So please enlighten us, how will someone make money from the free product that is free and no one pays for because it is free?

Selling user browser data obviously won't fly (and note that Google has never explicitly nor directly sold user's browsing data as far as I know, but they do have a huge ad network that utilises cookies...), so what's the plan? Put ads in the browser? "Premium" features?

The only thing I can think of is highjacking links to Amazon et al to insert referral codes en masse, or selling links/ads on new tab pages.