my requirement is to start up a browser, preferably chrome, and open up a certain page, this page is essentially like a digital scoreboard that is shown on a tv. electron embeds chromium and can start up an application super quickly, of course it requires nodejs and a bunch of nodejs libraries, but seems around 79M for the binary, my electron app requires a few nodejs libraries, but this is all text so nominal.

i explored using some scripts to autostart firefox and open up a certain page, but the fact that i needed kiosk plugins from third-parties just ended that for me, i don't want the browser frame to show up. electron is a bit overkill, but thus far it gets exactly what i want done. that piece will be optimized once i find the time.

I don't know if you have already tried this, but if not, try 'google-chrome --kiosk <page>'.