They did more than that at the beginning, their original business model was something like "user pays us X, directly or by looking at ads, and we distribute tha

They did more than that at the beginning, their original business model was something like "user pays us X, directly or by looking at ads, and we distribute that X to the sites they visit”, effectively inserting themselves in the ad chain by force. They've since changed that model 15378382 times, every time denying that there was a problem with the previous versions, so I stopped caring. I mean I get it: it's a very hard problem to fund a browser that is user-centric, and all solutions found as of today suck in one way or another. Mozilla does it by leveraging Google's need for a fig leaf when talking to authorities about monopolistic behavior. Vivaldi does it by selling pageview counts or something like that. Etc etc. I just wish companies were more honest about it.