Chrome Enterprise Premium promises extra security – for a fee

[Gandalf_The_Grey]

Hoping to upsell freeloading corporate users of its Chrome browser, Google has announced Chrome Enterprise Premium – which comes with a dash of AI security sauce for just $6 per user per month.

It's been a while since anyone charged for a web browser. Netscape initially asked $39 for Netscape Navigator Personal Edition in the summer of 1995, but didn't fare well against Microsoft's free Internet Explorer.

"Netscape dropped the price of its browser to zero only in response to Microsoft's predatory strategy," as was noted [PDF] in US Justice Department documents some years later.

But as Gartner foretold last year, "by 2030, the browser will become a platform from which enterprises can distribute software, collect intelligence, control access, and securely enable remote work."

The analyst firm further predicted: "As the browser increasingly stakes its claim as the center of the knowledge worker's corporate universe, enterprise browser vendors are increasingly developing security controls that live within the browser."

That's more or less an invitation to rethink browser monetization. Small wonder Google cites Gartner on its website.

Chrome Enterprise Premium promises extra security, for a fee

Paying for browsers is no longer a memory from the 1990s

www.theregister.com

 

[Brahman]

It's ok since it's only an upsell and business customers have a lot of options which are free and open source. It's not like the situation in the year 1995 where users have Netscape as the only viable option and were forced to pay.