You're still using 1/4 of your write unendurable for your fricking web browser. And exceeding the endurance rating can make you ineligible for warranty service/replacement of the drive.
> I dunno but I think plenty of people consider their web browser a pretty vital application.
No one is arguing against that point. However, most people do not need their browser state to be needlessly backed-up that aggressively (every 15 seconds - which is about the same time it took me to type everything before this sentence). I'm OK with losing up to 20 minutes of my state in a browser. Most work done in a browser is usually synced to an upstream browser every few minutes - auto saved emails or multi-step web-apps.
And when you just spent 10 minutes finding the link you need, and your browser crashes, you're going to spend a lot more time again. There are plenty of cases where I'm really glad my browser re-opens all the tabs, with cookies in play etc.
If your job includes having to use a web application for significant portions of said job, it's even more invaluable. I've worked on several applications that account for more than 40% of some employees' time per day... This was back in the IE6 days, they bemoaned having to close/reopen once a day because of memory issues (IE6 had horrible GC across COM boundaries).
TBH, I wouldn't even have thought about searching history... also, every change for every window would save history requiring a sync... And for some things, cookies, sessionStorage, localStorage, websql and the like are pretty important too.
The web browser is basically everything I do, though. My email is in it, my code review is in it, my IM is in it, on some of my machines my terminals are in it (via the Chrome mosh app).
Email/code review/IM/terminal doesn't justify 12GB of writes per day (and attendant hit to drive endurance/battery life). Those are lightweight activities. Emacs can do all those things and it doesn't write to disk unless you tell it to. Heck, even bloated beyond belief Outlook + Visual Studio + Skype + PowerShell wouldn't create anywhere near that kind of background activity.
What does "justify" mean here? My web browser does them in a lot more useful fashion to me than Emacs would - in other words, it is worth 12GB of writes per day for me to get these into my web browser instead of into Emacs. Am I wrong for thinking that this is a good tradeoff?
Did you actually decide to make this tradeoff? Did Firefox at some point explain it was going to do 12GB of writes per day and you clicked the button that said yes?
Those applications have the benefit that they know exactly what the user data is, what their own state is, and how much of that is due to user input. The browser doesn't have that advantage. For one, state is coming off of the network all the time.
Anybody buying a drive so cheap it can't handle Firefox is probably putting the drive in a machine so cheap that it will only be lasting 3-4 years maximum anyway.
Real lifetimes are often a multitude of the endurance rating, BTW.