Would you say most people use chrome very much similar to how emacs is used?

Apart from using it to browse web pages, people use it for various web apps: word, spreadsheets, calculator, photo tools, games etc. Since chrome is a javascript interpreter at its core (like emacs is for lisp) , people extend it/ abuse it to perform so many things in chrome itself using web applications. I always kind of disliked web apps and since my intro to linux, I have found many command line tools to replace some of them and they are so much better. So I guess, while chrome does a "good enough" job being a general purpose workspace for most people, other user friendly or "FOSS" applications would do a better job.

It's called Chrome OS.

I think similar in execution, but fundamentally people that work on emacs know it's a lisp interpreter, and the ability to "extend" is merely writing programs that run on the interpreter, and you pretty much use it in that context. The browser can interpret javascript mainly because that's what webpages uses. I'd say the closest thing to a javascript environment in a browser is a website. There's a lot of guard-rails that go into place in chrome to prevent certain code patterns from being executed.

Chromium is open source

You can use Chromium or some other derivative, or Firefox to do the same job as Chrome. Yes, in that regard Web browser are pretty similar to Emacs. So are even Microsofts Office or Open/Libre Office. Difference beteen Emacs and web browsers, behind the obvious rendering modell and choice of scripting language, is that Emacs is pretty much unrestricted environment from security view point, while Web browsers are very restricted in terms of I/O acces to disk, and the global state of the browser. For example Chrome runs every tab in its own process to shield Web pages from each other as much possible. There are no such restrictions in Emacs, at least yet, but I have seen some mention of sandboxing, but don't know how far have they gone with that.

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Javascript came as an extension language to browser just like elisp is an extension language to Emacs, or VB is an extension language to MS Office. Security model came afterwards, after the madness of late 90s and early 20s whe people used JS for mere annoyance, frauds etc. The security modell for extensions nowadays is much more restrictive, but technically there is no reason why JS couldn't have access to anything in a browser, just like elisp has in Emacs.

I'd disagree. Browsers are primarily consumption platforms, and secondarily a way to run (usually very limited) single-purpose applications. The modern web is designed to discourage and prevent customization and self-help. In contrast, being able to tailor your tool to your needs and problems is a core design principle of Emacs. As a user, the JavaScript runtime in the browser is not for you. It's for people making sites you visit. In Emacs, Elisp runtime is there specifically for you to use it.

No, I wouldn't. Emacs is a platform, primarily focused on editing unformatted text, based around elisp, and focused on system-level text-manipulation tasks. The web browser is a universal software platform, primarily focused on network activity mediated by the HTTP application protocol, hypertext as the engine of application state, rich document-oriented user interfaces, with javascript as its language. They're … very vaguely similar, but sufficiently different that the comparison doesn't provide much value, honestly. > I always kind of disliked web apps and since my intro to linux, I have found many command line tools to replace some of them and they are so much better. I use tons of command-line tools. And I spend most of my day in web apps. They (and mobile apps, and traditional desktop GUI software, and …) all have very different properties; one is not /categorically/ better than another. > So I guess, while chrome does a "good enough" job being a general purpose workspace for most people, other user friendly or "FOSS" applications would do a better job. Again, it's hard to defend a categorical statement like that. Some would, many others would not. Modern web apps represent some of the most refined versions of certain classes of software … yet some command-line tools will outlive you and I both. The world is not, and does not need to be, so high-contrast.