I remember the old AOL promo disks, they gave away to sign up for aol but they were basically a browser and isp iirc. Or atleast thats what i thought it was when i was 10. The point being, there seemed to be a fairly large gap between paying for browser service and browsers selling your first born child's identity to pay for the fines they got for stealing people's data. Im not calling any one or the other out and if you need me to then youre already too fucked to care.
I find it very very very difficult to justify ever spending money on any SaaS and i think its the fault of the browser peeps. The few SaaS ive fucked with used to always be minitool or the otherone for data recovery. I was yound and new to the industry because i didnt have even an email address till i was 33 and that was balls deep in pandemic. The point im getting to tho is that how much fucking service and work are they really putting into a product that is basically running cli commands anyone can usually find and run. Not much changes with 99% of set up pc's so what the fuck could they be updating and slaving over that they can justify some out fucking landish prices.
The most transparent one ive used was as a trial and i did pay for a couple months. That was screaming frog... then i learned everything is already there on the internet anyway so just take the time and scrape it .anually, which lasted about a week and within a month i was able to find keys, access full databases of competators and all by not doing fuck all illegal. Im not talking big companies but still. Am i just too used to working in te mines to know most people would rather pay to have it done than learn or put the work into doing it?
Oh and i almost forgot to bring this full circle. Browsers fucking update almost daily trying to keep up with the internet demands. They always have multiple versions testing diggeremt shit, they are one of the most widely used products and/or services by just about fuckin everyone.
So thats my full circle: microsoft pays people to putout broken products that break other products theyre plugged into. Google mak3s you pay for their security that also ranks highest under most security and data breaches, tinder is just getting paid for buttfucking you into thinking your guna buttfuck someone, i cant fucking believe what they charge now. Partition wizard does the same shit prssing Ctrl and clicking start menu button does on windows (along with tons of other similar software swervice providers who just run cli commands with a gui. ALL OF THEM CHARGING AN ARM AND A LEG meanwhile ive been using ff, ddg and chrome every day got the past 20 years plus. Have never had a security issue i didnt personally cause my self or by using social media nack in the day. But looking accross the field and the players in play, what the fuck are they actually charging for and why are people still paying for the shit.
The first web browser was free!! NCSA Mosaic! However since few new users had download capabilities (because they never used command line FTP before), there were software distributes making copies and selling those on store shelves for a few dollars.
Not quite accurate. Yes, at the time Windows 95 came out Netscape Navigator Personal Edition was selling on shelves for about $40-$50. If you bought Netscape Navigator Gold, it came with the Netscape browser and and WYSIWYG HTML editor which was a big deal back then because otherwise you're using notepad to make your website.
Other WYSIWYG HTML editor sitting next to this on the self would be products like Hotdog or Hot METAL Pro:
However, Windows 95 at launch did NOT ship with Internet Explorer. For the launch release of Win95 to get Internet Explorer 1.0 you had to buy the addon package "Microsoft Plus: Companion for Windows 95" for $49:
Internet Explorer 1.0 sucked and Netscape was far superior for the day.
One other artifact from those days. There was another GUI operating system that was still around back then called OS/2. This was an IBM product from the 80s, and the last gasp of it occurred right before Win95 came out. IBM released OS/2 Warp (OS/2 3.0). A good chunk of the marketing was that it contained web browser (called WebExplorer). There were unsavy users buying OS/2 Warp thinking it was just an application when it was a whole replacement operating system.
Great comment! Loved the flashbacks it gave me.
Just wanted to add some context to the quoted part of your comment:
A lot of people didn't know how to download things, sure, but another barrier was most people were on dial-up. It would take a long time, sometimes on expensive calls, to download software. And getting disconnected often meant starting over.
Even if you didn't mind downloading, it was unusual enough at the time that a lot of people probably just felt safer buying the disk from a retail store. It's tangible. So people would get software either off the shelf at the store, or free as part of another purchase.
For example, when I worked for ISPs in the late 90s, we gave every customer a floppy or CD with a dialer and a browser. One popular one among ISPs was the Netscape dialer + browser bundle that we could customize and lock down the settings we wanted, like DNS, proxy, POP phone numbers. I remember we charged $19.95/mo for dial-up in 1998, but at least you got free email and a homepage so you could put up HTML pages with animated GIFs!
Early on there were many different browsers, too. Some based on Mosaic, some independent (e.g. Opera). Netscape eventually became the most common one. I think IE may have been based on Spyglass Mosaic. Microsoft definitively felt threatened by the idea that the web and Java (applets!) could make their entire golden goose, Windows, obsolete. Write Once Run Anywhere was an existential threat to them. So, eventually they ripped out the Microsoft Network (forerunner to MSN) and put Internet on Windows instead. It took them a while, though. And that was only in Windows 95. We were using the WWW before that. (Trumpet Winsock anyone?)
Sorry for going on an old-man rant. This triggered some really crusty memories.