Browsers aren't a product because massive companies give it away and destroy the market.
If any product was given away by massively rich companies there would be "no market" for it, because it was destroyed.
If any product was given away by massively rich companies there would be "no market" for it, because it was destroyed.
This means that you as a consumer have to spend at least $1 (likely more - profit not revenue) for every $0.70 of value you receive in "free" services. Being supportive of ad-supported services is therefore financially irrational.
No, people are not going to pay much for browsers and websites, that's why ad supported products and services exist. Otherwise someone would make better software and charge for it. The only way this works is government intervention, which is what's happening here.
If you want to prevent such alternatives from existing, you'd need fairly authoritarian measures.
It’s all flowers and sunshine when you agree with what they are doing but it’s incredibly easy to abuse the power. And suddenly, like compounding interest, you have dictatorship.
Ads are private sector propaganda. They’re manipulative material attempting to exploit the weakness of the human mind to get YOU to spend money you don’t actually want to spend. Yes, YOU.
We know things that exploit the weaknesses of the human mind, like nicotine, have the potential for extraordinary evil when left to the hands of the private sector. We haven’t all come to this consensus on advertisement, but we will.
It very much is not.
Judging by how much hyper-consumerist behavior I see in myself and my coworkers, we’re not. Everyone is constantly buying shit they don’t need and then justifying it.
As the saying goes, if the product is free, YOU are the product.
You do know most of those companies do both charge you and sell your data? Almost the only companies that don't sell your data are big tech advertising companies.
"When you don't pay you are the product" doesn't mean "If you pay you aren't the product", you still are the product the company is just double dipping.
The majority of Netflix users over the next few years will be advertising based users. That just doesn't bring in enough profit because people are not willing to pay enough subscription to cover what those things actually cost.
Your hypothesis has a bit of a gaping hole where "real world user behaviour" sits.
A browser is an operating system feature.
I mean, you can get alternative file manager programs. Pay for them, even. But most people will never bother.
Microsoft fought and (largely speaking) lost an entire case about that assertion [1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
IE had the opposite problem. Microsoft was moving too slow and was genuinely holding the web back. And obviously, that was intentional because Microsoft's business model at that time was entirely tied to locking users into Windows.
Its never been easier to write cross browser web apps. Some companies choose not to because they don't care enough to test in other browsers. And even then, there are a lot of apps that just happen to work in all the major browsers by chance. It wasn't nearly as easy to build a cross browser app for the IE6 dominated web.
Could be. But this decision is why we even have other browsers.
The decision came too late to save Netscape. Microsoft then stopped competing, and were slow to react when Firefox emerged.
Meanwhile, Apple were always going to create their own browser — as part of their own OS — eventually. Opera kept on keeping on. Konquerer was never going to live or die depending on what happened on Windows.