Why Emacs should have a good web-browser

[Fernando]

Hello.
Sorry if this is not the right place, but I wanted to ask some
questions to the community and expose some arguments.

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).

1) One of the main purposes of Emacs is programming. Web development,
css and JavaScript are emerging languages present a lot in the
internet since a long time and now they are even extending to the
desktop (gnome-shell, seed, adium themes...). Emacs has modes and
tools to edit on this languages, but the integration is not as good as
it could be if you had js and html interpreters integrated in Emacs
itself.

2) There are very few web browsers that are comfortable to use in a
keyboard-only interface. Emacs would be very good in this sense
because its keyboard navigation is very usable and as it's designed
for editing text, it will be perfect for all the form editing, comment
writing and all the editing related actions you have to do often in a
browser (editing wikipedia articles, etc).

3) Emacspeak  has turned Emacs into a very accessible environment for
the visual-impaired and it would offer  these people a highly
customizable interface to help them browse the web, along with the
keybindings.

4) Emacs since long time has been one of the greatest tools for an
operative system. During the Age Of The Usenet it was an good
newsreader. Now that the newsgroups have started to die slowly and the
HTTP protocol and Javascript are the kings of the big cloud Emacs
should adapt to it.

5) Browsers are turning into the next generation Emacs! they can
browse ftp, access IRC channels, check your mail, read pdf and other
things with embeded applications, now they can even play video/audio
as a core functionality, they are often used for editing text (web
forms, comments in blogs, etc)... there's even the whole "Google
Chrome OS" designed around a browser. Sooner or later they will be
able to edit code (there's even prototypes for this already) when this
happens Emacs has to compete or it will slowly die. Web browsers are
turning into the main program for the end/power-user in a PC, when
they reach Emacs in functionality I'm sure a lot of people (even Emacs
users) would end up switching to hack Javascript instead of LISP.

6) The special features of Lisp and the extensibility of Emacs make it
be the perfect candidate for an extensible and modular web browser.
Current browsers are tending to improve their extensibility by means
of "plugins" and "extensions". Emacs has since long time a powerful
scripting that a lot of browsers would envy to have.

- Emacs-w3m is not enough and it's not an Emacs module that can be extended.
- Emacs/w3 was a very good idea but soon it has passed more than 1
year since the last single commit to the git repository, it doesn't
look very active at all (am I wrong?).

So.. I just want to know what's the general feeling of the emacs-dev
community about having an emacs web-browser and what expectations
should we have in this regard, is there any other work being done by
anyone? how much is the interest on this?

Not long ago a new (alpha) version of Guile was released that
introduced some basic support for ECMAscript, announcing that there's
a goal to support up to version 3.1 of the spec. Would this make it
possible for a (distant) future Guile Emacs to be able to have an
efficient Javascript-capable web browser?
There also seems that a bit more of work was put on the Guile elisp
compiler lately, although it's still far from being mature.

-- 
Fernando
(sorry for my english)