Re: Why Emacs should have a good web-browser

[Adam Wołk]

Dnia 21-07-2009 o 19:13:47 Thomas Lord <address@hidden> napisał(a):

> On Tue, 2009-07-21 at 11:52 -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote:

> > It might be possible to use one of those engines as Emacs's rendering
> > engine, indeed.  To me, it wouldn't seem like an good solution to the
> > problem at hand because I don't think it would allow me to control the
> > web-browser from Emacs (e.g., how would I access from Elisp the content
> > of pages generated from HTML?).  So it'd be more like embedding Emacs
> > inside a normal browser.  It's not a bad idea, but I don't think it'll
> > provide as many benefits from Emacs's point of view.

There already exists a browser that tries to implement things the Emacs  
way. It's called conkeror.

From their website (http://conkeror.org):
"Conkeror is a keyboard-oriented, highly-customizable, highly-extensible  
web browser based on Mozilla XULRunner, written mainly in JavaScript, and  
inspired by exceptional software such as Emacs and vi. Conkeror features a  
sophisticated keyboard system, allowing users to run commands and interact  
with content in powerful and novel ways. It is self-documenting, featuring  
a powerful interactive help system."

Benefits of helping out with this project:
* Conkeror can be fully controlled from withing emacs using mozrepl
* Doesn't have problems with most pages that Firefox can handle
* Can use existing Firefox extensions (Adblock etc.)
* No problems with websites blocking less popular clients (a very common  
problem even for browsers like Opera)
* Shares many concepts with Emacs

Instead of implementing a full blown browser inside of Emacs, which by  
itself is a massive complicated task both from a usability point of view  
and security. Maybe we should focus on improving the interoperability  
between Emacs and conkeror which already exists and is available.

> It might make an interesting experiment for someone
> who has the time and inclination to try writing an
> Elisp interpreter and Emacs primitives in Javascript.

As far as I understand, they are not implementing an elisp interpreter but  
javascript is used the same way to provide functionality to the browser.  
Which by itself is quite interesting considering how far they have gone.