Up to now I've been using conkeror for my browsing need (and w3 in the terminal when following links in email from wanderlust in emacs) since emacs is my OS of choice. However I'm now in the process of converting to chrome. I found out that with the help of some extensions and a little bit of scripting I will be able to have a chrome almost as keyboard driven as conkeror and finally be able to use some extensions I have sorely missed in conkeror (biowalled2browser, readability, etc) and that most google products work fine without having to write modes for them (nice since many of googles products are rather keyboard driven by nature)
Why do I do this? For one I hate wasting time, and I hate wasting screen real estate. My computer should be a tool that helps me get tings done as fast as possible, not something beautiful to look at. The more use of GUI and/or mouse the slower one works. If you can to everything from the keyboard, and _know how_ to do it from the keyboard, you can work much faster than when jumping back and forth between the keyboard and mouse or other pointing device.
But I take it one step further. Being all about efficiency I don't want to have to move my hands much either. I therefor strive for using and/or creating setups where ones hands never have to leave the asdf-jkl; position of the keyboard. Thus I don't use enter (C-m or C-j), I don't use arrow keys, and avoid at all cost using any keys that are not reachable without moving my hands from the home location on the keyboard.
To sum up: Basically I'm a keyboard and efficiency geek ;)
Reading your post on the other hand, woke up my urge to switch back to my old window manager. ratpoison, here I come! (Though, I do wonder if I even need a window manager.. I could just control everything from Emacs)
I've actually been planning to get a TypeMatrix one of these days, but I'm planning on remapping the enter-key in the center to ctrl.
Personally I use the stump window manager because it's lisp and I can control it from Emacs using slime. I could however almost do without. All I use stumpwm for is a placeholder for a terminal with multiple nested screens and conkeror. So switching between those two windows is all I normally use stumpwm for.
(I DO have a mouse, and use it when absolutely needed, but thankfully, such cases are fairly rare)