Steve Yegge Has a Point
In his latest post, Steve Yegge pointed out that Emacs’ biggest competitor wasn’t really IDEs, because Emacs isn’t really great because it edits text. Emacs’ biggest competitor is really Firefox, because what makes Emacs great is that it is so extensible, and so it is with Firefox as well (although I prefer ELisp to XML and Javascript anyday).
This didn’t really hit me clearly until I noticed that for many web-related activities like checking mail, updating twitter and posting to my blog, Emacs has solutions (VM for mail, twit.el for Twitter and weblogger.el for blogging), but so does Firefox (Gmail for mail, TwitBin for Twitter, and ScribeFire for blogging).
So, everytime I want to blog or update Twitter, or even check mail, I have to consider what I want to use, which is really dependent on what program I happen to be in at the moment. So, in a way, the race is on: will Firefox get a better extension language and text editor, or will Emacs embed a good browsing capability. Personally, I’d like Emacs to embed Gecko with the upcoming libxul, but we’ll see how hard that turns out to be.
