uBrowser in SL will add embedded Mozilla Gecko rendering engine

Mozilla Gecko + Second Life client = cool possibilities. uBrowser combines libXML and Mozilla Gecko rendering engine and is glimpse of things to come in Second Life:

… my work at the moment is focused on embedding the Mozilla® Gecko rendering engine into our client. This will enable lots of very new and exciting content. For instance, it will allow users to access Second Life specific Web pages such as the Lindex Currency exchange directly from within the client - something that previously had to be hard-coded using our own GUI before. Content and functionality can be shared between our software and the Web. The ability to use pages containing XUL & SVG as well as plain old HTML/CSS/DHTML will allow all sorts of interesting, “in-world applications”. Things will really take off when I complete the piece that allows residents to put interactive pages on objects they create in world. As always, we’ll be amazed and impressed with what they’ll come up with.

An early Windows uBrowser binary exists for download here.

The uBrowser FAQ offer a bit more information on how this might actually be useful inside SL: “Being able to visit Web sites displayed on a prim in our world may be of questionable value. Being able to use it on prims for UI, mixing Web content with our own UI, creating XUL/SVG (eventually Flash/Java) applications will open up all sorts of great content possibilities.”