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.
