What are the differences between Node.js and the browser?

Brief Explanations:

• In the browser, most of the time what you are doing is interacting with the DOM, or other Web Platform APIs like Cookies. Those do not exist in Node.js, of course. You don't have the document, window and all the other objects that are provided by the browser.

• Also in the browser, we don't have all the nice APIs that Node.js provides through its modules, like the file system access functionality.

• In Node.js, you control the environment. Unless you are building an open source application that anyone can deploy anywhere, you know which version of Node.js you will run the application on. Compared to the browser environment, where you don't get the luxury to choose what browser your visitors will use, this is very convenient. This means that you can write all the modern ES6-7-8-9 JavaScript that your Node.js version supports.

• Since JavaScript moves so fast, but browsers can be a bit slow to upgrade, sometimes on the web you are stuck with using older JavaScript / ECMAScript releases. You can use Babel to transform your code to be ES5-compatible before shipping it to the browser, but in Node.js, you won't need that.

• Node.js supports both the CommonJS and ES module systems (since Node.js v12), while in the browser we are starting to see the ES Modules standard being implemented. For example, this means that you can use both require() and import in Node.js, while you are limited to import in the browser.

Note: Both the browser and Node.js use JavaScript as their programming language.

Thanks for reading...