It is difficult to get people to pay for it. People happily pay for 10€ beer but asked ”friends” about how to bypass WhatsApp’s 0,99 lifetime licenses.
I'm not tracking what's currently going on with the underwater portion of frontend iceberg. Are things still like it was in late '00s and early '10s, where browsers still had plenty of their unique implementation quirks and non-standard features, and plenty of sites were relying on those?
Back in the day, it was not entirely unheard of having two significantly different frontend implementations - one for IE, another for Netscape, with quite unhealthy amounts of parser hacks to hide code from the browsers.
Possibly naively, but I think it's not that bad nowadays? (At least it wasn't so in late '10s.) Some things are Chrome-only, or Apple-only, but I rarely see "not supported in your browser" - the majority of features is generally standards compliant, and all those newcomer engine problems (like in the article) are mostly because there's a lot to implement.
It is not about what is supported now, but what will be supported in the future? Google is pushing most of the web standards and has a huge influence. Other, less used browsers must support them if they want to have any chance.
You should ask that how many of the standard features are brought by someone else without huge influence of Google. If you cannot get anything new, when it is enough that Google says "no", then in reality there is only one browser.
They don’t. Most of the common web developers do what the managers and users require. Otherwise you are not providing value and using your time efficiently.
I'm sure there are plenty of people who will pay for it even though its being given away for free. Maybe not enough to replace the income from google but its worth a shot trying a fund raising drive.
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