Re: Why Emacs should have a good web-browser

[Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 11:55 PM, <joakim@verona.se> wrote:
> Chong Yidong <cyd@stupidchicken.com> writes:
>
>> Fernando <ferkiwi@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> First, I would like to know if you agree about the reasons for having
>>> a web browser in Emacs (either as part of it or as an external lisp
>>> package).
>>
>> Rendering the modern web is a very complicated task, and I doubt it's
>> worthwhile to try to implement this independently in Emacs.
>>
>> An easier route might be to use Gecko or Webkit to embed webpages in
>> Emacs windows, in the spirit of how we use the GTK library to draw the
>> tool-bar and scroll-bar.  Emacs might either link directly to
>> Gecko/Webkit, or use XEmbed to fit a separate mini-browser process
>> inside an Emacs window.
>>
>> AFAIK, no one is currently working on anything like this.
>
> I would like to point to:
> http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsXembed
>
> I have some screenshots there of my xembed patch for emacs that allows
> xembedding for instance a video player(mplayer in the screenshot) in emacs.
>
> I am currently making a small xembeddable wrapper on webkit that I will
> make some screenshots with to show Emacs embedding a browser.
>
> My original aproach was to use Firefox for embedding, since theres a
> nice integration with Emacs called MozRepl, but the mozembed component
> crashed when trying embedding.
>
> I need to make small wrappers around apps because most apps doesnt
> support to be xembedded out of the box. Emacs and Mplayer are easily
> xembeddable without modification.

It is probably a very nice piece of job you are doing, but for many
people just controlling Firefox from Emacs would probably be good
enough.

BTW, I have heard that espresso offers even better interaction than
MozRepl but I am not sure. Is there anyone who knows more about this?
Some examples of how to interact from Espresso/MozRepl?