I've been browsing for a few hours, and Xfce Task Manager on the previous version (Firefox 25.0.1) shows a resident set size of 272 MB. My PC has 1 GB of RAM, and I routinely stay out of thrashing swap even with nine Cracked.com tabs open. Part of how I keep Firefox slim is that I use the Flashblock extension, so that sites other than YouTube and Newgrounds and a couple other whitelisted sites aren't allowed to load the Flash Player until I click.

The illustration on the page you linked uses Silverlight as an example. Netflix uses Silverlight so that it can wrap rented videos in Microsoft's PlayReady digital restrictions management, and lack of PlayReady is why it doesn't work in Moonlight. Video on demand providers use digital restrictions management in the first place to deter users from in effect teeing a rented video into an encoder and keeping it past the rental period. How would VOD work on a browser distributed as free software without any proprietary plug-ins?

The page you linked states: "As browsers have advanced, this kind of feature development can occur directly within the browser using technologies such as WebGL" but this page, on Firefox 25.0.1 on Xubuntu 12.04 LTS on a laptop with an Atom N450, states: "Hmm. While your browser seems to support WebGL, it is disabled or unavailable. If possible, please ensure that you are running the latest drivers for your video card." A lot of users aren't in the position to buy a brand new PC just to be able to switch from Flash or native apps to web applications.

The page also mentions asm.js, but do non-Firefox web browsers, such as Chrome, Safari, and IE, support it yet? Otherwise, will have to write the program several times: once in asm.js for Firefox, once in Native Client for Chrome for PC, once as a native app for Android if the user hasn't already switched from Android Browser or Chrome to Firefox for Android, and then once as a native app for each platform that IE or Safari runs on.

That won't especially help when Apple refuses to implement key HTML APIs in its iVersion of the mobile web. True, Safari for iOS can't run Flash anyway, but the idea on mobile is to get developers away from making platform-specific apps.

Quick question: Using HTML APIs, how should a web application let the user select a folder (or "directory" if you insist) on the local machine and upload all files in the folder?

Sites that depend on advertisement revenue would block your dream browser. Enjoy your paywall.

Starting from the web site of a band, how would you listen to the music that the band is offering to stream to you?

Starting from the web site of a short film producer, how would you watch the video that the short film producer is offering to stream to you?

If you have a web page with 100 kB of comments, and you click the button below a comment to view replies to that comment, do you really think it's efficient for the site to resend the 100 kB of other comments plus the additional comments in the tree that you expanded? Repeatedly resending comments would run up your data bill, especially if you happen not to live in a country with affordable unmetered mobile Internet access.

Would you rather have to register in order to use any web site with a shopping cart because an online store cannot set an anonymous session cookie to which to associate your shopping cart? And how would you log out of a web site without closing all other tabs? Most browsers that implement HTTP basic authentication don't stop sending the user's name and password until the user completely closes the browser session.

Cookies are needed for an anonymous session, such as adding items to your shopping cart before logging in. HTTP Basic authentication isn't capable of distinct anonymous sessions.

Cookies lets you stay logged in without having to reenter your name and password on every page and add items to your own shopping cart. JavaScript lets you expand and collapse comment trees without having to reload all the tens or hundreds of kilobytes of comments already on the page.

If your combination of GPU and Java plug-in supports OpenGL, but your combination of GPU and web browser gives only "Hmm. While your browser seems to support WebGL, it is disabled or unavailable. If possible, please ensure that you are running the latest drivers for your video card." with your operating system's latest drivers, then Java beats JavaScript.

Then have the user zip up the folder and work with the zipfile.

You might be right. Besides, I just realized I had forgotten about state governments' Eleventh Amendment right to infringe copyrights owned by citizens of other states, such as Washington-based Nintendo and California-based Interplay.

That's caused by the lack of a multi-process model in Firefox. Mozilla is working on it under the codename Electrolysis (e10s). It's still incomplete, but you can try it out by opening about:config, turning on browser.tabs.remote, and restarting Firefox. One drawback is that click-to-play is broken, as are "many plugins".

Copyright lasts 95 years, and I was under the impression that Nintendo was still hunting down ROM sites.

Employer-issued phones. Or hand-me-down devices from the richer side of the family. Or having bought the device before circumstances change, such as loss of a job.

Because giving all children access to an equal opportunity produces a better long-term outcome for the whole society. That's why tax-funded schools exist in the first place.

After having read this post, I thought for a moment and came up with other motivations: Your competitor has come up with a cure that would make your long-term treatment obsolete, and you want your own cure. Or your competitor has come up with a less expensive long-term treatment, and you want to make it obsolete. This could be as simple as a generic version of the treatment that you brought to market a decade and a half ago.

The general-purpose chip has already existed since graphics cards switched from fixed-function pixel shaders to programmable pixel shaders. If a pixel shader can compute bump mapping and SSAO, it can compute motion reconstruction and IDCT.

YouTube did switch to WebM on players that support it, so long as the partner or copyright claimant didn't choose monetization settings that require Flash Player.