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If Chrome became a $5/month subscription, would you pay for it?

pythonmegapixel
By pythonmegapixel
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Vote only if you use Chrome on a regular basis.  

107 members have voted

  1. 1. Would you pay a subscription for Chrome?

    • Yes
      1
    • No, I would switch to Safari (Mac) / Edge (Windows)
      14
    • No, I would switch to Firefox
      51
    • No, I would switch to something different
      35

Posted

I know this would never happen, I'm just curious...

 

This question is mainly addressed at people who are already Chrome users. It also assumes that the Chromium rendering engine remains open source so other Chromium browsers still exist.

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pythonmegapixel

into tech, public transport and architecture // amateur programmer // youtuber // beginner photographer

Thanks for reading all this by the way!

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Posted

Subscriptions for the sake of subscriptions will drive people away from the browser; they'll need to offer something/things in return.

 

Knowing Google, I wouldn't be surprised if they turned it into something like YouTube where a free version gets a lot of ads, while a premium version doesn't.

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Posted

I've moved off of chrome for at least a year now. Firefox is so nice

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Posted

I use chrome and firefox (one as a regular, the other for a private/anonymous browser). I would either switch to chromium or fully to firefox. 

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Posted
3 minutes ago, lewdicrous said:

Subscriptions for the sake of subscriptions will drive people away from the browser; they'll need to offer something/things in return.

 

Knowing Google, I wouldn't be surprised if they turned it into something like YouTube where a free version gets a lot of ads, while a premium version doesn't.

Didn't they deliberately destroy the performance of YouTube on both FireFox and Microsoft Edge at one point? Something about them using very outdated APIs that caused stuff like recommendations and comments to take forever to load compared to Chrome. Funny enough around that time they had little banners advertising Google Chrome for users accessing the website via other browsers.  

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Posted
4 minutes ago, BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said:

Didn't they deliberately destroy the performance of YouTube on both FireFox and Microsoft Edge at one point? Something about them using very outdated APIs that caused stuff like recommendations and comments to take forever to load compared to Chrome. Funny enough around that time they had little banners advertising Google Chrome for users accessing the website via other browsers.  

I know about the banners, especially on Google's search engine, but I don't remember the nerfed performance. Must've been using chrome at that time. 

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Posted
1 hour ago, pythonmegapixel said:

It also assumes that the Chromium rendering engine remains open source so other Chromium browsers still exist.

The Chromium browser would still exist then, which would be my choice

🙂

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Posted
35 minutes ago, James Evens said:

@BlueChinchillaEatingDorito Don't quote me on that but they placed useless code/script in there to circumvent edge optimisation/make it slow.

Wouldn't surprise me. Honestly YouTube was the only website that ran like crap on the old Edge for me. It felt un-naturally slow. And CPU utilization would be high even on the YouTube Home page 

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Posted
1 hour ago, pythonmegapixel said:

I know this would never happen, I'm just curious...

 

This question is mainly addressed at people who are already Chrome users. It also assumes that the Chromium rendering engine remains open source so other Chromium browsers still exist.

 

If Chrome decided to charge money, what would happen is people would just compile Chromium and release it without the google bits. Eg Microsoft, Opera.

 

A better question would be "What would get you to stop using Chrome in favor of (Firefox, Edge/Safari)" and to that answer, if Firefox made WASM click-to-run or disabled by default, I'd stop using Chrome in favor of Firefox. However that isn't going to happen as both Chrome and Firefox made a big stink about supporting it, and it's only getting used for malicious uses.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/half-of-the-websites-using-webassembly-use-it-for-malicious-purposes/

 

If it continues on this trajectory, you'll start seeing proprietary WASM blobs being required to use websites instead of Javascript, because some crackpot programmer insisted on programming the UI in Rust and transpiling it to WASM.

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Posted

$5 no ads?

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Posted

already using firefox, been using it for years and I still love it.  I have like 50 tabs open and it's using under 750 mb of memory ... If they ever made the browser I use paying then I would just switch to a free one until there's no more free ones left to switch to.  Then I might resolve myself to learn how to code to make myself a web browser ... ;)

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Posted

This is a really smart question, got me thinking a whole lot about how and why I use chrome, what the others offer and how deeply I am invested.

 

It would be a lot of work to unlink my workflows from Chrome so I would have to pay the subscription for a while, so I could see how to extract all my other Google related stuff and recreate workflows with another browser.

 

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Posted
23 hours ago, GDRRiley said:

I've moved off of chrome for at least a year now. Firefox is so nice

I use both Vivaldi and Firefox. 

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Posted

I don't even use chrome, so no.

 

They would need to offer very damn compelling reason for a subscription plan like that. Like...what's in it for me, what do they offer over the free competition that would justify the cost.

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Posted

There's a reason why Opera dropped the "pay for the full browser!" model in 2005.

 

Nobody wants to pay for a browser.

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I already use opera gx, but I couldn’t imagine paying for something that sells all my data.

 

(yes I do know opera probably sells my data too, but I’m not paying for it)

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I started using Edge on all my devices about a month and a half ago. 
 

I think it’s fine, nothing too special about it, and I’ve never had problems reading websites, so I’m happy. 

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Posted

Hmm can’t pick I don’t use it now option, but no I would not use it for free nor would I pay to use it.

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Posted

Every browser is pretty much the same, Idk why someone would bother installing chrome? Chrome and Edge are now based on the same thing.

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7 minutes ago, RorzNZ said:

Chrome and Edge are now based on the same thing.

man i have been out of the loop! Where can i learn more?

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I’d been a FireFox lifer on my home PCs since 2009. On iPhone, I use Safari. It’s pretty much only the work PCs that I use Chrome. 

My eyes see the past…

My camera lens sees the present…

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