Would you be willing to pay for a browser?

If the browser was FOSS, had good add-on support, secure OOTB, didn't mine my data & respected my privacy I would be 100% willing to pay for a browser.

What if you could pay by leaving a silver coin at a crptologically predetermined secure location?

Depends. Not always. I bought my VPN license for 24 months in a store with cash. Which you can do in my country.

No.
/thread

You don't /thread your own post you stupid faggot

PRISM isn't selling data for profit. It was coercion from the government and sometimes without the knowledge of the actors involved.

If you're asking whether I would be willing to pay someone to make a browser according to my specifications (which aren't yours, eg fuck customisation/plugins) then sure. If you're asking whether I would be willing to buy a program after the fact via the honour system of copyright, lol no. Might donate if I wasn't broke though.

But what you're actually asking
is about a software as a service subscription model. And to that I can only say: fuck you and the horse you rode in on, you fucking cancerous fucking fuck.

If it were free software (as in freedom), and I could somehow know it would be that good, sure. I've donated some money to the developer of the browser I currently use.

hahahahahaha
wikileaks.org/nsa-france/

no and the idea that the fabric of the internet is so complicated such that it requires funding to work begs for a new fabric (of course, the web isn't the fabric of the internet, but it's the only common way of sharing documents)

and 5 minutes later it will become illegal because nothing to hide

Maybe, OP.

But you'd be better off with a one time fee, or maybe a patreon.

10-$25 max, unless its bulletproof

How would you motivate people spending billions on fibre optic cables running across the planet for free?

Nah, most people would rather have adblock that actually works 100%

At this point with how shit all browser are, I would pay 10$ for it if it is well done and libre. What I have a problem with is the "per year" part. What happens if I don't pay? Does the browser shut down? Or is it like what Crossover does, where if you don't pay you don't get updates, but you can still use the software? Even that raises issues though, a web browser is a much more security-critical application than a Windows compatibility layer.

So what? How could the knowledge of your purchase benefit anyone?

Safari's security is a fucking joke.

Vivaldi satisfies my requirements. But if I didn't find it (just a month ago or so), and was left with Firesucks or Chrome, yes I'd pay for it.

You paid for stolen code from KHTML and you think you're smart.

I can tolerate waterfox with plugins.

If it was this hypothetical perfect browser that kept up to date with web standards, had all the functionality I'd want without plugins, didn't have any functionality I don't want, and I was able to pay for it without paypal or a credit card, then sure, why not. I'd even pay 5€ per month.

To me spending money for software is not a problem, it's the fact that I don't have a credit card or paypal so I can't pay for fucking anything even if I tried.

what does physical architecture have to do with the web?

Shitfari is garbage, though

Vivaldi is ok. I find it sluggish though. Also I must admit that I've not checked into their security and all that. Them using the Chrome extension "store" triggers me.

Well if you intend to cross continents then you're kinda limited to physical infrastructure. Or did you imagine you could do it without. Even a satellite is a physical object.

Their security track record is poor (they don't push out updates quick enough), but it is very power efficient. For normal every day stuff, I'll choose Safari on my mac before anything else.

Please leave Holla Forums and never come back. The day you faggots were allowed to use Firefox, was the day you should have never used Safari ever again. Firefox may be shit, but what else is there?

Annually? Fuck no. That's just a waste of cash.

A one time payment doesn't bother me so much. The problem with browsers is that they haven't really modernized and no one's willing to dump all that legacy's code and start fresh. All browsers are these days are botnet browser, built in shit, Firefox derivatives, and literally whopera

Any method of truly requiring payment to run the software violates freedom 0, the freedom to run the program as you wish. Any partial method of requiring payment is easily bypassed, so in any case the payment has to be optional.

Monetization is the problem with free software that Stallman is so quick to dismiss. You can build a service around it, have optional payments or ask for donations. But for a project as big as a full fledged modern web browser it is exceedingly difficult. I wish the best of luck to anyone who undertakes that task. Hopefully they can learn from Mozilla's mistakes.

