» Kazehakase...ruby in your browser?!! +

I just came across a project called Kazehakase. It is a web-browser based on Gecko (the Mozilla/Firefox HTML rendering engine). Big deal, you say. There are already Galeon and Epiphany and so forth. But I ask you, do any of those browsers have a ruby prompt sandbox (with autocompletion!) built in? No? Didn't think so. Well, kazehakase does!

The docs are mainly in Japanese and the wiki and mailing list are subject to spammage, but you can always check out the source of ext/ruby/kz/ruby-dialog.rb to see what's going on behind the scenes.

And on a related note -- there has been some talk in the Firefox community of late about allowing third-party scripting languages (notably python) to interface with XUL and the gecko innards. See here for example. In fact, in the Bon Echo 3 nightlies, one can use the python: protocol to launch the interpreter to evalauate a statement (the same way one can currently evaluate a javascript statement with javascript:). Does this mean that sometime in the not too distant future we'll be able to write extensions for Firefox in pure ruby? Let us hope and pray!