You seem to believe that the reason people use Microsoft Office is because they are unaware of the more sensible choice. People use Microsoft Office because people resist change, and collections of people in bureaucracies resist change even more.

Proprietary nature of information storage is considered a plus in bureaucratic circles - because many institutions have more money in their budgets than IQ or technical expertise in their staff. Proprietary means that when it breaks , somebody can be held responsible. It means that when someone doesn't understand something, they can fall back on their pre-existing knowledge of how to use a telephone and call support - thereby also absolving themselves on paper. The reason for work not done can be provided to superiors as "There is a problem with the software. Technical support is looking into it." The alternative would be to actually delve into the thing and try to fix it yourself - but that would involve learning something - which is not their job.

Neither does it help that when it comes to open formats, the best answer you can expect is "You found a bug? Submit a patch".

Open source software typically lacks a central authority that bureaucrats can complain to , sue if necessary, when things go wrong. The risk of licensing that you talk of is not even a factor - because the incentive to minimize one's own effort is higher than actually getting the task at hand done.

This is always going to be a major problem unless mitigated by a Red-Hat like model of doing business. Still, the geek community fails hard at understanding why the typical institutions still use licensed and proprietary software. They are trying to approach the problem from the logical point of view, while what is at play here is human psychology, behaviour, and administrative politics.

It's a tad late but India has a poverty level of only about 20% roughly. The problem in India is actually that the gap between poor and rich is vast. Most Indians (esp. urban populations) can easily afford mid-range smartphones.

I fail to understand what you are saying. My point is that India is not a market for extremely low-end devices like the Intex shown here. In fact, Indians being too poor to own existing smartphones is a myth since it already has 87% penetration and most of those are mid-range smartphones as of today.

This is why they are setup for imminent failure. The best selling mobiles in India are what the western world would call mid-range, like the Lenovo VIbe X.

And even then most are mid-range only in price and build-quality. Chipset-wise the Chinese phone-makers are bringing in some rather speedy models. And this already in a country that has 87% mobile penetration.

If they think that India is a market that will swallow up junk because it is so poor, or even if they think it is the 'developing world', they are delusionally out-of-touch.

I for one would say, the unparalleled sync, multi-core usage binary, sandboxing, lack of Australis(hit), non-clunky interface, official 64-builds that actually have better performance etc. are good arguments. I don't mind using Firefox on my most powerful machine - but it is a major pain on mobile and ULV processor ultrabooks (especially those that depend on multiple cores rather than speed per core).

For a seamless experience across all my machines Chrome is still the best browser out there.

Please don't talk out of your ass AC. Adblock variants are derived from the original Adblock source code. It is perfectly possible to have a Chrome version of the extension with the same underlying code but different packaging and UI elements for Chrome. In fact, I have found my replacement.

All right, there's been the NSA gaffs already, Julian Assange has talked about it, and Google here even plainly looked through someone's email without a warrant.

What is it going to take for people to stop using Gmail? Why don't people understand that cribbing about a free (as in beer) service is not going to help. You have the choice to stop using it.

Unfortunately, I cannot use Adblock Edge even though I like to, since I use Chrome. The Adblock Edge developer has shown no interest in making a Chrome version available.

And, yes, please don't tell me I need to be using Firefox - there are plenty of reasons why Chrome is preferable.

That would be the the inverse of the ratio of retards compared to sane people.

No one was judging a country based on their rocket launching capability. People were appreiciating the efficient and economic rocket launching capability and the efforts that went into developing it. You are one who is doing the judging of an entire country, rather than just the particular achievement reported posted in the article.

As for all the problems you describe as being present in India, as an Indian I thank you for your concern. But seeing as you aren't doing that much to help us solve them, you can keep this list of what is wrong with yourself. We already have that list for the last 60 years.

I use Firefox on my desktop. Until I started getting ULV processors for me ultrabooks and such. Firefox tanks there, even with SSDs. So much so that my need to maintain syncing between portables and desktop caused me to abandon Firefox on the desktop too. Australis just encouraged me to ditch it.

So, your condescension aside, I did manage to talk to Firefox developers over IRC and they themselves concede that Electrolysis is not even close to stable and the problem with Firefox being single threaded (which includes the XUL rendering) is just too deeply entrenched to have any easy solutions.

You've never been to reddit. That commenting system is close to perfect. It does it's job, and it's scaleable.

Well, the core of Firefox was written more than 10 years ago, and while it didn't necessarily have to be that way, the truth is that it has simply not kept up. Just getting Firefox to optimally use a modern multi-core processor is considered a massive effort. It is time for Mozilla to close down Firefox development (like they did with Thunderbird). Or at the very least, fork Chrome - it's been done before and it will give them instant parity with all modern web browsers.

And then there are people like me who discover after going through 3-4 distros that their new laptops will only work properly with all features as advertised on a Windows install. To begin with Laptop power management and suspension states on Linux absolutely sucks. Period.

All Samsung Ativ books have problems due to a video driver upgrade that has not yet come through. You know how many of those Samsung has sold ?