Your logic is retarded. Paying €10 != you not being able to do whatever you want with your software. Stallman specifically mentions that you can charge money for your software, because free != libre. Fuck off with your FUD bullshit.

Not an argument.

Firefox runs like dogshit on the mac. Scrolling is pure garbage.

10 euros per year of updates would work fine. There is more than one way to do this.

Stallman very strongly objects to software that stops working after a period of time, though.

Opera did this and went nowhere.

I found this on Apple. Never heard of it before, but it has been going since 1999.

Please read more carefully. The key word in my post is "requiring". The key phrase in the OP is "have to".

It's not possible to force payment for free software. You can charge for it, but that is optional payment Stallman is referring to.

Charging for support is ok, but requiring payments for updates wouldn't work. Security updates are essentially mandatory in a browser. Updates are also software and their source code would need to be made available for them to be under a free license. So again the payment is easily bypassed and optional.

Wrong, because nobody is forcing people to write and release free software. The payment happens before the software/source is made available. Payments for updates work on the same principle. Nobody pays, the update doesn't get released or even made.

All the faggots in here going on about privacy/data mining. I understand wanting privacy but the way it is being harped on here I starting to think Cheese Pizza is what the privacy is really needed for

debit card

If you don't understand the principle of least privilege then maybe you should abide by the principle of leave privilege and gtfo.

Literally

Ok, that is still asking for donations or voluntary funding.

My point is trying to require purchasing via licensing keys, subscriptions, DRM and various other dirty methods proprietary software vendors use doesn't work for free software. Anyone can copy and redistribute it for free. The copyright can not be used to sue people for making unauthorized copies, so there is no way to enforce mandatory payment as the OP has proposed.

The data that google, facebook, microsoft mine from you is worth like $20-30. Not $20-30 annually, $20-30 PERIOD. Image just paying 20 once for privacy.

I would support an open source browser project even if it was crap, so long as their intentions were good and they released official tax documents proving that the developer's income is not much more than mine.

dat crab mentality :^)

I would rather pay for websites to provide a version of their website that works properly without javascript. Every single website nowdays is slow as fuck except stallman.org.

It would have be a miracle of programming to warrant a price tag and more importantly continue to be a miracle of programming afterwards. It's easy enough to come up with a browser but apparently all these IT cucks have a hard time not fagging their own product up over time. Look at Firefox.

if its free software, and way better than firefox and chrome, i would, why not?

Deal w/ it bro. Why should I "support" someone ten times more wealthy than me?

You support them so they continue working on the project. If they do a good job, it's very likely they'll start earning more than a dumb ass like you can attain.

I forgot all about that comic. This is one of my favorites.

Straight no. Browsers are not the problem but the whole internet infrastructure.
More importantly why not design a better web-alike technology that prevents 'those' flaws? there's gnunet and maybe gnusocial for example that solves a few problems.

Most botnets are from the server-side so you only have to be picky about the kind of sites you browse and use or just get a decoy phone and PC/OS for normie shit.

To a hacker's perspective it is actually a deeper rabbit hole and a tangled mess.
You have to think of the ISP's datamining capabilities, your browsing habits, the devices you connect to or are nearby (botnet public or private routers and phones fingerprinting wlan/bluetooth MAC of devices plus android apps while they also fingerprint other wlan connected devices through uPnP or some new shit), even what is outside of you is dangerous which is your (n00b) family and friends and other intruders like hackers, NSA, or LEA shit that can duplicate your monitor's analog noise from a blimp.

6 degrees of separation is to be taken seriously if you are a true hacker.

spooky test:
good thing about iplogger.org is you can see the referrer link if it was an independent request and even trace the time link was opened because there is a possibility that your connections are hijacked on the fly or the ISP is splitting everything on its malicious gateways.

Few web browsers don't actually turn off that goog-malware or safebrowsing botnet that sends all the links you click to google's supercomputer botnet (bonus if that facebook link had a unique token on its URL because it does, I call it URL cookie and even a throw-away javascript http-request can push information even with cookies disabled and since it is http then your ISP now has everything they need of you)

Let's pretend everything's fir e.

