Miskatonic University Press

Firefox and Emacs again

emacs r

There was a new version (27.1) of Emacs earlier this month, and today Firefox version 80 is out. This reminded me of When will Firefox overtake Emacs? (from 2012) and Firefox overtook Emacs (2014).

I updated the release history data a CSV file (the ugly date format is because it’s easiest to copy and paste from the Firefox version history article on Wikipedia; the Emacs release history has better dates) and if you have R installed (and the tidyverse) then you can generate the chart with this pipeline:

## install.packages("tidyverse")
library(tidyverse)

read_csv("https://www.miskatonic.org/files/se-program-versions-3.csv") %>%
  mutate(date = as.Date(Date, format = "%B %d, %Y")) %>%
  ggplot(aes(x = date, y = Version, colour = Program)) +
    geom_point() +
    geom_step() +
    labs(title = "Emacs and Firefox release history",
     caption = "William Denton (CC BY)",
     x = "",
     colour = "")
Chart of Emacs and Firefox version number history
Chart of Emacs and Firefox version number history

Firefox is the best browser still, but you can run Firefox inside Emacs. It may do releases more slowly, but Emacs will always win this contest. Or any contest.