Makes me think of the horse browser (https://gethorse.com), namely the fact that unlike pretty much all other browsers it's a paid, subscription product. You actually have to pay $60 a year in order to use it.
Sounds absolutely ridiculous when you consider that you haven't had to pay for a browser since Netscape, and even then I think you only had to pay once for it (it was before my time, might need some help on this statement from people actively using Netscape in its heyday), but this whole Google antitrust thing has made me appreciate just how fragile the current browser status quo happens to be. Safari and Edge are fine, but I don't particularly like using either, and to be frank the reasons for using an open-source browser besides Firefox or Chrome are largely ideological.
It just might be the case where if you want an actually good browser, you'll have to start paying for it.
As far as I recall, the Netscape browser was free. There may have been a paid one (for enterprise), but I'm pretty sure we had a free one.
They did charge OS makers to bundle it (via support contracts) but the biggest market there (Windows) wrote their own. By IE5 Netscape was basically gone, IE6 had no competition (and hence no development) until Firefox came along.
Horse charges $60 a year and it's still nothing more than a skin over Chromium. I saw the recent surge in paid-for browsers, but none of them seem to actually do any engine work themselves, they all grab Chromium or WebKit and throw a layer of UI on top.
Of course, people are paying for browsers, even if they don't know they are. WebKit and Edge are maintained by companies in a way similar to how Chrome is maintained by Google. It's just the alternatives to those two that are now in danger, and all of their derivatives (Electron, Tauri, and anything built on top of that).
Sounds absolutely ridiculous when you consider that you haven't had to pay for a browser since Netscape, and even then I think you only had to pay once for it (it was before my time, might need some help on this statement from people actively using Netscape in its heyday), but this whole Google antitrust thing has made me appreciate just how fragile the current browser status quo happens to be. Safari and Edge are fine, but I don't particularly like using either, and to be frank the reasons for using an open-source browser besides Firefox or Chrome are largely ideological.
It just might be the case where if you want an actually good browser, you'll have to start paying for it.