This question just came to me while I was buying a subway pass. It’s priced very well, provides a very good service, doesn’t suffer from enshittification, and its price increases very rarely.
What are some other services which people don’t mind subscribing to?
I think web browsers would make sense as a subscription. The battle to keep them secure is intense and always ongoing. I think Firefox and Chrome should be subscriptions, while free browsers should have a drastically reduced feature set.
Stop making websites do more and more shit, and browsers would need less and less development.
Stop making browsers with AI enhanced garbage. Stop embedding “features” in software that at its core only needs to render websites.
This is a terrible idea!
It is the reason why Microsoft was able to gimp the Internet for so long with Internet Explorer. Companies couldn’t make money off of the browser, so Microsoft made a browser that helped defend the Windows monopoly.
Average capitalist consumer
I’m not against supporting a software in a recurring form but the web browser is essentially the lock and key of accessing the entirery of what exists outside your machine.
That would garner an immense power to whichever entity developing one. Remember Microsoft and the IE case.
Firefox is not perfect and apparently on a downwards spiral but what made it stand out was because it wanted to be free and for all. Chrome is far from being a good thing.
Even though it would be one way to make Mozilla self-sustainable, it would open a pandora box of different problems. Would free-versions continue receiving security updates? Would access to some websites be locked behind the premium version? It’s a dangerous idea.
By “free browsers” I didn’t mean “free versions”. I’m thinking more along the lines of Pale Moon or Konqueror (in it’s early days), third-party FOSS browsers with limited features.