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Discussion on: The Rise of Browser Os

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cubikca profile image
Brian Richardson

Not a bad observation, but I think it's more like the Rise of the Polymorphic Browser. I run Linux and have need of running certain Microsoft applications, like Visio. There is no way on Earth I'll ever run Visio on Linux, but it runs just fine in a browser. Many cloud offerings have browser-only applications, which as you say are rich and varied in implementation.

That said, I think I like my OS on my OS. Not everything needs to be in a browser frame, and indeed, is often more usable outside of it. You remind me a lot of the Emacs users of old, who often proclaimed that Emacs was more of an operating system than an editor. There were many people who loved Emacs. I was always a vi guy though 😅

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w3ndo profile image
Patrick Wendo

who often proclaimed that Emacs was more of an operating system than an editor.

Wait, do you have a link where they would explain why they thought this?

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cubikca profile image
Brian Richardson

I'm afraid you'll just have to trust me on this one. It's ancient history now.

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peerreynders profile image
peerreynders • Edited

Unix Culture

Sorry but EmacsEditor is a refugee from the long dead culture of LispMachines. It's an asylum seeker in the UnixCulture.

("Lisp Machine" is a generic term. A Lisp Machine is a computer whose operating system and applications are written in Lisp. Example: Genera)

See also

While browsers aren't implemented in JavaScript one can argue that JavaScript was specifically developed to script page specific automation of the browser runtime and that it was at least in part motivated by doing Scheme in the browser (Is Scheme Lisp).

Also note that GNU uses Guile (based on Scheme) as its "extension language platform" (perhaps inspired by "emacs lisp").