Most people don't want to pay for anything. Look at all of the workarounds for news sites. I try to pay or donate for most of what I use but there seem to be a lot of people who want to get everything for free.
I totally won't mind paying for the occasional article I open, if micropayments were a thing! Pay a quarter, read something worthy.
The problem is that micropayments are not interesting for most news outlets: the friction of current solutions is high, the resulting revenue stream, unsteady. Monthly / yearly subscriptions bring a better revenue stream, and cost way less.
If micropayments were indeed zero-friction, and effectively zero-cost, maybe they'd be (reluctantly) integrated.
My experience w/ most news outlets is that they have a random article I'm linked to. That's not worth a subscription in my mind. A news service you have an ongoing relationship with is.
I'm deeply disturbed of this normalization of software as a subscription service. I want the return of good old days when people could pay once for their software and use it in perpetuity.
This is not a subscription to use the browser. You can always build it from source and use for free, as designed.
This is a commitment to support the development, because the development should be oingoing. Not Netflix-style, but Patreon-style.
(Also see how JetBrains handles "subscriptions" to their closed-source software. Once you've paid, the version is forever yours. Updates are bought with some additional sums if desired.)
I hate the "subscriptionification" of everything as much as anybody, but there is a cost to ongoing updates to software. Especially on something like a browser, where both standards and exceptional behavior contrary to the standards change rapidly.
Maybe we could go back to where people paid once and could pay separately for support?
subscription is a significantly fairer revenue model for software which undergoes regular upgrades and has support, which is most software nowadays.
It makes sure that people who continue to use continue to pay. Upfront charges are often either too low with long term users free-riding or too high, in case the project is abandoned. Subscription makes it much more likely to price products correctly.
Leaving nonpaying users on old versions on browsers with security issues and who will no longer support the latest web standards will be bad for the web.
If users want to stay on an old version, why shouldn't they be allowed to? Sure, there may be additional security considerations or missing functionality, but there's nothing wrong with a user making that choice.
This model gets implemented, and then the comments section is littered with "I prefer when I didn't need to pay for software upgrades and backward compatibility!"
Yeah, people can get irrational about such things (like ignoring that they're only paying when they choose to rather than paying every month automatically).
But the solution to this is to offer both forms, as several companies do.
Of all the types of software where you should be ok paying a subscription, browsers are the ones where should be most ok with it. Browsers, more than anything else, need constant updates because they're by far the biggest and juiciest attack surface for hackers, and also web devs will just stop supporting you if you're not on top of the treadmill of browser standard updates.
It's not feasible at all to call a browser "done" and leave it alone, so if you want one that's independent from adtech, a subscription is kind of your only option.
I remember the forced obsolescence. There were a few good software packages but many would frequently force you to upgrade from version 12.31 to 13.0 which isn't backward compatible i.e., "This software doesn't run on Windows XP"
At least with Microsoft, they are fanatics about backwards compatibility. It is pretty
rare for something designed for an OS prior to Windows XP
to not run on current Windows OS versions.