You could actually make a far better case for Emacs being an operating system rather than a browser, what with the former not having as many security and sandbo

You could actually make a far better case for Emacs being an operating system rather than a browser, what with the former not having as many security and sandboxing restrictions. That and you can actually boot from Emacs: http://www.informatimago.com/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linux.html http://www.informatimago.com/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linux.... Really, by your definition, any piece of software with a plugin-based architecture is an operating system. There's certainly a trend we're witnessing where, for the end user, the browser is displacing the underlying operating system, and turning the latter into an environment for hosting the former. But to call the browser an OS is a huge stretch.