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 think that's absolutely right: whether this works or not depends on what you do.
I tried xwidget-webkit as main browser briefly, but very quickly gave up. When a collaborator sends me a Google Doc, for example, I really still need a browser to work on it. I still use xwidget-webkit daily -- it's a great PDF viewer, and really nice to be able to have Jupyter notebooks open side by side with code buffers -- but for most tasks involving the web I'll switch to a browser.
I use Firefox and cannot remember the last time I had to switch to Chrome. Most site work with JS off too (especially if you use reader view).
Quite a lot of sites work well with other browser engines too. I have tried PaleMoon, Netsurf. Users of Apple mobile devices seem to be fine with Safari.
Really light or unusual browsers might be a problem. Dillo, for example (its very fast though).
Even before I had much of the Internet ban me because I was playing with a bot, my FF profile on Linux was giving me a lot of trouble. About 6 months ago a lot of web sites barely functioned for me. I can't log in to E-trade. Home Depot and Lowes search doesn't work for me.
If I open a brand new FF profile, some of these sites do work. But I guess the combination of FF, on Linux, with my addons is triggering something.
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 tried xwidget-webkit as main browser briefly, but very quickly gave up. When a collaborator sends me a Google Doc, for example, I really still need a browser to work on it. I still use xwidget-webkit daily -- it's a great PDF viewer, and really nice to be able to have Jupyter notebooks open side by side with code buffers -- but for most tasks involving the web I'll switch to a browser.
Quite a lot of sites work well with other browser engines too. I have tried PaleMoon, Netsurf. Users of Apple mobile devices seem to be fine with Safari.
Really light or unusual browsers might be a problem. Dillo, for example (its very fast though).
If I open a brand new FF profile, some of these sites do work. But I guess the combination of FF, on Linux, with my addons is triggering something.