The Ad-Blocking Browser That Pays the Sites You Visit

Everyone hates ads. Or at least a lot of people do. But they’re what pays for practically all the journalism and entertainment you enjoy online. So what if you could just set a budget—say, $5 a month—and divvy that up amongst all the sites you visit? It might not amount to much, but if enough people sent pennies—or even fractions of a penny—then maybe, just maybe, those micropayments could add up to a real business model for the media.

This isn’t a new concept. The idea of funding content with micropayments even predates the web itself. But Brendan Eich, the controversial engineer who helped build the popular Mozilla web browser and created JavaScript—the most widely used programming language on the web—has a plan to make it happen at last.