Subject: Re: [bug#34128] [PATCH] add emacs built with xwidgets-support

From: Ricardo Wurmus <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2019 09:19:49 +0100

Arne Babenhauserheide <[email-masked]> writes:

> Hi Ludovic,
>
>> Thanks for the patch!
>
> Thank you for your review!
>
>> I wonder why this hadn’t been done before;
>> Nicolas, Alex, Pierre, thoughts?
>
> There is an older bug with xwidgets support which had problems because
> it depended on an old version of webkitgtk (I only found it after I sent
> the patch). Maybe that stopped others from submitting.

I performed the migration of the Emacs xwidgets feature from the old to
the newer webkitgtk API, but that’s when I noticed that xwidgets are
hardly usable in its current state.  I certainly wouldn’t use it as a
browser, for example, because there is virtually no integration with the
rest of Emacs.

It works fine for sending JavaScript snippets to the widgets and have it
respond, but it’s not very well integrated into Emacs.  Disabling
JavaScript has the effect of disabling *all* JavaScript, which makes
scrolling impossible (as it is implemented by sending JavaScript to the
widget).

Turning it into a usable browser would require more fundamental changes,
and that’s when I stopped working on patches.

--
Ricardo