As I’ve written many times, the only non-Emacs application that gets any significant use on my computer is Safari. If I could find a way of putting Safari’s functionality into Emacs, I’d be very close to never having to leave Emacs. I still use iMessage for texting, the excellent RadarScope for tracking the weather in real time (a surprisingly important capability when you live in Florida), Contacts for my address book, and a few other seldomly used applications but almost all my tube time is spent in Emacs and Safari.
The answer to this has been known for a long time. Way back in 2016, I wrote about using Xwidgets to embed WebKit in Emacs. Six and a half years later, I still haven’t done anything about it—the very definition of a slacker. Comes now Aimé Bertrand with a post on Using Emacs support for Xwidgets on macOS to shame me further. The post explains how to use WebKit for things like mail (with Mu4e) and browsing. If you’re an Emacs/macOS user, be sure to take a look.
If you’re using one of the precompiled Emacs distributions, you may already have Xwidgets installed. The easy way to find out is to run xwidget-webkit-browse-url. If that succeeds, you should be good to go. If it fails with a message about Emacs not being compiled with Xwidgets support, you will need to recompile Emacs with Xwidgets specified. See this Emacs Wiki page for details but it’s pretty simple.
So now I have two things to feel guilty about: not compiling Emacs with Xwidgets support and not compiling Emacs with native compilation support. I intend to remedy both of these shortly. No, really.