to fix anything because the product goes away if you stop paying for it.
I would argue that subscription is the only sensible model for browser (if payment is needed). For browsers you do want to keep up to date with security patches as well as new features, that is pretty critical for both usability and security.
For normal software you can buy and use some fixed version without too much issues, for browsers you probably need the updates.
Security-wise maybe something like buying a ESR version may be possible, but it will not be cheap and you may miss the new features when some webpage you visit breaks.
I talked about paying $29 for Opera for web browser software before : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16090235
I switched to the free Chrome because it was a better browser. Just because I was paying for software doesn't mean it's a good situation for me.
>Who do you think should pay for it? [...] Do their incentives align well with yours?
Even if I (the customer) directly pay for software instead of ads indirectly paying, it still doesn't mean it's the optimal solution.
I paid $80 for a text editor but after being frustrated with bugs in the latest version, I took a serious look at the free VS Code. I realized that the editor I was paying for had really stagnated and lacking modern features. I should have quit funding them a long time ago.
Another example is Quicken home finance software. Kept paying $60+ annual renewal fee every year and yet the software keeps getting worse. Downloads of credit-card and bank transactions randomly quit working. The ledger balances on my desktop don't match the balances shown online. I had used the software for almost 30 years since the DOS floppy disk days and just finally gave up. I look at the 1-star reviews of Quicken on Amazon and browse the Quicken help forums and everybody complains about the same defects.
Often, what happens is companies don't respect their paying customers because they know they're locked in because of inertia or sunk costs. They just treat their repeat customers as ATM machines and barely improve the software. (E.g. They make superficial cosmetic changes to UI instead of fixing core engine bugs.)
I'm not convinced paying a subscription for a web browser will give me a better browser. Maybe it will. But I doubt it.