this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
1587 points (91.5% liked)
Privacy
32442 readers
637 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yes, if it avoided this headache of ads, spyware and any other intrusive monetization. I'd pay for any category of software I wanted to use for this reason. Which is how software used to be sold before people got used to not paying for anything upfront and instead paid for it in hidden data harvesting.
Would you pay for each update as well? It's not MS Word where you can still be using Word 97. You need constant updates.
Usually the up front cost of the software would fund some number of years of updates. Then after that you would pay for a new version.
Sounds like a subscription would make more sense. Which exists BTW, there are subscription browsers.
subscription means don't pay lose access. So no, not a subscription.
But as soon as you stop getting updates, a browser is as good as useless. It's a security nightmare and you shouldn't use a browser that isn't up to date.
Problem is, having loads of people using an outdated browser because they don't want to pay for updates could cause problems for everyone. Browsers need to be kept up to date.
Except the browser isn't the only thing that needs to have revenue, websites also do, so buying a browser upfront doesn't negate the need for ads