Emacs is a Lisp machine. Even Firefox during its XUL heyday was not as customizeable as Emacs is. Nowadays, with browsers using WebExtensions, browsers are laughably inflexible by comparison.
Not joking. Emacs can't even do wysiwyg word processing, let alone the kind of interactive environments that browsers support.
Chromium/Electron is a Javascript machine, with graphical debugger; network monitoring; the world's largest package ecosystem; tab-local variables [1], built-in support for peripherals via webUSB, obviously live evaluation of js, 3D webgl, ...
It feels like you haven't gotten deep enough into Lisp and Emacs. Emacs is quite the epitome of malleable software systems. There isn't a single software product as flexible and configurable by design.
Just because it is currently doesn't have a graphical layer or cannot run a browser engine within (which is just a matter of time), that doesn't make it less flexible.
That's just stating the claim again, not providing evidence. How many browser extensions have I written? How many emacs extensions? Fwiw I did everything in Emacs for many years.
Regardless of the differences in the core platform, the ecosystem is where the real power is. The number of full-time paid contributors to Chromium/Electron/VSCode is dramatic, and it shows. The reach of the VSCode ecosystem means there are now competitive ports of Magit and other key packages.
Maybe the Emacs system has a little more power than a browser. VSCode disallows extensions from messing with the DOM to ensure stability; Emacs doesn't, which means less stability and more flexibility. But it's not much use in practice, or I haven't seen the use.
Anyway, Javascript and Elisp are both basically low-end lisps, largely written in C/C++, and running on x86 machines. Neither resembles the theoretical Symbolics machines of yore.
Maybe with billions in funding Emacs could start competing with the Chromium/Electron/VSCode teams. But that's not gonna happen. I can't afford to write my whole environment alone, so I go where the people are.
> Maybe with billions in funding Emacs could start competing with the Chromium/Electron/VSCode teams. But that's not gonna happen
We've seen that many times. With proprietary and free editors and IDEs. Eclipse, Delphi, NetBeans, Sublime, Atom, XCode, MonoDevelop, InteliJ, Visual Studio, VSCode, etc.
Many times in history there were "Emacs and Vim killers", and yet after over 45 years, Emacs is still here and Vim keeps improving. I can bet that 20 years from now and without billions spent on funding, Emacs still would do some things better than any of existing IDEs.
