Getting people to pay for something that has always been free is a tall ask. Most people are barely aware of what a browser is. They just think it’s part of the OS.

Enough people pay for Nebula and Kagi and Fastmail to make them profitable, even though YouTube and Google and Gmail are free. You don't need to get everyone in the world who uses the free service to be willing to pay, just enough of them to fund your project.

There's actually an advantage to the paid business model vs ads in that you don't have to appeal to N million people in order to pay the bills: you only have to appeal to `expenses / subscriptionPrice` people. This means you can cater to those people more aggressively and turn them into fans rather than just users, while also saving time on the features they don't need (reducing `expenses`).

(I'm a happy subscriber to all three above-mentioned services and would immediately sign on for a paid Firefox fork like OP suggests.)

it's true. I never in a million years could have imagined that I would be paying for a search engine. now you can pry Kagi out of my cold dead hands.

gmail is only free for a subset of its users, as are other google services.

People pay for youtube and random youtubers now. They are fine paying for things.

Sure, for those things.

However when it comes to web browsers, there’s been a looong history of failed attempts at selling commercial browsers.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the only people who’ve ever made any serious and sustained income from browsers have been Google; and even that’s been indirectly via upselling their other services.

This is what people said about Search before Kagi. And, incidentally, those folks are also working on a paid browser that real people do buy.

Times change. Subscriptions are normalized, and tech people are increasingly aware of the hazards of "free".

Content is something that is traditionally paid.

Not on YouTube.