People were never gonna pay for a browser, it turned out to be the modern day equivalent of the turnstile to access DisneyLand.
Sure it's needed and it has to be installed for security purposes, but nobody is enthusiastic about the turnstile when they go to DisneyLand.
AOL (which had acquired Netscape) stock topped on Dec-13-1999 at 94/share. He bought the exact top of an epic speculative bubble.
He was maybe in the green for 1 or 2 sessions.
Just be a browser for fuck sake. I'd pay 20 bucks a month for a firefox that just did www and a thunderbird that just did email really well. Let me install extensions if I want extra stuff.
Some others to check out:
Luakit
Waterfox
LibreWolf
People were paying for browsers. It was the norm before Microsoft gave away Internet Explorer for free, which sort of killed that business model. Even so, well into the 2000s there were still browsers that you paid for (like Opera)
Or Adobe would have. Enterprise customers don't have the time to shop one piece of software for every function.
Microsoft Server solves(ed) them lots of problems.
No, not really. Most people paid $0 for web browsers even in the early Netscape's days in October 1994. That was Netscape's deliberate intention and was stated in their press release: https://web.archive.org/web/20061207145832/http://wp.netscap...
Personal use was free. Netscape intended for businesses to pay for the browser. Both the older Mosaic browser and Netscape Navigator were free for non-commercial use in 1994. Free browsers were the norm before the Browser Wars of 1995 kicked off with MS releasing Internet Explorer 1.0.