Embedding a Web Browser in Emacs

Heh, from stevey's http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/04/xemacs-is-dead-long-... :

"If Emacs can't find a way to evolve into (or merge with) Firefox, then Firefox or some other extensible browser is going to eclipse Emacs. It's just a matter of time. This wouldn't be a bad thing, per se, but there's a good chance it would be done poorly, take forever, and wind up being less satisfying than if Emacs were to sprout browser-like facilities."

Round one to Emacs, then.

I've wanted and want this feature so hard it's unreal. It's also based on Webkit which is amazing because it is the most ACID-compliant browser last I checked, supports JavaScript, Flash, all the usual horrible-but-necessary-for-getting-most-sites-to-work bobbins. All I want in my life is to be able to control Webkit with my keyboard inside Emacs buffers. I think the only logical step is to start work on this project.

Excellent, now I never have to leave emacs ever again

Every application attempts to expand until it can browse web pages. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

— http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html

Heh. This is the exact inverse of something I have been thinking about - an elisp bytecode interpreter in javascript. IE, run emacs in your browser; although it would take a lot more than the bytecode interpreter to get that far - one would have to reimplement enough of the C portion of emacs in javascript to get it working.

emacs-w3m is also quite good, provided you're on Unix. (http://emacs-w3m.namazu.org/)

Edit: It's a text-mode web browser.

Not in emacs as such, though very similar as far as interface, keybindings, etc. is Conkeror (http://conkeror.org/). Still missing some needed features, notably screen-splitting, but overall quite usable.

This was actually the first application I thought of when I first heard about uzbl. I'm wasn't knowledgeable enough with elisp etc to implement it myself, but I'll definitely be following this project closely.

rms wouldn't approve (http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/134252/focus=1...).

;-)

Absolutely awesome. Waiting for the patched Emacs to download now (the ability to embedd arbitary x windows in Emacs is in itself pretty damn cool) and playing with Uzbl, it's damn cool. Right now the only two apps I use most days are Emacs and Firefox, maybe it's time for Firefox to give in :p

Is uzbl windows-friendly or is it unix only? There are people that use Emacs outside of a unix/linux environment you know :p I wonder if something like this would be possible with Firefox.

Absolutely fantastic.