In-Game Web Browser Round-Up

theodp writes "CNET takes a look at Web browsers you can run inside of the latest video games, offering mini-reviews of PlayXpert, Steam, Rogue, and Xfire. Why run these instead of your standard browser? Well, these browsers run lean and mean, play nice with full-screen apps, provide hot keys that can make them appear or disappear in an instant, and offer transparency so you can continue to play a game in full screen while chatting, reading e-mail or looking up cheat codes. So how much longer before we see a variation of this on our real-world car windshields?"

Re:On windshields?

[www.drk.com.ar]

You are right. It sounds like a joke when, in the country where I live at least, there is a law against driving and using a cell phone at the same time.

Re:Oh good. Something else to do while driving

[jetsci]

Its actually quite scary. I was on the bus this morning on my way to work when I look out the window at a women driving. She is completely beyond reality and roughly 2 car lengths from the nearest car, fumbling for gloves that she clearly needs right that moment, then lipstick.
I was genuinely boggled when she pulled out a nail file and started working on her nails. All the while, oblivious to the cars around her.

Re:Thottbot

[Colonel Korn]

If you're just looking for something to look up info there is no need for a browser in WoW.

Install the Questhelper and lightheaded addons and you're all set.

Questhelper points you to the quest locations and lightheaded parses all comments from wowhead on quests in a ingame addon.

Questhelper has too large of a performance impact for me in my 3.8 GHz C2D with 4 gigs of ram. I'm glad you mention wowhead, which the GP should be using instead of thotbot. I think a good solution is cartographer and playing the game in windowed (but maximized) mode. In windowed mode, alt tabbing out is instant instead of incurring the 2 second delay of full screen. Of course, windowed mode incurs a performance penalty too, but it's less than QH and it can easily be turned off when not in need of constant reference material.

What?

[The MAZZTer]

Steam (and probably the others too) just uses the drop-in ActiveX Internet Explorer component. It's not mean and it's definitely not lean.

If they used Gecko or Webkit it would be a different matter.

Re:Oh good. Something else to do while driving

[Endo13]

Yo dawg, I heard you like to browse, so I put a browser in your browser so you can browse while you browse.

FTFY.

Re:Thottbot

[DisKurzion]

Questhelper has too large of a performance impact for me in my 3.8 GHz C2D with 4 gigs of ram.

Sir...I call bullshit. I can run Questhelper fine on a crappy Compaq laptop running Vista on 1 GB of RAM.

Although TourGuide (w/ the WoW-Pro guides) is better, and I use that now anyway.

Re:Two computers

[Jumpin' Jon]

I use my laptop and Synergy [sourceforge.net] to achieve just that.