People often say that as you get older you grow wiser and come to understand more and more things. Those people are lying. The older I get, the more things I don’t understand. Case in point.
Why would anyone want to run Emacs in a browser? Let’s face it, one of the frequent gripes about Emacs is that it’s slower than, say, Vim. Why would you want to make it slower by running it in a browser?
Then there’s the security issue. The browser is the leading point of exploit for the normal user so, again, why would you want to put everything you do in Emacs under that threat? It’s worse if, like me, you do the bulk of your work in Emacs.
But wait. It gets worse. Every time your browser updates there’s a good chance it will break your embedded Emacs. It’s bad enough when the OS updates. I can only imagine the problems that would occur if Emacs were running in the browser.
As far as I can see, the constituency for this is the same as that for Chromebooks: those who want to live in the browser. A case could be made for this, I guess, for your Aunt Millie but why would anyone doing serious, technical work on their computer embrace such a thing? In the end, all you’ve done is make Emacs slower, less secure, and given all the wrong people—like Google and Microsoft—more power to control how you use your computer.
I always say, “Use whatever works for you” but the idea of running Emacs in the browser is enough to make me reconsider—or at least amend—that. Really, I just don’t understand why anyone would want to do such a thing but I’m sure my much wiser readers will enlighten me.