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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 stoppin

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...