The most important part of this is toward the end, and whether you consider it a limitation or a feature is a matter of perspective: the modern commercial web does not play nice with this. So static HTML and blogs yes, Reddit and most anything commercial no.
You can actually get other close-to-browser experiences with stuff like xwidget and embedded WebKit (https://emacsdocs.org/docs/emacs/Embedded-WebKit-Widgets) but generally it’s not worth the fight for commercial sites these days; everything is vibed and only tested against Chrome, so if you’re lucky they’ll load in other Chromium browsers and _maybe_ Firefox.
I don't want to hate on this particular post, but I really dislike the great number of blog posts, videos, and articles that have a title which says "Why I do X in <some unconventional way>" where upon reading the blog post hoping to learn some useful feature that say, browsing the web in Emacs affords you (like closer integration between research and writing for example), you learn that the benefit in question is actually that the method is less useful than conventional means.
I think the idea that you do something in a more difficult or less convenient manner for the sake of "mindfulness" or "focus" is well-established, and what I hope for (and am always disappointed by the lack of) when reading such blog posts is an actually useful feature of the unconventional method in question.
The title of this blog post promises some usefulness from using Emacs as your browser, and upon reading, you discover that the "usefulness" is the inconvenience and impracticality of using it that way.
Unfortunately GNU Emacs is single-threaded and blocking by design and not well suited for this kind of thing. Using it for things like browser or window manager usually ends in either weird hacks or uncomfortable pauses.
I have more hope in projects like lem which implement new emacsen from scratch.
FWIW, you can login to here (https://news.ycombinator.com) using eww. The only minor issue is you are really limited to 1 line if you want to comment. And seems you cannot vote either.
I have yet to figure out how to get around those issues.
And a big plus, eww is great for resource limited systems like old 32bit laptops.
Would love to try to explore emacs again, but the emacs pinky shenanigans are such a turn-off. Simultaneously the most efficient and possibly the least ergonomic way to navigate a computer?
You can use "evil mode" for Vi-like bindings if you prefer. There are a number of Emacs "distributions" like Spacemacs and Doom Emacs which come preconfigured for Vi-like editing.
You can actually get other close-to-browser experiences with stuff like xwidget and embedded WebKit (https://emacsdocs.org/docs/emacs/Embedded-WebKit-Widgets) but generally it’s not worth the fight for commercial sites these days; everything is vibed and only tested against Chrome, so if you’re lucky they’ll load in other Chromium browsers and _maybe_ Firefox.
I think the idea that you do something in a more difficult or less convenient manner for the sake of "mindfulness" or "focus" is well-established, and what I hope for (and am always disappointed by the lack of) when reading such blog posts is an actually useful feature of the unconventional method in question.
The title of this blog post promises some usefulness from using Emacs as your browser, and upon reading, you discover that the "usefulness" is the inconvenience and impracticality of using it that way.
I have more hope in projects like lem which implement new emacsen from scratch.
I have yet to figure out how to get around those issues.
And a big plus, eww is great for resource limited systems like old 32bit laptops.