In-World Browser

What about a in-world browerser for Second Life, that let's us browse the web and save picture, that way we don't have to run in windowed mode and sacriface performance.

I support this in full.

Jim, I don't know if you're aware of this, but the key command Alt-Tab will switch out of an active application, into another, regardless of whether it's full-screen or not.

Alt-tabbing isn't always practical when using SL in full-screen mode.

If your video card does not have sufficient memory for texture caching, alt-tabbing between other Windows applications and SL can be very, very slow.

I no longer have this problem (as I recently upgraded video cards) but did prior to my upgrade. Additionally, running SL in windowed mode is always another option, one that seems to avoid the alt-tab texture cache problems. Of course, I prefer full screen.

Regarding the original subject of this thread: I'd love to see some sort of embedded browsing support, even if it was simple (no CSS/DHTML/etc) support ala an embedded GtkHtml or QT html widget (both of which are portable to Win32/Linux/OSX). This would be ideal for viewing the LSL programming guide/client help in-world as neither involve complex web pages, avoiding the need to alt-tab between SL and a web browser for LSL call / language information (or run SL in non-fullscreen mode).

Regarding the in-world browser having some "save image as texture feature", I wouldn't support that, as it has obvious copyright infringement concerns (most web content is copyrighted by somebody).

In a perfect world, html browser widget views could be mapped as dynamic in-world textures onto prims.. this would probably require some sort of linden server-side facility to request pages/render textures (unless they implemented some sort of time-synchronized client-side http request/html texture rendering support, which would probably be very hard to get working well due to different bandwidth/latency situations on everyone's net connection), so i'm not expecting this feature any time soon.

...escpecially considering the current Linden stance on outbound XML-RPC requests (due to potential security problems). Outbound linden server-based http requests would open the door to obvious potential security problems (password grinding on sites such as yahoo, hotmail, etc).

Additionally there may be legal issues with the Linden servers downloading content from other web sites and then redistributing it to multiple end-users (none of which directly requested the content, but rather were simply within view of the textured object) .

I'd still love to see it as a feature though.. Maybe some day

we'll still have to pay the upload fee to transfer and save a pciture on the data server.

I still think this is a good idea, although perhaps for different reasons than the original post suggests.

I'd like to have a "virtual" PC in SL that could have a web page displayed on it at all times... in other words a way to point an objects texture at a remote (pick one) page/texture.

I saw this demonstrated at a SIGGRAPH a few years ago. A virtual world where you could click on a link in a virtual PC and have the "screen" update. Ever since then I've hoped that someone would offer this in a commercial product. If it were really done well you actually COULD use it to browse the web from within SL, but I'd settle for just a crude approximation of the page for now. My theory is that as screen resolutions get very high (my laptop is ONLY 1600x1200) managing several screens in small windows, zooming in on them when necessary, might be a preferred alternative to the current alt-tab and iconification (is that a word?) paradigms.

Well, SL will replace the Internet eventually...

something like this http://metaverse.sourceforge.net/ will replace the world wide web eventually.

the internet encompasses overhead traffic plus many other services, such as email, that won't be disappearing any time soon.

I mentioned this on the day I joined to member James Miller, and he stated this would be impossible as pages cannot call remote objects.

My plan was a script which interacted with an outside program (sorta how secondvoice works) which would overlay the page, using the same technique as video overlay (but a different color i suppose), and when your mouse is over the window it will send locations to the program.

however this would be rather laggy and it'd be a lot nicer just to have SL insert one.

If you're looking for a free and open source browser base, Gecko

You Know WHat Else Is Fun?
If You Dont Like Tabng Through Windows I Recomend a nifty feature called
ALT-ENTER
...
Yeah, it pull up a nifty toolbar at the bottom that shows time, and you can tab through the open windows!!
you could even start aqplications by clicking th button on the far left!