If by purchasing it you're granted access to the source, and you're allowed to share patches/other customizations with other users of this browser, yes, that'd be the absolute perfect browser.
€10,- a year is fucking nothing for something that'll greatly improve my life.

I bet you think notch did nothing wrong and bitch at people for pirating vidya.

If they already have an income, why do they need my support? They should just make the software out of desire for personal satisfaction, pride in their craft and wish to benefit society just like the rest of us.

Donations are merely a mechanism to prevent people from being blocked from their aspirations by starvation or homelessness. Once you have the essentials covered, e-begging further (from people who don't) is called being greedy.

literal communist detected

I would pay €10 to purchase a browser flat out. But anything with a recurring fee? No.

there's nothing wrong with not wanting to get raped by the police state for looking at a picture

iBrowse for classic AmigaOS is shareware too.

But it is. You're under no obligation to host your software for everyone. You just have to make sure users can access the source code if they demand it, or ship it with each copy. It's up to users to decide whether they'll share their copies.

There's always the (controversial) RHEL model: make customer accept contract to receive software, updates, and support. Installing more copies than allowed, sharing, etc. ends the contract and leaves customer without support and updates.

That's not a donation model of funding. It is a work for hire.

Safari is objectively the worst browser. It's probably worse than 2007 IE. You really need to rethink what you're doing with that one

I'm for pirating but you sound like an entitled child.

I don't care who they develop for, or why. But "donating" money to someone who makes 10x more than you, when you yourself can barely afford rent, is retarded.

Not an argument, plenty of people make quality software without jewing their users.

You basically asserted in your post that you wanting free things overrides someone well off wanting to charge for software. If they choose to charge for software then they choose to charge for it. You can pirate and steal or whatever but they're not morally obligated to make their software legally available free of charge to people less fortunate than them.

Developers in the donate category, or anyone for that matter, will usually accept donations from people *willing and able* to donate. There's nothing wrong about that if someone wants to donate for a product they appreciate after all.

I'd be interested, but it'd have to be pretty damn good.

You can already get an API like Webkit, wrap it with whatever language you want, and build a browser that way. Mix with python and you get "UZBL", which was nice in theory but lacked the maturity to make it worth dealing with, much less paying for. (Not that anybody asked money for it.) Most of the functionality you would want beyond "input url->see webpage" comes from user-made modules, which are all garbage, are invariably written for the wrong version of the core, etc.

The same is basically true of Conkeror. It's a blob of JS running as a UI on XULRunner, and there are "page modes" for when you want custom JS running on a given domain. The bitrot is as intense as you would expect. You can kind of import Fx plugins, but again, versionitis is the rule, not the exception, and shit flat out doesn't want to work a lot of the time.

Firefox extensions are pretty important. A browser is useless to me without Greasemonkey, so the perfect browser not only needs the same functionality as Fx but needs lock-step conformance so that extensions and GM scripts don't go out of sync or develop platform-specific bugs. Kind of a sisyphean task for $10.

No but I'd donate to one provided the devs aren't SJWs like Mozilla. I will never pay for proprietary software (and any browser you must pay for would have to be proprietary).

No. The idea itself is good, if there was accountability.
But what they will do is take your money and do that crap anyways. Because greed.
Also, I don't like or trust closed source software. They will get subpoena'd/blackmailed to add backdoors and shit.

What we should have is a bounty program to have someone fork Firefox or whatever and make it not suck.

Say that there is X versions released in a year. and you pay 10€/X for a version, to use as long as you like, but if you want a newer one then you have to pay 10€/X again.
Then realize that running an outdated version is not that great an idea due to exploits and compatibility.

Parted Magic is an example of it. Not shure how sales would be.

I don't like paying subscriptions in this way. I want to feel like the software is mine, I don't want to just buy a liscense to use it.
I'd do a one time of $30, maybe $50.

I'd at least require it to be open source. And I would want some one reputable to audit it before I use it, that way I know if it's pozzed or not, I'm not paying to just have another pozzed browser.

