3 ms·

But there's an obvious difference between shelling out $60 up-front or $5 a month or whatever and shelling out $0 (and then being tracked, or having your data h

But there's an obvious difference between shelling out $60 up-front or $5 a month or whatever and shelling out $0 (and then being tracked, or having your data harvested). Especially in the modern ecosystem where costs have become divorced from income, people would (behavior observation strongly suggests) much rather pay with their information footprint (a resource they can't capitalize alone) than the dollars in their wallets. Otherwise... Where's the successful paid-for browser right now? Which one? Can we point to it?

b112 2y ago
But they aren't capitalizing their data, because they're paying more in the end. That's my point. Let's say widgets are $x. Now the widget manufacturer, as their competitors are advertising, decides to advertise too. They just hit magazines. Success! But then comes targeted advertising. Now they must pay for profiled advertising, which means that someone colllected the data, archived it, continues to track, and provides uptime and an api you can poll. Google had 300 billion in gross revenue, what of facebook and others? And there are more nuanced, more targeted providers too. The entire tracking industry has got to be hundreds of trillions in revenue, and guess where that comes from? The cost of everything you buy. So you get a browser and gmail for supposedly free, but now steak costs 3% more. What a savings. And yes, when people are tricked into thinking a browser is free, it will be hard for visibly paid competitors. People complain about global warming, and "how did we get here?". Well, the same way we have no paid for browsers. No one cares past their own nose.
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  If your argument is "Browsers are subsidized by advertising driving up the cost of goods," I don't think I disagree but I don't think the consequence of stopping that model is the cost of good goes down. Advertising is driven by competition; in the absence of a browser-subsidy flow for that money, the ads will still be there and prices won't go down. The ads will flow through other channels. Then we get higher cost of goods and no zero-cost browser, which seems strictly worse?
  - b112 2y ago
    If the cost goes up, then the cost will come down. It doesn't happen overnight, and yes a browser is a minimal part of the market. However if everyone paid cash for browsers, browsers would also be quite cheap. If you sell 50M copies a year, even $1 goes a very long way. Firefox seems to spend around $200M/year1 on 'software development', but they also have lots of side projects (pocket, proxies, other software like thunderbird, etc) so I bet $50M could easily fit the bill. And Firefox doesn't even use a shared render engine, or HTML/etc parsers, it's not a chromium based browser. 1. https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-investigating-the-bizarre-finances-of-mozilla https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...

b112 2y ago

But they aren't capitalizing their data, because they're paying more in the end. That's my point. Let's say widgets are $x. Now the widget manufacturer, as their competitors are advertising, decides to advertise too. They just hit magazines. Success! But then comes targeted advertising. Now they must pay for profiled advertising, which means that someone colllected the data, archived it, continues to track, and provides uptime and an api you can poll. Google had 300 billion in gross revenue, what of facebook and others? And there are more nuanced, more targeted providers too. The entire tracking industry has got to be hundreds of trillions in revenue, and guess where that comes from? The cost of everything you buy. So you get a browser and gmail for supposedly free, but now steak costs 3% more. What a savings. And yes, when people are tricked into thinking a browser is free, it will be hard for visibly paid competitors. People complain about global warming, and "how did we get here?". Well, the same way we have no paid for browsers. No one cares past their own nose.

shadowgovt 2y ago
If your argument is "Browsers are subsidized by advertising driving up the cost of goods," I don't think I disagree but I don't think the consequence of stopping that model is the cost of good goes down. Advertising is driven by competition; in the absence of a browser-subsidy flow for that money, the ads will still be there and prices won't go down. The ads will flow through other channels. Then we get higher cost of goods and no zero-cost browser, which seems strictly worse?
- b112 2y ago
  If the cost goes up, then the cost will come down. It doesn't happen overnight, and yes a browser is a minimal part of the market. However if everyone paid cash for browsers, browsers would also be quite cheap. If you sell 50M copies a year, even $1 goes a very long way. Firefox seems to spend around $200M/year1 on 'software development', but they also have lots of side projects (pocket, proxies, other software like thunderbird, etc) so I bet $50M could easily fit the bill. And Firefox doesn't even use a shared render engine, or HTML/etc parsers, it's not a chromium based browser. 1. https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-investigating-the-bizarre-finances-of-mozilla https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...