Emacs 10.7? What are you running? I have a a couple of dozen file buffers open, a Magit session, and some ag buffers and Emacs is reporting 39,748k. Meanwhile, my IntelliJ instance is reporting 1,341,992k with three files open. Each of my two Firefox instances is reporting between 450,000k and 500,000k, with less than 5 tabs each. When every basic application assumes it can grab between a few hundred megs and a couple of gigs or RAM, Emacs claiming 40 megs is sort of nice.

If you're looking for libre notebook/organization software, I've never found anything better than Org-Mode. It runs across all major desktop operating systems (via Emacs), and is included with the default distribution of Emacs. I don't think OneNote even comes close to Org's feature set.

Is the implication that Google gave them the money and said "Make a browser just like Chrome"? That doesn't make any sense. What happened was that Chrome changed users' expectations about browser behavior and Mozilla adapted their product to the marketplace. The differentiating feature of Firefox is its extensibility, and, AFAIK, that hasn't changed at all...it's still the most powerful browser platform for extension by a long shot.

Google created Android and Chrome to promote diversity within the mobile and browser ecosystems. Google has a vested interest in consistent, prevalent standards so they can advertise across every platform. Google wouldn't pull Mozilla's funding over Firefox OS any more than they would pull funding because Firefox became "any sort of threat" to Chrome.

Chrome changed the game in two ways: it focused on speed/security, and it brought many of the geeks back to a closed-source browser. Sure enough, Google is slowly building in proprietary non-standards compliant tech into Chrome. It's not as overt as ActionScript with IE back in the bad ol' days, but we're getting there, IMHO. Mozilla is the last bastion of a free, standards-compliant browser. And Mozilla has done amazing work in the last few releases to make Firefox faster. And, their R&D is impressive. While Google wants to make the web faster by pushing everyone to integrate a new language into every browser engine (Dart), Mozilla created asm.js. http://kripken.github.io/mloc_emscripten_talk/sloop.html I'd assert that the work Mozilla is doing is vital to the continued health of the internet. I don't agree with every decision they make, but asserting that it's somehow a better idea for them to drop most of the work they're doing and start funding themselves through PayPal or Kickstarter every year is absurd. Every other major browser (Chrome, IE, Safari) has a multi-hundred-billion dollar company backing it. Marketing and R&D are critical parts of Mozilla's survival strategy.

"Sophistry" comes to mind.

And, you take your chances if you're hosting it somewhere within your control. I mean, I get the whole "my data, my drives" concept, but I have seen exactly zero evidence that clouds have less downtime than internal solutions. And, if the cloud is the only place you have your data, well, that's just as bad as storing it in any other single place.

First of all, everyone is using software from the eighties, closed source AND open source.

Second, I am of the opinion we have spent the last 20 years regressing in our sophistication. We graduated from TeX (LaTeX) to word processing - great, way to replace something awesome with a steaming pile.

We graduated from Vi and Emacs to GUI-centric coding systems like Eclipse, NetBeans, IntelliJ and Visual Studio. These are good IDEs, but they basically suck at text editing.

From the SchemeWiki:

Its a shame that the students of our generation grew up with windows and mice because that tainted our mindset not to think in terms of powerful tools. Some of us are just so tainted that we will never recover. -- Jeffrey Mark Siskind in comp.lang.lisp

And so it is. Many of us actually choose to use older-style software simply because it is more powerful. As the guys over at the site for the Ion Window Manager say:

So-called "modern desktop environments" converge on total unusability, and present-day mainstream graphical user interfaces in general are far less usable than they are praised to be. Usability simply does not equal low learning curve, and hiding system details from the user, as the Official Truth seems to be these days. ... Those of us who prefer to use the computer primarily with the keyboard for reasons of efficiency or health, are forgotten when "modern" graphical programs are designed. Mouse-based search-and-click interfaces simply are not efficient except for some very specialised tasks and in other cases involve lots of tedious repetitive clicking and searching.

All this is to say: just because software is old does not mean it is somehow "bad". In some ways, the lack of resources we had then led us to design more beautiful systems that ended up being more usable.