But yeah, it's an ok idea.

OP, what value doe pretending provide. What features are you looking for / imagining in a browser you would like to build ? For me, an html-only browser would be sweet.

If it took the opposite stance to joogle's "if it isn't JS it isn't the internet" shit I would donate some money. Build from scratch, tho, no bloat !

Some documentation explaining what the code does, line-by-line, is the only way to ensure the value of open-source. Otherwise, what good is it if only code-literate fags could verify the shit does as it says ?

Anybody is free to do this. However nobody could ever be bothered to invest such an effort; the payoff is worth nothing compared to the investment of effort. The value of open source is in the development of software that's done in the open. Illiterate people have no business judging the open source development method.

You don't really need extension compatibility. There's thousands of extensions listed on addons.mozilla.org and 99% are worthless crap. The handful of good extensions are really just user patches for functionality that Mozilla is too jewish to add.

This is all stuff that should be a core browser feature anyway (maybe disabled by default for power user stuff like NoScript).

So when you make your browser just remember to add functionality from a few well known FF extensions and you're good to go.

Why would any codelord care about code illiterate plebs?

In order for browser to protect itself (meaning; to effectively cost something) it needs to be botnet by default.

Provided it's free software, I would. But rather something like 30 bucks once instead of 10 a year.

Cool market research thread, put this on offerwalls so I can get .75 cents for answering.

Consider the following:
Who gives a single fuck what that big fat autistic faggot Stallman thinks? He's not even de Raadt in the first place.

We need more browser threads on the front page

i am on the case!

No.

Gnutards care for reason user.

I used to register Opera when it was still shareware, so yes. Would do again if it meant botnet free.

please kill yourself. Like QNX is more legit OS than that, at least it has a history of UNIX compliance.

Bretty good in its day, it was notable for its ultra-svelte proprietary engine (originating on Atari TOS) that ran modern sites on 1MB HDD & 1MB RAM back when NS 6 & IE 5 were gargantuan 30-80MB HDD/RAM messes. It bloated slightly over its lifetime, but to an infinitely lesser extent, and retained support for older environments (especially 68k & OS ≤9) much longer. Notable features I liked included superb max-autistic integrated filtering, history, autocrawling, archival, and scripting features.

Also notable was Omniweb, an extremely early OS X browser with a proprietary engine ported from NeXTSTEP/OpenSTEP. It was pretty, smooth, lightweight, and thoroughly integrated into the standard GUI.

Sadly, both browsers eventually ditched their engines to become Safari reskins, much like Opera later did.

Monoculture sucks

As long as it was Libre and respected my privacy I wouldn't have a problem with paying for it.
And if I did I could just get the de-branded version.

I definetly would.

For me it is important that I have a secure environment without bullshit.

Currently I use Inox (Chromium Fork) and I'm very happy.

I have been using Web, which should be the Safari for Gnome.
It runs very nicely, but not as nice as Safari, even it being based in the same webkit. Probably the Gtk port was not very well made.

This, old Opera was the best browser I've ever used. They had a banner ad in the UI for free users.

Kinda looks like what Vivaldi used for most of its layout source.

Yes, but it would have to revolutionize the way the internet works, and not just say it does.

That actually looks kind of comfy actually, but then I realized that's because the webpages have content on them, unlike modern webpages that are full of empty space.

...

does it still work on the old macs like G3 imac?

iCab holds onto legacy support way longer than most Mac browsers, but it still dropped PPC builds a few years ago:
icab.de/dl.php

Another interesting fact: Its developer also used it as the basis for a modded Safari that makes browsing as un-retarded as possible without jailbreaking an iPhone/iPad.

It's easier than it sounds. Compiling something as huge as a browser is not a trivial task - something most normies will never do. So you can go ahead and have your repo in the open.

Ff a normie pays, they pay for access to officialy built binaries. Or they can download the binaries from some 3rd party, untrusted source.

Freetards will of course compile it from source.

Some FOSS chrome extensions as well as android software already employ this model.