Why? Let me throw down the gauntlet, I'll pay $10k tomorrow for an Apple web browser that will never fucking crash on me.
There must be a market of people, just like me, who are fed up with browsers, mail clients, and basically all desktop software because it's so unreliable and who are more than happy to pay a premium, even an outrageous premium, to stop screwing around with software and get back to our real work.
Tomorrow I could (theoretically) go out and spend $10k on a hand-crafted work of art guitar from a luthier, or $200k for a mostly handcrafted precision automobile. For $100k I can go into space, but for no amount of money can I buy software that doesn't make me want to throw my computer into the swimming pool.
Will we ever see a boutique market of consumer software that's written with stability and quality in mind? I don't care that my web browser can clean up my neighbor's dogshit and tell me which AS number the website I'm looking at is on (21844, by the way), I just want to get my work done.
I'm not really interested in why Firefox, Safari, and Chrome all suck. I know why, it's because all software sucks. I'm a consumer willing to pay money, lots of it, for a browser that doesn't suck. Build it and sell it to me.
