He leaves a publicly funded team building a web browser, starts a commercial entity, and for whatever reason they don't feel they can charge for their browser funded by private equity. You could in fact buy it in a box at the local electronics store, but with the pricing I suspect most of that money went to distribution, not NCC. So they try to find other ways to make money, like their web server and overpriced consulting (for their notoriously awful web server).

The entire dotcom era then emulated this pattern. There were certainly other logistical reasons for it (like the state of credit card billing at the time), but I can't help but feel like this was the rock that started the avalanche of adware and commercial cyberstalking.

And so here we are 25 years later, and the last remnant of Netscape is trying to build the free browser and not much to fund it. I'm kinda surprised it lasted this long.

To be fair to them though, and particularly on the topic of this story, if they were going to build a free browser, it always should have been on the community to contribute to the dev tools. It's the part of the browser that we have a vested interest in.

And in fact, it used to be that way. Firefox had no dev tools at the beginning. They copied a very popular add-on, which I now recall made absolutely no sense to me at the time. I felt like their attempt was less effective in several ways, and why are they shouldering out this tool that made them in the first place (as GP asserts, nobody develops first-class support on a browser they can't debug in, or at least not when there is an alternative.)