Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
_Leo_
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.
Bored at work? Play Game!
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.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
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.
Yo dawg, I heard you like to browse, so I put a browser in your browser so you can browse while you browse.
FTFY.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
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.
I use my laptop and Synergy to achieve just that.