Because no matter what their subscription price is it’s only reflective of the development work required to add features on top of Chromium, not of building a web browser. As such it’s not sustainable.

If it ever became a competitive issue Google could very easily close source Chrome. Then suddenly all these Chromium-based subscription browsers would be on the hook for all browser development, security updates included. And that would be enormously expensive. So their prices would have to go up. Would their business still be sustainable? It’s questionable at the very least.

> Google could very easily close source Chrome.

Only today did I realize that most of Chromium (and WebKit) is BSD licensed. So closing the source would be much easier than I expected.

Firefox and Gecko are MPL licensed, which is like GPL but scoped to individual source files.

Software only makes sense in the context of the non-tech world, specifically the behavior of humans.

Despite the fact that only large corporate interests can maintain a browser, that monopoly exists because of a careful balance where developers contribute free labor to the project. Also Google's open-source initiatives still have some developer goodwill.

If Google close-sourced Chromium, they would definitely suffer repercussions. They would anger most programmers and hackers. Say goodbye to bug bounties. Say goodbye to free labor. Say hello to Microsoft taking the opportunity to fork Chromium and make Google look even worse.

Do you see it becoming a competitive issue though? Even the commenter who brought it up doesn’t even think paid browsers will ever be mainstream. I certainly don’t.

Perhaps because they won't be truly independent because of the cost to hard fork?